5G is almost here. I say ‘almost’ because we have yet to see broad deployment by major mobile operators across Asia – either at the consumer-retail level or enterprise.
Yes, lots of PR wins by smartphone makers touting their next generation smartphones bearing the 5G standard. Similarly, network equipment vendors are giving themselves praises for launching new equipment or signing more MOUs with carriers.
Sure, AT&T president Kevin Petersen blamed the limitations of physical manpower and community logistics for the slow rollout of gig-speed mobile networks.
But beyond excuses by operators or how fast or slow they are at launching commercial-grade 5G service, the reality is that there are no real use cases to date to validate its impact on customer experience.
FutureCIO spoke to Colleen Berube, chief information officer at Zendesk and Achim Granzen, principal analyst at Forrester on their respective views regarding the impact of 5G as it relates to customer experience.
Do you see businesses neglecting the human element in favour of the 5G narrative?
Colleen Berube: In engaging the modern-day customer, the ubiquity of 5G could mean losing touch with the human aspect of customer support, resulting in gaps on how customer data is collected and interpreted for decision making. This needs to be top of mind, especially when 76% of customers want personalization in their customer interaction.
The trick is to find the moments where human interactions really matter, specifically looking for where it impacts customer happiness and loyalty. Then, leverage technology to provide automation elsewhere.
5G will allow AI and automation to be deployed at a larger scale, empowering customer support professionals to create amazing CX by harnessing rich insights. However, this will not be immediately successful to those that are not ready to adapt to it.
Achim Granzen: In the short-term future, 5G will be bringing benefits primarily in B2B scenarios, like IoT or Smart Cities. Low-latency online gaming is often cited as the lone B2C “killer app”. That B2B focus may lead to a business focused 5G discussion.
That said, ultimately humans will be impacted – initially in their work environments – so the human impact must certainly raise in priority.
How does 5G go hand-in-hand with the growth of AI & Automation?
Colleen Berube: 5G is not just limited to speed – it means we’re no longer constrained by the limits of a 4G network. From a customer experience (CX) point of view, we can now do things that weren’t possible before, including boosting the Internet of Things (IoT) to allow for greater personalisation, relevance and immediacy to customer service through artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.
Zendesk Benchmark data reveals that Singaporeans (62.4%) already take the lead when it comes to adopting AI-enabled customer support channels in Southeast Asia, while Chat is the dominant self-help channel for Malaysians (18.2%) and Indonesians (16.4%). The data shows that once customers have had a great experience in self-serving, it’s their preference.
As 5G continues to scale, we will need to treat AI and automation like any other new technological advancement, adopting and leveraging it appropriately to champion customer experiences, employee experiences and productivity.
Achim Granzen: 5G will ultimately provide AI and automation with more and stronger connections to the physical world, thus drastically increasing the breadth and depth of applications and use cases. For example, 5G’s low latency will allow real-time on the shopfloor and in warehouses and vehicles, which will boost Industrial IoT and Logistics applications.
Crucially, 5G will also dramatically extend the opportunities for running AI and automation at the edge, whether that’s in Smart Industry, Smart Infrastructure, Smart Healthcare, and even Smart Consumer Products and Services.
In particular. the ability to set up private 5G networks across a campus, factory premises and even farms and agribusiness will drive the adoption and scale of AI and automation applications in a dazzling variety of use cases and industries.
Why it’s crucial for companies to encourage a culture of innovation?
Achim Granzen: Innovation culture is crucial for an organization to stay ahead in today’s hyper-competitive, high speed environment. But traditional processes, organizations and “ways of working” often block the crucial “experiment a lot, fail fast” approach.
Organizations aiming to be leaders must not hide behind the current state. To build a winning innovation culture, deploy a flexible, adaptable and collaborative strategic program to drive change across people-processes-technology-organization.
How will connectivity impact innovation?
Colleen Berube: The scale of 5G is going to make the cloud more accessible, opening doors to new possibilities for enhanced user experience. Particularly, the collection of data from intelligent devices will enhance AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities, resulting in meaningful interactions leading to better engagement outcomes. It may also include much richer engagement experiences we have not seen until now, including VR or AR.
Capturing data across more touchpoints helps businesses stay on top of their customers’ needs at a more granular level and in real-time, allowing them to not only leverage insights and analytics but to drive innovation and personalized engagements.
Achim Granzen: The biggest impact will be on massively expanding the use cases into near-real time scenarios at scale, with lower overhead. For example, in Smart City initiatives many more devices and sensors could be connected in real-time.
Just imagine if, in the current Covid-19 crises, all temperature measurements in all public buildings, clinics and hospitals in Singapore are connected to give a real time view on the virus spread!
Ian Fogg, vp of analysis at Opensignal threw his view on the 5G adoption commenting that to accelerate 5G adoption, consumers need to see a real-world improvement in their experience such enhanced mobile gaming, side-stepping congestion on 4G bands, faster speeds, or sustained higher quality mobile video streaming.
“If consumers do not see an improvement in their real-world mobile network experience, then operators will find marketing 5G tough. Without seeing value in 5G, consumers will tend to adopt 5G only when it’s a standard feature of their next phone and operators bundle in 5G service for no additional charge,” he added.
As for enterprises, expect rollouts to only start to leave proof of concept labs when the service can deliver stable, secure, scalable service at prices financially attractive to the chief finance officer.
