How 5G Impacts Your CX Strategy

With 5G just around the corner, it’s essential you begin thinking about the impact of 5G on your customer experience (CX) right now. With 5G’s potential to revolutionize the way your company interacts with customers, 5G capabilities will soon likely dominate how you define and deliver on your CX strategy. 

The impact of 5G lies in its ability to provide significantly higher speeds and lower latency than what’s possible with 4G networks today. Once you start to think about how an increase in speed, performance, and capability upgrades can power your CX strategy, you’ll soon begin to see how you can use 5G to deliver a next-generation customer experience. 

5G should improve the experience of your customers by helping you deliver more speed, new products, higher efficiency and deeper integrations into powerful technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. Here are three ways 5G is set to impact your CX strategy in 2020 and beyond:

Introduce New Services with Network Slicing: Network slicing lets network operators easily set up multiple virtual networks on top of a shared physical infrastructure while providing the ability to span across multiple parts of a network (core network, transport layer or access network). Each network slice creates an end-to-end virtual network. 

As demand from customers for more self-service capabilities and anytime-access to data increases, enterprises should be able to use 5G’s ability to incorporate network slicing into their CX strategy to massively scale their available bandwidth. For example, the addition of a new recording or transcription feature for your customer support center  an increase the demand for bandwidth as you handle substantially more data as a result of the new capabilities. Rather than add more bandwidth, network slicing lets you dedicate a virtual network for those features so they do not compromise the performance of your primary voice network. 

The impact of 5G and network slicing is that you should be able to add new services that can be be allocated a dedicated network slice.. You will also be able to assign different layer security zones in the different network slices as needed, ensuring you maintain security and compliance without over-regulating data that doesn’t need your most stringent levels of protection.

Think Deeper with Big Data Analytics: Call centers are already incorporating AI to help identify customer patterns. By making analytics a more significant part of your CX strategy, you’ll be able to better prepare your call center agents to serve your customers while enabling intelligent chatbots to assist customers directly with increasingly complex questions. 

In addition, 5G-powered analytics can power a new generation of immersive experiences across the CX spectrum. While still in the early stages, VR and AR are expected to one day be used by customers to interact with chatbots and human agents alike for everything from shopping to technical support. 

The impact of 5G and analytics should be crucial for providing the performance and intelligence needed for these technologies to work anytime. 

Deliver CX Faster with Multi-Access Edge Computing: The technology of both today and tomorrow rely on a constant connection to the internet to operate effectively, with billions of IoT devices ranging from autonomous vehicle sensors to smart appliances and voice assistants, all requiring real-time, context-based content.

Rather than process all that data in the cloud, multi-access edge computing is used to process data closer to the source, enabling data to be analyzed and acted on within the device itself. With speeds much faster than what’s currently possible with 4G, 5G will help devices almost instantly communicate back and forth with your enterprise to deliver content, process decisions, and identify and solve issues quickly and efficiently, possibly without the customer even realizing the device is actively communicating. 

The impact of 5G and multi-access edge computing on your CX strategy should allow you to generate and work with larger amounts of data at the edge of the network, such as smartphones and IoT sensors, helping you provide a smarter and more responsive customer experience. 

In each of these areas, 5G can help you begin to view your network not as the infrastructure through which data flows, but as a facilitator for insight and proactive service. By using 5G to impact the way you deliver the customer experience, you should be able to impact your business performance in the process.  

Learn more about how you can deliver winning experiences to your audience by exploring our customer experience services.