Telcos Play Catch-Up with Cable Rivals on Customer Data

While telcos generally are thought to know precious little beyond who their residential customers call, operators are learning more as they deploy content services to a wider audience.

And companies powering development of access devices, lacking even basic customer calling info, are taking more aggressive and extreme measures to find out what consumers really want. A case in point is Intel Corp., which wants this info to more strategically build the chips for handheld mobile units.

Indeed, newer telco TV and portal entries are striving to learn more, not just to enhance content services, but because of intense competition from entrenched cablecos. Many of those operators have been offering TV services for decades and already have gathered customer behavior detail from historical experiences and set-top boxes.

On the service provider front, companies are looking to their other ‘lines’ of business for customer data.

“We’re also an ISP, so we take the Internet usage data to help us understand what customers use and want,” said Larry Wagman, director of technology at SaskTel, a large regional multiservice telco that serves the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. SaskTel launched its IPTV service in 2002.

Knowing where Internet customers go, and how they spend their time, has helped SaskTel customize its MAX TV user interface to provide more than just access to shows and movies. The company added local weather, movie listings, the ability to rate films, flight arrivals and departures, an interactive phonebook, and even horoscopes.

“We really want this to be the central entertainment hub in the home,” Wagman said.

Telecom service providers are not alone in gathering more information about what customers like and want. Companies such as Intel, which make the hardware that allows devices to access content, are doing the same thing.

“Wireless devices are very limited in what they can do today and customers are aware of capabilities, but don’t really do much with them,” said Kevin Kahn, director of Intel’s Communications Technology Lab, and a senior fellow at the company. “Intel has hired social scientists and social anthropologists to learn how people use technology.”

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