By Theresa Eyssens

What do garbage bins have to do with new ways to engage with customers, create new customer experiences, and leverage new technology?

Quite a lot, because while not in themselves terribly exciting (unless your bin is the one overflowing in the street), the way that technology is changing how this household item is delivering value is fascinating.

The story starts close to home - in the street where I live in Sydney. My local council has recently replaced all the garbage bins with new, smaller ones that contain a chip.

And that got me thinking. The council bins are now IoT devices. With 5G being rolled out across Australia, there will come a point when all of these bins can be connected.

That's when new, more-innovative services can be created.

That's when things start to get interesting.

The point about 5G here is twofold: first, 5G is capable of connecting up to one million devices per square kilometre, compared to 10,000 devices per square kilometre for 4G, as we have right now (GSMA predicts 24.6 billion IoT connections by 2025).

Secondly, 5G enables the cloud to manage all the heavy data processing and data storage.

Today's motivations for my council are likely to be around saving costs and increasing recycling. But in the near future, the council will be able to consider new services: rewarding homeowners who put out less garbage, perhaps with a small rate reduction, or offering homeowners additional garbage collections for a small fee.

Flexibility, and new services currently not even imagined, become possible.

Now remove 'council' and 'garbage bins' from the use case above and replace them with 'hospital' and 'prescription dosage monitoring', or 'insurance company' and 'remote window locking monitoring'.

In these scenarios, the service provider can conceive and deliver new services because the cloud, enabled by connectivity across a whole range of options from 5G to programmable networks, creates and provides the infrastructure.

“With enhanced connectivity, cloud-based services and a little thinking outside the box, new propositions are possible, and new value can be created.” Theresa Eyssens, VP Cloud & Customer Solutions, Optus Enterprise

New ways to engage with customers

In addressing why many organisations consider a ‘cloud-first strategy’, it's useful to start with an IDEA. It's an acronym for four key considerations, and why a move to cloud makes sense and how it might deliver new customer experiences.

The 'I' represents INFRASTRUCTURE and clients wanting to modernise their infrastructure, typically by moving to a cloud-based environment and implementation, whether that's hybrid, on-premise, private or entirely within a public cloud, sharing network slices as needed.

The 'D' represents DATA and the critical need to secure data as it moves between and within hybrid cloud environments. Data is the new currency that can be re-imagined to create new sources of value, or to provide the insights and information needed.

The 'E' represents the ENTERPRISE - whether it's a company or a government department. The ambitions the enterprise has for its customers, and the services and value it seeks to provide its customers, as well as consideration for the capacity for change an enterprise has, define the rest of the IDEA.

Finally, the 'A' represents the APPLICATIONS that sit on top of the infrastructure. Transforming business processes and the applications that support those processes can be a critical driver for a move to the cloud.

The customer experience goes digital

This concept of a new IDEA is being applied increasingly to contact centres and the trend to move on-premise contact centres to cloud.

It's redefining what contact centres could be, which are digital interaction centres that change every interaction and transaction with customers to re-imagine and improve the customer experience digitally.

That might well be through a physical centre, though post-Covid it’s as likely to be a dispersed group of connected experts sitting in any number of workplaces.

Much of this will be online, some over the phone, and we're seeing evolutions toward chatbot and artificial intelligence (AI) (see our recent partnership announcement with Google).

To achieve this requires full connectivity, across the infrastructure, enterprise, data, and applications.

As organisations automate that engagement, they need to build empathy into the engines and systems that support the customer engagement. This is where data comes in, to prime AI engines to make the interaction more efficient for the organisation, and better for the customer.

Being different

How does the new technology and these new options allow enterprises to consider new ways to interact more effectively and more efficiently with their customers? How will those parameters be defined, and what technology options should be considered to use in implementation?

The answer is to give enterprises the new thinking and knowledge they need, around customer interaction, systems options, connectivity options, and the opportunities that flow from all of these, so that enterprises can make the best-possible strategic decisions.

Access to the cloud, providing secure infrastructure and data protection, allows for the creation of agile services and solutions and minimum viable products - what I call innovation acceleration.

And from that comes differentiation. To do that, an organisation must understand how to gain leverage from the technology that's available, understand how technology helps optimise costs, modernise infrastructure, and transform its applications portfolio.

As a result, the relationship between service provider and customer changes - including for councils, and their bins.