Customer experience in 5G: new perspectives for m-commerce and IoT?
The new 5G cellular standard is pushing the door to the future wide open, creating entirely new opportunities for mobile commerce, particularly in the e-commerce segment. It also represents a milestone in the advancement of IoT, the Internet of Things.
5G: ready to define new standards
The cellular network is currently being upgraded to the new 5G standard. The successor to the LTE network, 5G is up to 100 times faster and therefore able to deliver much more capacity. This will not only significantly change how users handle mobile data. In many ways, the new standard will also bring about a paradigm shift in e-commerce.
Although many of the developments that will occur in connection with the new cellular standard are no longer in the distant future, it is still difficult to identify and specifically predict the full scope and array of opportunities offered by the new standard. A lot will depend on other factors that have not really been calculable so far, for example the intensity of the competition and how the power relations between the big players will be played off on the highly competitive global market of the future.
Reducing bounce rates in e-commerce and m-commerce
It is no secret that there is a direct link between conversion rate and page speed. Many sales processes in online shops are abandoned or not completed because it simply takes too long for the information requested by the user to show up on his or her smartphone display.
With more and more users now visiting shops on their mobile devices, the shorter page load times achieved by the 5G standard will no doubt accelerate this trend considerably and give m-commerce even more momentum.
Smartphone users will clearly be the main target group of online shop operators, giving rise to the development of shop systems that are even more intuitive and user friendly. Online payment services will in turn also benefit enormously from this. However, companies that are not able to offer a seamless customer experience and a positive mobile shopping process in an m-commerce environment will quickly vanish from the scene.
With 5G, “mobile first” could quickly become “mobile only”, without waiting for the very last e-commerce providers to recognize the signs of the times and ensure the necessary customer experience in their mobile shops.
Mobile commerce will also be boosted by technological innovations made possible by the 5G cellular standard and its massively increased bandwidth. 5G will even allow data-intensive applications to be integrated into online shop systems, without impacting the page load time and consequently the customer experience as well.
Such applications mainly include:
- High-resolution video content
- Virtual reality and augmented reality
- Playful content to gamify the mobile shopping experience
Consumers don’t use their smartphones to just buy goods in online shops, but also to research and compare products before purchasing them in-store. Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications are already being incorporated along this multi-channel consumer journey in nearly all sectors. Only with 5G will such data-intensive apps, which until now have still lacked interactive options and a multivalent experience, be able to leverage their full potential. It will be possible to integrate a physical realm of experience into mobile shopping as a completely new dimension.
Voice technology adds another dimension. Developments in the area of IoT, such as smart headphones with speech recognition and automatic real-time translation, make it easier to tap into new markets and enable service departments to immediately respond to customer requests and orders from other language regions.
The future culture of consultation: in mobile commerce, a German consumer will be able to ask a virtual Chinese service representative about an electrical product before ordering it online.
New 5G standard, new markets: the IoT revolution
Quasi-real-time data transmission will spark a revolution in the Internet of Things. The advantages that faster data transmission offers here will range from small process improvements in existing application fields right through to the creation of entirely new business models that will shake up existing brands and whole sectors.
Networked products and solutions will be in demand in nearly all spheres of life, such as:
- Smart home
- Industry 4.0
- Logistics
- Medicine 4.0, medical design, and health science
- Decentralized smart grid applications
- Smart cities
Many applications rely on the lowest possible latency. After all, the lower the latency, the quicker the reaction. A prime example of this is autonomous driving. With 5G, the latency is a mere millisecond under optimal conditions. In the LTE network, it is fifty to eighty times higher.
How 5G is changing the mobility market
Thanks to IoT, self-driving shuttles can already be networked with other mobility services via sharing and booking platforms. Such an all-embracing concept, as already presented by Bosch at CES 2019 in Las Vegas for example, has the potential to revolutionize the entire face of mobility in urban areas within a period of 10 to 15 years.
At DMEXCO 2019, speakers
- Julian Blessin, co-founder of TIER Mobility,
- Pascal Leonard Blum, co-founder & CEO of unu,
- Sara Weber, Managing News Editor for the DACH & Benelux regions at LinkedIn, and
- Alexander Zossel, founder of Velocopter,
discussed precisely this topic on the Experience Stage under the title “New mobility concepts: How will our cities look in ten years from now”.
In the mobility sector, a whole new market of products and services is already emerging. It may still be lagging behind the traditional automotive industry, but 5G will give progressive mobility companies a real chance to get a step ahead, actively steer the fate of future mobility, and define benchmarks for a good customer experience in this new market.
