Since its inception in 2007, Waze has become the world’s largest community-based traffic and navigation app. Acquired by Google in 2013, Waze has more than 50 million users worldwide.
What makes Waze so unique? The answer is the company’s crowdsourcing algorithm. Rather than tirelessly mapping out every single road, lane and side street, Waze relies on its users to act as field ops, cartographers, and road police, flagging and recording updates on accidents, bottlenecks, and traffic as they drive.
Waze uses motorists as smart “sensors” to collect real-time data. Relying on commuters for data has allowed Waze to build incredibly accurate maps.
The company’s business model is simple – Waze encourages users to report real-time data that can be used to provide compelling traffic-related insights. Active data is collected using voice commands and icons, while passive data, such as the user’s location and speed, is gathered via the user’s smartphone. Both are used by Waze to provide commuters with the most optimal route to their destination.
The Similarities
Although Veego lives in a completely different sector, the parallels with Waze’s approach are outstanding. Veego uses data to generate insights to help Telcos leverage and monetize their own data to improve operational efficiency, increase revenues and reduce churn – all while providing subscribers with the best quality of experience (QoE).
The Power of The Masses
Like Waze users who report traffic data in actual time, Veego collects real-time and non-real-time data from Telco subscribers’ standard home router. It works via an agent that sits on the router and discerns the subscribers’ internet behaviour and their specific-individual preferences. Like Waze, Veego uses the power of the masses to determine the best way to reach its destination. Veego leverages a large number of subscribers to determine the best way to experience home connectivity.
Identifying The Anomalies
Through experience and habit, Waze learns what are the best and fastest driving directions. Waze believes that the best predictor of your trip today is the trip you took yesterday. But the most troubling traffic jams are those that are non-recurring or the ones that are abnormal — the anomalies.
Similarly, Veego reviews the Telco subscriber’s internet behaviour, identifying and categorizing their quality of experience. Veego can tell whether a subscriber is satisfied with their internet experience or not. Veego knows the recurrence of a good quality of experience and recognizes an anomalous experience. And like Waze which provides ETA, Veego identifies the problem and how to rectify it.
The Secret Sauce
Veego’s secret sauce is a weave of App ID and QoE Score (collectively – App Intelligence) score that generates a contextual based – quality of experience score.
Veego’s App ID module essentially “sees” which internet categories are being used, and in what capacity. It identifies, queries, and measures applications and devices being used
- Video Streaming – Online Gaming – Web Browsing
- Music Streaming – Video Conferencing – Social networking
- File Uploading – File downloading
Together with App ID, Veego generates a QoE Score that combines measurements from backhaul interfaces, Wi-Fi metrics and proactive probes from home devices and applications to determine the perceived quality of each service within the home. Veego uses the QoE score to assign real-time metrics to each service and classifies them as Good, Unstable, Bad or Broken. The combination of APP ID and QoE Score provides the contextually based core for Root Cause Analysis, recommendations, and auto-remediation.
Visibility And Optimization
Just like Waze provides visibility to traffic and navigation concerns, Veego provides visibility into the customer’s experience, behaviour, and the causes of their network Wi-Fi performance/malfunctions (inside or outside the home). And just like Waze’s direction recommendations, Veego’s analytics provides proactive initiatives that anticipate customer needs to optimize the providers’ network.
Who Can Benefit?
Veego is an ideal solution for Telco Customer Experience teams, Customer Care professionals, Customer Support, Marketing and Sales units. Its insights and dashboards also benefit Broadband Product teams, NOC and Network Engineering Departments.
Telcos can benefit from Veego in multiple ways. A standard customer experience department can easily segment its subscribers by means of customer life cycle events (sensitive events) and customer activity. For example, a Telco customer experience professional can easily use the platform to identify high-intensity work-from-home users, or heavy gamers, or proactively identify subscribers who are likely to churn. They will use the data collected to generate applicative and relevant campaigns for a specific audiences or specific problems.
Network providers’ marketing and sales teams can use the Veego system to accumulate data and identify pertinent leads for upsells and prioritization. For example, providers can easily identify subscribers who often binging, or high-streamers of internet content may be ideal candidates for a content-specific bundle. Veego’s analytics can help sales teams identify potential upgrades for extenders, streaming services, devices and others. The data that is collected and segmented is the core data for Telco sales teams to generate new revenue.
Throughout the world, drivers use Google Maps, MapQuest, and other mapping systems, to improve their driving experience. What separates Waze from other GPS-based mapping systems is that it is an experience-based AI technology.
Just like Waze, Veego is an experience-based technology. It uses actual subscribers’ internet activity and behaviour to determine the best internet experience. It records and classifies all the connections of the homes it has optimized and learns which are healthy experiences and which are anomalous. This means that over time, a Telco subscriber’s experience can become more efficient, profitable and churn free.
By classifying, comparing, and categorizing the experiences (as does Waze) Veego can transform a sad, suffering internet-connected home, into a happy and healthy home.
About the Author
Yossi Geller, Veego’s VP of Marketing, brings over 20-years of experience in marketing software solutions. His extensive knowledge and experience in cybersecurity and leading marketing teams to success make Yossi an extremely valuable asset to the Veego team.