Location services are getting a lot of attention lately. Not all of it good after Apple’s location file was discovered on the iPhone devices. As a result, more of the mainstream press and even Congress are looking more closely at the use of location as a way to target mobile customers. Is it evil? Is it convenience? The view seems to depend on your level of paranoia and your comfort (or discomfort) with technology.

And while location does provide an immediate context for many marketing messages, location is just one of many possible contexts that can be applied to serving personalized messages to customers. Globys, a company which made its mark with self-service billing solutions for mobile operators, can provide analytic input on dozens of contexts – most of them relating directly to the actual mobile account.

The broad categories for mobile context include:

  • Usage Behavior – actions such as first data usage, low usage, projected overage, roaming, app discovery
  • Billing – items such as bill available, bill, due, payment made, billing inquiry, bill dispute, payment type, late payment
  • Events – dropped call, new service/new line/new device added, plan change, anniversary, end of contract, birthday, new address, trial ending, competitive promotion
  • Interaction – call to customer care, visit to store, portal registration, portal login, lack of login or registration, text top out-of-network friend
  • Time and Location – end of week/month, weekend, beginning travel, public holiday, routine travel destination, new travel destination, time of day
  • Prepaid Milestones – top-up completed, low prepay balance, prepay balance upon expiry

While Congress examines location-based data as a possible source for restriction, it’s important to remind ourselves that there is still a bounty of information available about customers that will help improve their mobile service and marketing opportunities. Using data that’s directly related to the mobile account might take away some of the discomfort that people have about being “followed.”

Our next few blogs are going to take a look at each of these broad categories and how carriers can apply context to communications and marketing with their customer base over the entire lifecycle of the customer.