How contextual marketing can help you monetize 5G use cases

As new 5G use cases emerge and service providers around the world continue to launch 5G networks and shift their focus to monetization, service providers expect to start making money from their 5G investments as early as possible. To be ready to address these new use cases and deliver on the promises of 5G – such as ultra-high bandwidth, close-to-zero latency and guaranteed quality of service – service providers need to make sure their networks are equipped with certain superpowers that will enable them to build and fulfill profitable end-to-end offerings and services, such as: NPS (net promoter score) insights, cognitive planning, cognitive optimization, 5G monetization, intelligent customer recommendations, 5G customer-centric expert insights and service exposure. In this blog post, l'l take a closer look at how smart customers´ targeting helps build precise services recommendations to generate new revenues, taking the booming AR (augmented reality) gaming industry as an example.

AR and cloud gaming promise big 5G revenues

According to Ericsson ConsumerLab and Omdia report “Harnessing the 5G consumer potential”, of the USD 131 billion of direct revenue that 5G-enabled use cases are set to unlock by 2030,  40 percent are expected to be generated by enhanced video and video formats such as AR, VR and cloud gaming streaming services. These revenues are generated mainly from charging consumer for digital services bundled over a 5G plan (with or without devices) or via revenue sharing arrangements with third parties. AR gaming is the main initial driver for AR and service providers in South Korea, Taiwan, China, Japan and other markets are being proactive in developing AR-based services, while bundling headsets with 5G tariffs to open up this emerging market.

Building the network capabilities to enable profitable augmented reality gaming is the first giant step for service providers. These includes enhanced network speeds and bandwidth, decreased latency, guaranteed quality of service, network reliability and flexible 5G offers. With all that in place, they will be able to create the AR gaming offers needed to launch the new service into the market. Those offers will use new 5G network parameters to authorize, monitor and rate the traffic to make sure the agreed SLA (service level agreement) between service provider, users and partners are met. In a real-life example, once the subscriber starts to play and the AR gaming traffic is identified – based on network slice ID and traffic recognition codes, for example – his quality of service is increased to the highest levels. And the usage records may be used to bill the partner that provides the headsets or the games.

There is still a pressing question: how do you market these new services in an effective, contextual and low-cost way? Service providers need to reach the right audience, mitigating the risks of disturbing customers that do not care about gaming or missing the opportunity to reach avid gamers. The same Ericsson ConsumerLab and Omdia report confirms that consumers are willing to pay a premium for 5G services, especially if they add value to their area of interest. But they need to be aware of these new services.

Superpower your 5G network with intelligent user interactions

Among those 5G superpowers intelligent customer recommendations makes sure that the specific products reach the correct audience based on their behaviors and established usage habits, using AI (artificial intelligence) to continuously learn about its customer base. Through powerful algorithms, the platform can identify the target group of a new offer or upsell or cross-sell opportunities during the purchase journey. Let´s say Joe is a heavy gamer using a regular 5G subscription. Once the AR gaming offer is ready his service provider can build a customer segmentation strategy to find its subscribers with high gaming traffic usage. They can even do microsegmentation by splitting the users by region or monthly spending. For sure, Joe will be part of that segment and get the offer notification pushed to him through SMS or while he is browsing the service providers app to check his usage information.

Other intelligent customer interactions can also be used to enhance the relationship between the service provider and Joe in the long run. Products and orders information may be sorted in different matrixes to build an order association table and a product similarity table. If product A is sold more often with product B, they will be placed closer in the order association table than product C, that is rarely sold together. It’s the same idea for the product similarity table – products with similar characteristics are placed closer. These matrixes are then fed into an AI recommendation engine that finds out what is the exact next-best offer or the perfect cross-selling product that must be offered to Joe through the app or the next time he contacts customer service. Best of all, these recommendations are exposed to any channel that the operator may provide Joe to enhance their personalized interactions.

Here at Ericsson, we are simplifying the introduction of AI and optimization of customer journeys with our Digital Experience Platform (DXP), a cloud-based platform developed to help service providers interact with their subscribers through contextual journeys that caters for the evolving demands of the digital society. It provides consistent, secure and personalized access to information and applications across many digital channels and touchpoints. By seamlessly integrating with different BSS, OSS and Core Network backend applications to collect data, Ericsson DXP is able to build those intelligent matrixes with the help of in-built AI and ML (machine learning) algorithms. It then exposes the recommendations using standard TMF Open APIs to make it simple to any frontend channel to present the information to the subscribers. In summary, customer interactions with their service providers become much more relevant and natural with Ericsson DXP.

Curious to see how service providers can use intelligent customer recommendations along with intelligent network operations to supercharge 5G networks and tap into AR gaming revenues from day one? 

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