How 5G will revolutionize the customer experience

Huge data rates, unlimited data consumption, and very low latency… This is what the arrival of 5G in France next June promises us. In the face of this technological revolution, the 4G package model – with a limited amount of data transferred each month – seems quite obsolete. The performance announced is such that all sectors of the economy will benefit.

At Capgemini and Odigo, we are aware of 5G’s potential in terms of customer relations, and we anticipated early in 2019 the need to prepare service offers for this deadline. Two possible lines of thought were then open to us:

• A focus on infrastructure-related services, with slicing capabilities, bandwidth, IoT, etc.,
• A focus on service to the end customer.

We decided to explore the second option.

Keeping this in mind, Capgemini’s expert Salesforce teams came together with Odigo. Together, we explored the possible uses of video integration in managing customer interactions. This led us to carry out an experiment on behalf of SNCF, the results of which were unveiled in November at the last edition of the Dreamforce conference: the 5G accelerator for Service Cloud project.

In concrete terms, what will the 5G change for the mobile user? It will allow him to load any content almost instantly while retaining the best possible quality, and not just improve existing services, but develop new ones.

5G: Enhanced video to revolutionize the customer experience

Nowadays, the video stream, which is extremely data-intensive, still remains far from being used to its full potential. Thanks to 5G, it will be possible to leverage it for high value-added uses. Indeed, for the first time, high and very high definition audiovisual content (4K video, 3D video, etc.) will be within reach of every 5G phone owner.

Add to that the Open CTI coupling capabilities of the Salesforce platform – with its pop-up sheets on linking, log-on-call communication purposes, etc. – and enhanced video can become a new channel of interaction in its own right.

What could it look like? A glance at the news can give us an idea: a presenter speaks, there is a banner with text scrolling at the bottom of the screen and inlays of images, even video, illustrate the subjects. In terms of customer experience, 5G will make it easy to do the same with customer context elements during a video call.

The next step? Add a layer of interaction management and rework these embedded elements by making them operable. Welcome to the world of enhanced video!

Imagine a customer who wants to take out a loan by phone…. Not inclined to use self-service, he prefers to talk to an advisor who can help him configure his loan. Thanks to this technology, it will become possible for him, wherever he is, to easily vary amounts and/or durations on the screen of his 5G phone. All this while talking directly with an agent available to answer his questions and guide him through the process.

5G: The era of collaborative video

With 5G, it will be possible to build a screen from scratch – through the mixing of agent and customer video streams, but also customer data – whose visual representation will be identical on customer and agent sides.

Indeed, what will be displayed on the customer’s screen will be included in the Salesforce user interface. The agent will therefore be able to unfold, fold, and interact with this visual representation on his screen with ease. Contrary to the trend towards dehumanization of interaction channels, this technology, if properly used, will make it possible to put the human back at the center.

Tomorrow more advanced features will be available

More advanced features may be offered depending on the use case. In the tourism sector, this could eliminate communication problems between foreign travelers and agents.

The tourist will be able to express himself in his native language and the agent will understand, in real-time, what he is saying. How is that possible? Thanks to a well-dosed combination of speech-to-text, machine translation, and text-to-speech. With the reverse functions, the agent will answer him in French, but our tourist will receive the answer in his mother tongue.

And, going a step further, other functionalities could, for example, make it possible to identify the customer’s mood by analyzing the video stream (image) and/or the audio stream (intonations)…

Easy to set up

This technology will use the phone’s native video stream injection capabilities. So, we’re talking about an immersive full-screen experience that doesn’t require installing a client-side mobile application. The only necessary programing will be to materialize all the interactions that are projected within the video (dynamic effects of appearance and disappearance of inlaid elements, reaction on the gestures, etc.). Nothing to install either on the agent side. The only requirement will be to have a webcam available. Lastly, no ruinous investments in sight. Salesforce is now an important part of the contact center market and companies already equipped with Service Cloud will not need to purchase an additional Salesforce license.

Admittedly, in terms of infrastructure, a good network remains essential to exploit video bandwidth. As a prerequisite, the contact center will therefore have to ensure that it has sufficient data rates for this type of channel.

In terms of operating costs, the implementation of an intermediate signaling server – allowing the connection between the mobile phone and the contact center agent – will be necessary. Its cost will depend on the number of communications.

The difficulty of properly calibrating the service offer

Since we speak of something based on technologies available natively on the phone, the challenge is not so much technical. The real difficulty lies in the fact that these are disruptive services of which corporate customers may have difficulty conceiving the potential. It will be necessary to ensure that the tailor-made service offer is well-calibrated to correspond to the uses of tomorrow.

These uses are not known today. Correctly materializing the chosen use case will therefore be somewhat of a bet. For this reason, adjustments will be necessary in order to provide an increasingly enhanced user experience, using levers that weren’t necessarily initially identified.

New interaction channel = new uses

In short, this new channel will allow a multitude of new use cases in terms of assistance, support or sales in many sectors of activity. We are convinced that this type of service, with increased interaction capabilities, will bring consumers and their brands even closer together.