Background
The Personal Emergency Response Systems (PERS) market is predicted to be worth $11.1B by 2025, with mobile systems (mPERS) accounting for the largest, fastest growing segment1 . Powered by IoT technologies, mPERS solutions are seeing increased adoption rates due to their ability to track and monitor users regardless of their location, as well as their automatic fall detection and alerting capabilities. However, despite the projected market growth, many key players in the PERS space are looking for additional ways to expand their portfolios to remain competitive in a market dominated by mergers and acquisitions1 .
Challenges
A global, leading manufacturer of wandering prevention devices achieved success as an early adopter and supplier of mPERS solutions. However, like many providers in the industry, the organization felt the competitive pressures of a growing market and needed a way to differentiate its offerings and provide users with the most innovative, advanced technologies available. As a result, the organization decided to develop a new, multi-functional, wearable solution that built on traditional mPERS functionalities to provide optional panic alerts, fitness tracking capabilities, GPS personal locating technologies, and optional integration of medical monitoring options. All features of the new offering could be customized to meet unique, individual needs.
The organization’s newly designed GPS Safety Watch provided accurate tracking with one-minute updates, which required an IoT partner that could deliver low latency, secure, managed network access to power the solution on a global basis. Having already worked with over a dozen providers including both MVNO’s and major cellular carriers, the organization was experiencing significant issues with their connectivity services. The customer support costs and resource allocations required to manage these issues triggered the organization to engage a new partner that could provide increased flexibility and reliability, as well as a connectivity management platform that could support scale and growth into new global markets.
The mPERS provider ultimately selected KORE as its IoT partner to bring their flagship GPS Safety Watch to market, citing KORE’s superior connectivity offering and complementary professional services that support device certification on new products, in new regions, and on new carrier networks.
Solution
As the company had previously deployed connections on other carriers and network providers, KORE facilitated the migration of their legacy devices to the KORE network, provisioning them to a specific and customized configuration optimized for the organizations’ safety technology. A representative from the organization noted that the support received from the KORE Team was excellent, as they worked closely with development to integrate the connections into the business’ Customer Relationship Platform. The KORE connectivity management platform provided the business with significantly improved flexibility and reporting capabilities, with highly responsive Support Teams attentive to the specific needs and challenges of the organization.
In addition to migrating the organizations’ existing connections and facilitating the growth and activation of new devices related to the launch of the new GPS Safety Watch, KORE was also able to leverage its IoT expertise and professional services offerings to enable the company to further expand their offerings. Through a specialized partnership agreement, KORE dedicated resources to the development, certification, and deployment of the business’ next-gen LTE solution.
Results
Since partnering with KORE, the organization has experienced diminished connectivity-related customer service calls, resulting in decreased support expenses and the ability to focus internal resources on what matters most to their business, including product enhancement, sales, and marketing efforts. With more targeted efforts on core competencies, the company benefited from the “exponential growth” and competitive differentiation they were seeking via their expanded product offering.
Aside from enhanced connectivity, support, and professional services offerings in primary North American markets, KORE’s global reach and local expertise has enabled the organization to seamlessly penetrate new, global regions. According to the Project Manager at the organization, “KORE addresses our global business challenges as we are now opening up many international dealers and distributers in Poland, Germany, UK, South Africa, Costa Rica, and Columbia to name a few”.
Working with KORE versus other major providers for our primary USA and Canada connectivity, we have seen increasing revenues month over month.
