Sponsored: For most of my career I have focused on and led teams at companies like Microsoft and Facebook that build software to help telcos better engage with their subscribers
What I observed in those days was that communications services providers (CSPs) operated in a world where legacy software, hardware and process dominated and dictated how customer experience was delivered to subscribers. I felt that this was entirely separate from the Internet world, which was the world I was working in where technology was used in a far more agile way.
When founding and starting up LotusFlare about eight years ago, my co-founders and I saw it as our job to connect or bridge the gap between these two worlds.
Massive opportunity
Fast forward to today and where the metaverse stands before CSPs (depending on your perspective) as either a massive opportunity to become even more part of the “internet world” or as a massive waste of time. Acknowledging all of the potential problems and difficulties – no standardization, issues related to security and identity, intellectual property, etc. – I still would bet on the former.
The metaverse will impact everyone. When? It’s doing so right now but probably in most younger generations who are more comfortable in AR and VR environments due to gaming. As this generation grows up and becomes the adult population of the future, these subscribers of the future will be very comfortable with transacting in a virtual or augmented reality environment.
I believe that metaverse skepticism is actually helpful at this point. Skepticism will force developers of and enterprises using metaverse technology to get answers to those legitimate questions, especially around standards, security and identity management.
But what does this mean for CSPs in terms of opportunities the metaverse presents? I see two areas of opportunity, the first to leverage metaverse technology to improve existing business and subscriber experience, and the second to build entirely new businesses.
Improving existing business
The metaverse can be used to improve existing businesses around consumer experience, reducing costs, and optimizing existing processes. In this way, the metaverse is another channel for customer interaction. It does not replace web, mobile app or contact center, but it is another channel that delivers a whole new immersive experience, which will be increasingly attractive over time.
Orange Spain is one of the first CSPs to move into the metaverse. For our part, LotusFlare has been building a metaverse prototype to enable companies to brand and test out use cases in a metaverse storefront experience. And this leads to the other thing that the metaverse may help with today: a new support agent experience.
For issues from billing problems to routers that don’t want to work, the metaverse offers another means of interaction and a change to the way support is being given while reducing cost to support.
Outside of consumer experience and support the metaverse can also be used to improve existing processes like training and network planning. Costly and lengthy training can happen in a more natural way.
The evolution of wireless communications involves an increased complexity in the management and planning of networks, with a large number of parameters to be optimized. Digital twins – a form of the metaverse can help reduce cost and improve results.
New business opportunities
Now let’s look at some potential new business opportunities for CSPs that the metaverse brings. The metaverse could be a place CSPs can locate and feature more edge computing for the reduction of latency. Today, LotusFlare is helping CSPs sell advanced network services and APIs, monetizing 5G-enabled services. Massive amounts of data and new APIs such as interactions, location, population movement etc will be created with the rise of the metaverse.
Who is going to create the Twilio for 5G and the metaverse? Who is going to create the zoom of the 5G and metaverse? Identity authentication and management will become more important as virtual worlds become more sophisticated.
CSPs should leverage their existing customer relationships to position themselves as identity management, governance and compliance and fraud experts as the metaverse takes shape.
And then there are CSPs (ie SK Telecom) are creating metaverse worlds to directly compete with internet players like Horizon worlds and Decentraland. If CSPs embrace the metaverse today, they have a better chance of getting into position to benefit from the metaverse growing in use by their subscribers.
Interested to see how LotusFlare is creating CSP storefronts in the metaverse? Click here.