The world of customer experience continues to evolve at a rapid pace

In the last few years alone, we have seen the rise of video conferencing for customer interactions, self-service solutions, and even augmented reality interactions. For most companies, however, the shift in the CX landscape is largely due to new ways to leverage data.

After decades of work in automation, instrumentation, and connected tools, the intelligent edge is emerging as an indispensable component of true digital transformation. Grandview Research predicts that the smart edge will be worth around $64.14 billion by 2028 and will forever change the way we interact with consumers and people.

Not only does the smart edge mean that access to technology and insights will become easier on a large scale, but it can also be a valuable way for businesses to significantly improve CX in all aspects of the workplace. Let us take a look at what the intelligent edge is and what it could mean for Telecom CX.

Defining the Intelligent Edge

The intelligent edge is a carefully structured ecosystem of advanced connectivity (such as IoT), compact processing power, and intelligence (AI) that resides near the devices responsible for using and creating data. Properly deployed, the intelligent edge represents a major step forward in the evolution of everything from automated manufacturing to utility management to telecommunications.

With the intelligent edge, businesses can access advanced cloud computing tools, AI, and analytics in areas that are physically closer to where data needs to be analyzed quickly. This means that companies can respond to data faster or even incorporate data into intelligent process automation strategies. In particular, many experts believe that the ability of the intelligent edge to bring cloud capabilities to remote operations could significantly boost their performance.

The evolution of the intelligent network is due in large part to the rise of AI and automation. It is believed that the rise of the intelligent network will drive the evolution of service environments to decentralized, distributed, and location-based environments. While the intelligent edge will not replace the cloud or the modern data center, it will create a more holistic cloud-to-edge environment where everything runs more smoothly.

In the future, certain components of a service, such as in telecoms, will run in a centralized cloud, while other, more localized data will reside closer to the edge. In telecom, for example, this could mean keeping data at the edge for CX improvement opportunities. Each local telecom provider will be able to assess functionality and call performance at the edge to enable more proactive network management strategies through automation.

The rapid use of information available at the network edge could also pave the way for faster and more effective automated diagnostics and troubleshooting in the telecom environment, allowing enterprises to determine where issues in the communications landscape are coming from to resolve them more quickly.

Why is the Intelligent Edge Important?

The smart edge is a revolution for data-driven businesses like telecoms. The telecom landscape relies on data, from tracking call flow and calls to maintaining customer satisfaction. With the smart edge, businesses can better manage the flow of data in certain environments, resulting in benefits such as:

• Better bandwidth utilization and network visibility.
• Lower costs with better customer service
• Greater automation and autonomy in servicing customers and maintaining high-quality communications.
• Support for low latency within the telecom environment and faster response times.
• Greater control over data management, triage, location, and privacy, which is critical to regulating the communications ecosystem.
• Reduced need for risky data transfers across networks.
• Resilience to unreliable, poor, or lost connectivity through reduced reliance on wide-area networks

In the telecom landscape, as well as other key data-driven industries, the intelligent edge brings additional flexibility and transparency to operations, enabling faster data analysis, amazing real-time responses, and better comprehensive automation. When certain microservices require high security and low latency, such as B2B telecommunications with facial or voice recognition to protect against fraud, these services could be enabled at the edge. This enables tighter decision loops, lower security risks, and lower costs.

The intelligent edge also supports comprehensive transformation solutions that can radically change logistics, manufacturing, mobility, robotics, and consumer electronics. For example, the right system can transform supply chains from linear, vulnerable environments to more responsive, programmable, and adaptable digital networks that are able to remodel themselves to respond to changing disruptions and demands. Another example is telecommunications: telecom companies could use AI-powered systems to track the flow of data in local data centers and identify when certain parts of the ecosystem might fail and prevent those failures before they occur.

Discovering the Benefits of the Intelligent Edge

The telecom industry is already starting to consider the benefits of the smart edge with the deployment of things like 5G networks to help people connect faster and without latency in the communications landscape in a mobile world. Cloud providers in other areas of the IT ecosystem are also looking to the smart edge to optimize their infrastructure and service offerings.

Already, experts predict that by 2023, about 70% of enterprises will run their computing on the edge in some form. The transformation of the world according to COVID and the acceleration of digital transformation have quickly led us into an environment where we are working more with data, intelligence, and automation than ever before.

There are still some challenges to overcome in the intelligent edge environment. For example, best practices and standards are still evolving. Security and interoperability issues need to be addressed on a case-by-case basis, and perhaps most importantly, companies need to ensure they are prepared to move into the intelligent edge environment when it is ready to evolve.

What we do know, however, is that there are significant benefits to be gained by bringing computing capabilities closer to the environment where critical data needs to be analyzed. The smart edge opens the door to a faster, cheaper, and safer approach to operations in everything from managing autonomous vehicles to deploying IoT and automation.

Considering the Edge as Part of Digital Transformation

For companies in the telecom industry seeking digital transformation, considering the smart edge is just one aspect in a rapidly growing environment. Today, the leaders in the telecom industry are those who are ready to leverage the right technology to serve customers and teams more effectively. To meet the changing needs of customers, companies in the telecom industry are increasingly adopting tools for business process automation, self-service, and proactive support. Comprehensive digital transformation toolkits often include the use and deployment of data in a variety of ways, such as:

• Proactive network management: processing data from customer devices, service delivery platforms, and network elements to provide insights for managing technical operations and customer support.
• Automated diagnostics: leveraging data available in the ecosystem to guide agents through automated troubleshooting and diagnostic processes. This can reduce the number of repeated interactions and enable faster resolution.
• Asset management: asset management tools require the rapid collection of local information to provide insights into enterprise assets, their health, maintenance needs, and development schedules.
• Enterprise automation: intelligent process automation requires the use of collected data to form triggers for important actions across the enterprise, such as changing the flow of data on a network with connectivity issues.
• Virtual agents and bots: bots and agents in the telecom environment need access to local and relevant data to make intelligent decisions that support the customer at hand.

All these innovative next steps for the telecom environment can be enhanced with the right approach to telecom data and computing on the edge. With intelligent computing on the edge, companies can improve their local and global service performance like never and provide more accurate, faster, and personalized responses to their customers.

To learn more about how you can begin your digital transformation strategy with a focus on the benefits of the intelligent edge, contact Bulb Tech today.