Demand for B2B services of operators, special features of AI in customer service and news about digital developments
Tags: VR, Artificial Intelligence, Moscow, Telecom, VPN

Demand for B2B services of operators, special features of AI in customer service and news about digital developments ICT.Moscow Follow May 25, 2020 · 4 min read

ICT.Moscow’s weekly news digest

Ernst&Young studied how the restrictive measures introduced due to COVID-19 affected the telecom market and concluded that the industry is quite stable in the new realities. Among the main challenges highlighted there are increased load on the network, network and capital investment optimization, stores closure and optimization and the supply chain operations. In terms of revenue, in the mass segment it will be stable for some time and will even increase due to higher Internet tariffs for remote work. But, according to experts, the B2B segment can shrink a little.

Ernst&Young analysts forecast that the restrictive measures will result in situation where the fixed communications in B2B will experience a slightly negative impact, and the mobile communications in this segment will not be significantly affected.

According to the operators, in Moscow during quarantine among the services most demanded by business there were services for organizing remote work for employees, video surveillance and video analytics, including using the module for taking body temperature, narrowcasting, IoT solutions and others.

For instance, in Megafon the largest growth in consumption was demonstrated by the platform for holding online conferences and webinars, in ER-Telecom it was demonstrated by the services for providing communication links (VPN), and in MGTS — by the sales in services for organizing work of traveling staff, according to representatives of the operators. Many companies became more interested in big data technologies — Tele2 B2B clients started to use service for targeted SMS mass messaging more often.

Igor Zhizhikin, CEO, Tele2 Moscow macroregion:

“The peak of demand was at the beginning of April. Interestingly, at the end of March, companies delivering food products were the most active users of the service. And at the beginning of April the leader in connecting to the service were the board game manufacturers”.

ER-Telecom claims that in addition to traditional services, the demand for innovative services, for example, for thermal imaging cameras, has also increased. The company representatives said that several clients had had to shut down for an indefinite period of time and stop using several services. But, according to Vitaliy Klishin, Director of the Moscow branch of ER Telecom Holding, it is too early to make predictions and speak about significant changes in services consumption.

Read more about how the operators’ demand for B2B services has changed on ICT.Moscow.

Artificial intelligence in customer support

The achievements in the natural language processing (NLP) development allow to be optimistic about the conversational AI, chatbots and intelligent assistants market. Maxim Tsukanov, head of CRM and Client Intelligence and SAS Russia&CIS, claims that even COVID-19 will not be able to make the forecasts more negative, as currently communications are more actively shifting to online.

Chatbots are mostly used in telecom, financial institutions and retail. But, as Just AI representatives claim, small- and medium-sized enterprises also use conversational bots, mainly in first line support to resolve most frequent issues, collect data for delivery, confirm orders, etc.

Experts believe that as the confidence in technologies and the maturity of approaches to using conversational AI in corporations increase, the integration of robots in the customer service infrastructure becomes deeper.

Anton Balakirev, founder of Celado AI:

“I suppose that in the near future chatbots will become more clever due to the larger accumulation of information by companies that implement the chatbots. There will be fewer bots with variants of answers and questions, and switching the client to the operator will become less frequent. Not only functions of informing, but also functions for performing particular actions will be added. And gradually such bots will take away the functionality of people”.

Industry representatives told ICT.Moscow about the special aspects of conversational AI in customer service and the future of this area.

Other news

MTS became the last one among the “big four” to enter the Cloud Gaming market after launching a cloud gaming service. The operator is launching a pilot project with three domestic companies — Loudplay, Playkey and Drova, and then it will be able to launch a marketplace of similar services. Earlier Megafon had made a deal on launching a project with Loudplay. Tele2 launched a pilot project with GFN.ru, the service with which Vimpelcom also cooperates.

The first store without cash desks and cashiers appeared in Moscow. The products on the shelves are monitored by computer vision technology, the same technology puts the goods chosen by the client in the virtual cart. The project is being tested privately by Sberbank and Visa in “Azbuka Vkusa” (in the Federation Tower). The technology will become available in a month.

Meanwhile, the joint venture of the bank and Mail.ru Group acquired the controlling stake (75.6%) in Samokat, a service for express food products and household goods delivery. The service will be connected with all ecosystems of Sberbank and Mail.ru Group.

In the near future the staff of all Perekrestok supermarkets will be trained using VR technology. The technology will be included in the standard for opening new stores. To train the assistants the company will buy the licenses and 1 thousand VR goggles required for management platform. The retailer will also engage in developing courses.