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by William LaForest, Field CTO and Victoria Needham, Staff Solutions Engineer, Confluent
Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are the conduit for today’s digital world. Their role as critical infrastructure providers was tested during the pandemic when people relied on global communication networks for essential services like education, healthcare and government resources, alongside work, leisure and just staying in touch.
Today, CSPs continue to be focused on offering high-speed and integrated networks that connect countless devices at reduced latency to transform the digital experience for organisations and consumers worldwide.
It’s a network of global scale that seeks to guarantee data moving quickly between on-premise data centres, edge (including consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices), and multi-cloud architectures. Not to mention integrating legacy systems to ensure that the transition to new services and customers is as seamless as possible. Of course, the concept of real-time data is nothing new for CSPs who have depended upon it to help keep the networks operating optimally for decades. The innovation, however, lies in being able to do it at scale and across business functions.
How real-time data impacts end users
Real-time data means CSPs can react and respond now — in the moment. They don’t have to wait five minutes for a query to finish. And they certainly don’t have to wait until next week when batch workflows have completed their cycle.
This is critically important for those CSPs focused on customer churn and the interplay between customer experience and cross-selling. With data streaming, CSPs can bridge data silos to make sure that the data view is relevant and up-to-date for every single customer interaction.
Today, privatisation, increased competition, and growing pressure from new entrants have helped fuel new levels of customer experience. As a result, CSPs need to be able to understand customer behaviour that is increasingly dynamic.
And if they are ever to fully emerge from the pure telco space, they need to understand their own products at a granular level, focus on their customers’ needs and wants, and pinpoint exactly where their cross-selling opportunities lie.
For instance, data streaming combined with 5G is helping companies like Globe – a major CSP in the Philippines – leverage new levels of connectivity and enhanced customer experience. If a customer is close to a 7/11 convenience store where they can buy phone credit, the company can send the customer a notification with an offer, such as a discount or free product, if they top up with Globe. Not only does this encourage customer loyalty, it also helps customers stay on top of their credit.
In the UK, BT uses real-time data to provide broadband backup to customers in the event of an outage. If this should happen, customers are informed immediately about the fixed-line outage and provided with extra data for their mobile phone so it can provide a tethered connection. This focus on the end user ensures a high level of customer service while engineers work to resolve the fault and bring services back online.
Delivering meaningful benefits to CSPs
Combine this customer-focused approach with the operational efficiencies that can be derived from real-time data and the result can be seen directly on the bottom line.
If CSPs want to bring around real transformation then they need to make changes deep within their infrastructure, and sometimes their service culture. They have to change all aspects of the wiring that lies at the very core of their businesses.
Some CSPs have opted to do this themselves. But it’s not without risk. Instead, there’s a far stronger business case to employ a fully managed service like Confluent – the leader in providing CSP-grade Kafka. Confluent has the experience of providing governance, security, lineage, and streaming for thousands of companies every day, backed by the technology that has powered market disruptors like LinkedIn, Uber and Netflix for nearly a decade.
By making CSPs more resilient and efficient, Confluent also ensures that these providers of critical infrastructure have the operational headroom to absorb the dynamics of any global communications business and deliver the situational awareness to manage the many forms of risk that pervade all aspects of the digital globe.
Critical infrastructure needs the right security in place
For instance, some CSPs are conducting anomaly detection in real-time to weed out nuisance phone calls as they are being made. Protecting customers in this way can only be done effectively using real-time data.
Elsewhere, CSPs can play a role in targeting burner phones, which are often used by criminal organisations because of the difficulty in identifying numbers. However, with the ability to process and analyse real-time switch data (a great example of dropped telemetry), it’s possible to trace phone calls immediately, analyse patterns that are of interest to national security or fraud, alert the authorities, and in some cases, counter-respond at the speed of the attack or crime in progress.
But the benefits of real-time data don’t just help prevent crime. As the world moves towards the fourth Industrial Revolution, business sectors across the spectrum are set to rely even more on interconnectivity, automation, and machine learning — and the technology that connects all three together: real-time data. Machine learning (ML) and its more ambitious cousin, Artificial Intelligence (AI), can be best described as dynamically adaptive algorithms, and dynamically adaptive is just real-time by any other name.
It’s something that is already being seen in areas such as smart meters and connected vehicles. Since it’s important to handle those computational workloads close to where they are, CSPs have the potential to explore new opportunities with the development of edge data centres.
But real-time data sharing is just the start. Here at Confluent, we want to work with our CSP customers to set up new workflows and release their innovation potential. While it’s important to understand the heritage of CSPs, it’s also imperative that we continue to look where their sights are set in terms of business transformation.
The transition to real-time data — and everything that comes with it in terms of customer experience, reduced churn, lower operation costs, and an improved bottom line — is a once-in-a-generation technology.
It’s time to ring up the real-time and place all those silos on hold.
