The Expanding Customer Experience

 

This is the use of new A3 (analytics, AI and Automation) to provide support for unassisted (digital) and assisted (human agent) interactions between the telco, the telco’s customers or ecosystem partners and the telco’s supplier or partners.

The diagram shows the increasing complexity of these interactions using the lines between the boxes: the black lines show current interactions which are mostly human-to-human.  The coloured lines then show new machine interactions either for care purposes (green) or for purchasing (blue).

The newest area for telcos is the introduction of interacting with a  “thing”.  This is defined as a piece of user equipment (typically, a connected device or sensor or could be a bot) that can interact with the telco to request care or make a purchase.  The boxes on the diagram then highlight other entities within the environment:

  • A more centralized bot designed to purchase goods and services on behalf of a company or individual
  • The phrase “embedded intelligence” is used to describe intelligence added into a thing which takes it from being able to make simple requests (“I need help”) towards being able to collect data from multiple sources and create more sophisticated requests (the infamous smart refrigerator ordering groceries). Embedded intelligence in the telco network may also be able to receive more complex requests and prescribe/execute remedies in downstream systems
  • A general consumer bot (eg. Amazon Alexa)
  • A contact centre bot and sales bot which interact with humans or machines to provide help or take an order