How 5G Will Impact Customer Experience?

5G is the breakthrough technology promised to bring new innovations, change the way people are traversing through the Internet with its faster connection speeds, lower latency, high bandwidth, and ability to connect one million devices per square kilometre. Telcos are deploying 5G to enhance our day-to-day lives.

“When clubbed with other technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), it could mean a lot to a proliferation of other technologies like AR/VR, data analytics.” 

5G can be a boon for businesses with the delivery of increased reliability, efficiency and performance if it can be used to drive more value to the customers as well as the business stakeholders and meet their expectations with the help of digital technologies as mentioned below:

Consumer Expectations are on the Rise

In modern days, customer service teams provide and manage customer support via call centres and digital platforms. The rollout of 5G is expected to unleash more benefits with a positive impact on customer service as they improve their present personalized service offerings to customers and allow it to further create new solutions that could develop their customer engagement to win great deals.

For instance, salespeople in a retail store are being imbibed with layers of information about customers’ behaviour and choices that will help them build a rich and tailored experience for the customers walking down the store.

Video Conferencing/streaming is Just a Few Clicks Away

Video support is considered to be a critical part of Consumer Experience (CX) and will open new avenues for consumer-led enterprises.

“As per a survey conducted by Oracle with 5k people, 75% of people understand the efficiency and value of video chat and voice calls.” 

CX representatives used the video support feature to troubleshoot highly technical situations through video chat and screen sharing options with few clicks, potentially reducing the number of in-house technician visits during critical situations like coronavirus pandemic.

Also, nowadays video conferencing is facilitated with an option to record a quick instant video describing the process/solution and discarding the long process of sending step-by-step emails. Enterprises can develop advanced user guide for troubleshooting issues featuring video teasers for resolving common problems.

However, high-definition video quality is preferable for video conferencing, chat and demands for an uninterrupted network with smooth video streaming. This means operators need to carry out network maintenance activities on regular intervals to check whether there is any kind of 5G PIM formation on these network cell towers that could reduce receive sensitivity and performance, thereby deteriorating network speed, video resolution etc.

Thus, PIM testing becomes critical for delivering enhanced network services without interference, necessary for high-resolution online video conferencing, chats, and many more.

Increased Smart Devices and the Ability to Troubleshoot via Self-Service

The inception of 5G will give a boost to the IoT and smart device market which is already growing.

These smart devices IoT connections are expected to become twice in number between 2019 and 2025 i.e. more than 25Bn as per the GSM association which is an industry organization representing telecom operators across the globe.

With lower latency and improvisation in reliability, 5G has a lot more to offer as it connects a large number of devices. This will ultimately curb the manpower needed for customer support thereby reducing labour costs for the enterprise. Moreover, these IoT connected devices and high-speed network of 5G permit consumers to self-troubleshoot these devices at their own homes.

In order to facilitate these high-resolution networks, telecom operators need to perform 5G network testing and identify issues, take corrective actions that could improve their network and integrate with advanced capabilities, making it more efficient than previous connections with the wider network coverage.

Enhanced Augmented Reality (AR) / Virtual Reality (VR) Capabilities

As these tools are being widely used, customers are provided with virtual stores or immersive experiences using AR to view a sneak peek of the products in their house in real-time.

“‘Augmented Retail: The New Consumer Reality’ study by Nielsen in 2019 suggested that AR/VR has created a lot of interest in people and they are willing to use these technologies to check out products.” 

Analysis of Bulk Data With Big Data Analytics

Enterprises have to deal with a huge volume of data daily. 5G has the ability to collect these data and with its advanced network connectivity across a large number of devices, it delivers faster data analytics too.

Companies will be able to process this vast amount of unstructured data sets combined with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to extract meaningful insights and use them for drafting business strategies like using customer behaviour data sets to study their buying behaviour and targeting such segment with customized service offerings as per their requirement.

As per Ericsson’s AI in networks report, 68% of Communications Service Providers (CSPs) believe improving CX is a business objective while more than half of them already believe AI will be a key technology that will assist in improving the overall CX. Thus, big data analytics will be crucial for harnessing all new data and enhance the customer experience.

Conclusion

Looking from a CX point of view, 5G benefits will far extend beyond the experience of a citizen. Real-time decisions will accelerate with the prevalence of 5G and application of other new-age technologies like AI, ML, IoT, etc. As 5G deployment will continue to grow, so is the transition of each trending processes mentioned above that will ultimately improve your business in terms of productivity, gain a large customer base and bring more revenues.