By Doug Fantuzzi, Amdocs Media & Entertainment Solutions
Gartner stated: “By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationships with enterprises without interaction with a human.” User identify will be key to such digital interactions and the Digital Service Provider (DSP) that manages this identity will also need to stitch together these different interactions to create the personalized user journey. This journey will bring together digital technologies, the digital customer and the digital economy. Figure 1 below depicts the different components and characteristics of the future DSP which will play a key role in realizing Gartner’s prediction.
Today’s digital providers like Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, and Amazon understand how to utilize user identity via a username and password that enables them to access a user’s personal information. The user ID enables them to personalize services, create innovative monetization models, and deliver great user experiences where consumers can purchase and consume digital goods, wherever and whenever they want.
Communications Service Providers (CSPs), which for the purposes of this paper also includes MultiSystem Operators (MSOs) and cable operators, typically manage their relationships and interactions through a physical street address without much understanding of individualized usage. As an example forcable operators, a single address would have all or some of the family members watching the same TV in the living room or sharing the same broadband connectivity, with the operator not knowing which family member actually interacted with the service. But with the evolution of digital TV and personalized connected devices, each member of the family can watch TV or connect to digital applications via the internet using their own personal or shared device, such as a set-top box, a game console, a streaming media stick, or a tablet.
Today’s viewers expect a more personalized video viewing experience. MSOs and cable operators need to implement capabilities to better understand who the users are in order to provide smarter personalized experiences– for example, knowing the user’s digital video recording (DVR) history, favorite channels, preferred genres, favorite actors and actresses, or the next episode they’ve queued up to watch. All of this contributes to a more satisfied audience.
The transformation from a CSP to a DSP providing personalized digital experiences will require a change in the way CSPs engage their customers as well as their business partners. Every video or broadband interaction, promotion, trailer, advertisement, landing page etc. should be captured and matched to an individual user. Personalization eliminates the guesswork. It “unbundles the bundle” and opens the door to a wide variety of futuristic service offerings and business models. But, it requires a thorough, accurate and integrated digital user identity mechanism. This paper discusses a new digital user-identity approach (both the challenges and monetization opportunities) that will enable CSPs to transform to DSPs by identifying and managing their users as active individuals versus passive members of a household address.
The new digital identity consists of:
- A secure authentication and authorization process enabling an excellent user experience
- An intelligence-powered, personalized customer journey using a single ID
- An integrated experience across owned and partner-enabled digital services
- A simple entitlement management capability
- Dynamic grouping, such as families and ad-hoc communities