Artilium

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Can I disturb you?

Trying to contact someone can be a dilemma! Should I call, text or email, are they likely to answer, is it too late to call?
We have previously commented on how the presence (location and state) of a subscriber can be used for call routing, e.g. if busy in a meeting in the Belgium office automatically divert calls to the Belgian office manager. The network can therefore intelligently route calls based on live presence. However, it is also possible to intelligently learn from the network how subscribers may wish calls to be handled. To explain how this is achieved we introduce the concept of “disturbability” used to represent the wish of a subscriber to be or not to be disturbed. By analysing call records for subscribers it is possible to use historical behaviour to determine how “disturbable” an individual is. Rejected calls represent a large proportion of all calls and so they are statistically relevant.  There are a number of factors that we consider useful in determining the willingness of a subscriber to accept a call:

• Statistically, at what time of day do they accept most calls, relative to those rejected?
• Which callers are they most likely to accept calls from?
• What proportion of calls are accepted/rejected on different days of the week?
• When are subscribers active themselves, i.e. making most calls?

From these metrics extracted from historical call records, it is possible for a subscriber’s disturbability to be quantified for a given caller, at a given time, on a particular day of the week. There are clearly times when a subscriber may reject more calls than at other times e.g. some subscribers may refuse to answer calls during their lunchtime, and obviously you have little chance of getting your call answered in the middle of the night. Certain callers may always get their calls answered, whereas other callers might be considered unimportant and are rarely answered. The patterns may change significantly on different days of the week especially at weekends. The times when a subscriber makes most calls themselves also seems to be an indicator of a good time to call them.

So given that the network might know the disturbability of subscribers how can this information be utilised to some advantage? There are a number of ways to usefully use this information but the two obvious benefits are suggested to be:  a) giving an indication to a caller the best time to call a particular person and b) as a method to automatically screen incoming calls.

Imagine that the contacts list on your phone can be used to view your contacts name along with the following presence information: proximity, availability and disturbability. These are all useful parameters in determining when you might interact with friends and colleagues.  Proximity indicate the opportunities of meeting in person, the availability may indicate if they are busy (e.g. in a meeting) and the disturbability indicates if now is a good time to contact. Note that availability and disturbability, while related, do not indicate the same thing. It is entirely possible for someone to be busy in a meeting, but to be disturbable by some callers, but not by others.

To screen calls a subscriber may set a threshold which means that any incoming calls scoring lower than the disturbability threshold are automatically rejected without the phone ringing – so the subscriber is not disturbed.

Of course, the CDR statistics need to be interpreted carefully and certain exceptions need to be taken into account.  For example, a missed call may not have been intentionally rejected and so if the call is returned quickly it should be treated as an exception within the statistics. Similarly if the caller immediately tries again and this time it is answered this is also an exception. In many countries missed calls are intentionally used to convey a message (i) (e.g. ring me) and these factors need to be carefully considered.

When combined with other personal presence and subscriber profile data, disturbability can also be used to detect a subscribers willingness to accept not just calls but other content, services and possibly advertising. From a revenue generation perspective this is where disturbability may find its real value.

(i) The Rules of Beeping: Exchanging Messages Via Intentional “Missed Calls” on Mobile Phones, Jonathan Donner.
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/donner.html, 15 September 2009.