Stay on top of the customer’s experience in the 5G era

Over the last couple of years, digital transformation has become the highest priority for most of the clients. What it used to be for the tech world or retail, it has now become the buzzword for every industry. Right from manufacturing, retailers, healthcare and life sciences, everyone is embarking on their true investment in digital transformation, and most importantly, on the customer experience side of it.

Earlier, while it used to take a month or a quarter to garner feedback, it has now converted to an hourly basis. They are now reaching out directly to their consumers through multiple social media channels and customer sentiments across all those digital transformation initiatives. This has become the key for them to increasing their experience with it and thereby increasing their sales.

Every consumer is also looking for the immediate implementation of their request to increase their consumer experience. The total IT budget for the digital transformation initiatives across the Fortune 500 companies has increased from 20% to 60% over the last couple of years, and the budget is coming from the Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Experience Officer, and Chief Digital and Transformation Officer. These are some of the imperatives that we’ve seen across the organization over the last 18 months.

Many organizations have started to evolve from being reactive to being proactive with the concept of customer and user experience. Traditionally testing has been really focused on pure functionality and then we started to look at performance and response times, but it was always a secondary consideration. Now, we are starting to go beyond it. While there are real challenges with getting the right feedback at the right stage of the development lifecycle, organizations have started to pursue a number of different strategies in the pursuit of getting real customer and user experiences data as early as possible. But the environments are also much more complex as networks and applications become more sophisticated and integrated. As our capabilities are increasing, the user’s expectation has increased manifold.

Experience is the relevant metric of our time, specifically right now. When we live in a hyper personalization era where everything is personalized, we’ve seen applications working on that personalization angle and now they are trying to take it to the next level. Now the applications were able to achieve some amount of personalization, however, our networks were being mainly used as a deliver mechanism like as an application agnostic pipeline.

With the advent of 5G, our networks are becoming more application aware, virtualized, programmable, and very advanced. 5G is taking it many steps ahead and is becoming a network that can be personalized, not just the applications. The application and the network have to go hand in hand, and many applications are being optimized for 5G.

The 3GPP standards and networks have defined a metric called “Quality of Experience” (QoE). The applications need to understand what its own needs are, how much bandwidth would it require, and such. Applications can now make an end-to-end experience where they can be tested on live 5G networks.

QoE is the metrics the clients are asking us to create. If we want to have the QoE, our net promoter score will be increased for our application and brand. So, everything is a direct correlation of the QoE.

Digital assurance is more important than ever. Organizations have to deliver innovation, they have to deliver it fast and it has to be great, “just good enough” will not suffice.

Digital Assurance done right ensures the speed and quality that have become the imperative of any digital transformation. But doing digital assurance “right” is not simply a factor of proper test plans, use of automation and tools, viable test data, etc. While of course those are all vital elements, the nature of digital, and specifically, the significantly increased focus on digital engagement with the customer (i.e., the customer experience), creates the mandate that we must now seriously consider the voice of the customer (VOC) in the definition of digital assurance.

VOC is a composite of the customer expectations (needs and wants) and the customer’s performance experiences regarding products and/or services they have been provided. They can be both specifically stated and unstated. They can also be things the customer has no idea about, but it affects their experience (i.e., a mobile app that drains their smartphone battery).

Digital Assurance is not static. Shifting-right is now just as important as shifting-left. We have to be using tools and techniques such as digital experience monitoring to capture and report back on these real- time experience metrics. Digital assurance is not a linear path with a starting point and an end point – when done right, it is an “always on” loop.

Here is the link to access the on-demand webinar where our panel of experts, Ramnik Kamo, EVP, Chief Information & People Officer at Mavenir, Rashmi Varma, Founder & CTO at Innovate5G, and Mark Shorrocks, Strategic Partner at Schooley Mitchell, spoke on how to stay ahead of your Customers’ Experience in the age of 5G.

Why should you watch the webinar?

The 2020 Gartner Market Guide for Digital Experience Monitoring predicts that “By 2025, 70% of digital business initiatives will require enterprises to report on digital experience”.

Assuring a digital experience while keeping up with technological upgrades is critical for today’s global organizations. 5G is one such technology that will play a fundamental role and also create opportunities to transform the digital experience.

In this virtual event, you have the opportunity to learn from global thought leaders how 5G will transform digital experiences. Deep dive into the evolution of connected data sources, measurement, and analysis of pre, post and real-time data to predict customers’ digital experiences.

View the event to gain valuable insights into how you can stay ahead of the Digital Experience Assurance curve and avoid an “Oh, no!” moment.

Conclusion

Cigniti has incorporated 5G Assurance into our overall Digital Assurance strategy and, as part of this, has established a capability that provides 5G automated testing, monitoring, measurements, and analytics. We support a broad range of applications that can be live-monitored and tested:

• End Device Applications
• Edge Compute Applications
• Distributed Applications
• Special Hardware Applications
• Network Applications

Organizations now have an easy and cost-effective platform to test on a 5G network, whether that be the much-needed validation of how your current apps will work on 5G or building out your next generation apps that will take advantage of the promise of 5G. Paired with our Digital Experience Monitoring solution (InCight), they also now have the real-time visibility and predictability of the end-user experience to round out their digital assurance strategy.

Cigniti, being a worldwide leader in independent quality engineering services, is a strong advocate of quality assurance and its implementation right from the initial stages of the software lifecycle. We encourage customer feedback and believe in including such feedback in our broader quality assurance approach. We take great measures to make sure that we are fully equipped with state-of-the-art services and have partnered with other experts that specialize in providing testing services. Talk to us.