By Tim McElligott

Even though his family has a multi-generational heritage in this industry, Rob Riordan learned early on that he was not in the telephone business, but the service business. He learned it from his father.

Rob Riordan is executive vice president and director of corporate development for Nsight. He also was the opening keynote speaker for the B/OSS Live! Personalization Summit.

He said there are two paths to personalization: a person-to-person path and a machine-to-person path. The former is followed by customer service reps, sales people, technicians at the home – any personal interaction with the customer. The latter is not via the IVR (integrated voice response systems) which Riordan says even the best are far from personal. It is more along the lines of a personalized Web page or customer portal.

Both have to operate at their peak to create and support personalized services and set a service provider apart from its competition. But even that is not good enough, Riordan said. Not in the long run.

“Pretty soon, the competition catches up,” Riordan said. “Then the Life of Riley is over. You can’t just sit back and think everything is OK. You need to know what’s coming around the corner.”

Nsight has leveraged femtocell technology to develop personalized services that are easy to operate for customers in his northern Wisconsin region. For example, they have a service that will ring all phones associated with you when you’re home but only your mobile phone when you are away. Another service automatically uploads the photos recently taken with a smartphone when the owner walks through door at home and posts it to her Facebook page or blog.

However, there is more than femto technology behind personalization. There is a lot of data collection, analytics, policy management, real-time charging, provisioning and more. Rafi Kretchmer, director of product marketing for Amdocs, says personalization is but one component of the overall customer experience.

Still, personalization is a primary component that if done, must be done right. In addition to Kretchmer, Lara Albert, senior director of global marketing at Globys; Rob Jones, vice president of product marketing and business development at Acision; and Susan McNeice, vice president of software research at Yankee Group, joined Riordan for a panel discussion on the topic.

In order to even begin thinking about providing personalized services, you have to have the right context for it. And to do that, “You have to have your hands around rich data that is available but also in a format the service provider can act on,” Albert said. That includes marketing, billing and network-engineering information that makes sense for a customer lifecycle perspective.

And beyond that, the next trick is to ensure the data’s anonymity. So far, McNeice believes service providers have been hiding behind the privacy laws as an excuse not to embark on what is sure to be a difficult endeavor.

Riordan agrees. “[The industry] has been afraid to use the information we have. That’s insane,” he said.

Other companies seem to find a way to provide personalized services yet maintain anonymity, so why not telecom? Take Google, which can provide personalized traffic information without actually identifying you.

Besides, Albert said, the biggest challenge is not privacy. “I spend a lot of time counseling operators about the barriers to personalization as never does privacy ever get mentioned. The biggest barriers have to do with the tools to run all that raw data into actionable insight.”

Kretchmer said that relationships take time to build and that they rely on trust. Therefore, you have to develop that trust with the customer before getting too personal.