Veego Software announced five predictions expected for 2022 as communication service providers (CSPs), including telecoms and ISPs strive to outperform in the connected home services market.
“The US market has seen substantial year-over-year growth in the number of connected homes, and this is expected to continue in the years to come, say analysts at McKinsey in a recent report. “Despite the proliferation of devices, however, we’re still far from the vision of seamlessly connected homes.”
With the lack of seamless connectivity and other issues reducing connected home customer satisfaction levels while demand rises unconstrained, the connected home experience experts at Veego are making the following predictions, expected to materialize over the next year:
Prediction 1: Improving the connected home experience becomes a priority for telco/ISP providers.
Among the many problems that can occur which impact connected home devices are Wi-Fi problems caused and intermittent connectivity failures. These are responsible for the majority of customer complaints and lead to bad streaming, poor gaming experiences, slow downloads and other annoying conditions. Many of the connectivity failures were due to bad Wi-Fi link quality caused by improper configuration of extenders. To remedy these conditions for customers, service providers are turning to new AI-based solutions as these are able to resolve many connected home malfunctions without user intervention to keep connected home services online and performing optimally. In 2022, we can expect that bandwidth-related issues will be addressed by internet service providers (ISPs) using these new solutions so that people at home will not experience degradation in their internet services.
Prediction 2: Personalization to reduce limitations, free the customer and improve service quality.
There is a revolution taking place in Internet service consumption. The abundance of applications and devices in the connected home is providing Telecom providers with enormous volumes of operational data which will be deployed to create more personalized subscriber experiences. Just as the individual human genomes differ from person to person, so does home connectivity. And as users move toward improving their qualities of life, the ability to diagnose the connected home helps to deliver a much improved quality of experience.
Prediction 3: Customer self-care to become highly automated
Non-technical home internet users increasingly desire on-demand insights and a forecasted standing of their home device use. In addition, they show high levels of interest to proactively improve their connected home experience. This can include a simple speed test commonly offered by providers to home users or greater knowledge of the health of all network components and active devices supporting the connected home. Looking forward into 2022 and beyond, the subscriber will expect these to be automated services with system intelligence displayed on their devices or components, with details on performance; cloud applications, CSP services, Wi-Fi networks, and end-user devices. This will assist subscribers and service providers to quickly identify Quality of Experience problems in order to eliminate common customer calls to the CSP’s Customer Care department.
Prediction 4: Connected home device malfunctions to increase in 2022
According to Transparency Market Research, “the connected home devices market will expand at a growth rate of 12% CAGR through 2027 to reach US$ 157 Billion.” The connected home market continues to expand rapidly as Internet-based applications such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and social media applications increase in popularity, 5G/6G services proliferate globally, and the connected/smart devices leveraging these applications and services expand. This trend shows no sign of slowing. As this growth continues, the rate of home device malfunctions is also expected to increase, impacting the customer experience. Because this will result in customer churn as customers blame their telco/ISP, service providers will seek to remedy connected home device malfunctions over the next 12 months in ways that are more automated and subscriber friendly.
Prediction 5: Data-driven subscriber insights to become central to resolving connectivity issues
New technologies, especially AI, will enable the generation and collection of very useful data about operational/infrastructure data impacting the subscriber experience on the Internet. This may include how connected home devices are interacting with various cloud services, networks and what kinds of apps they are having issues with (for a wide variety of reasons). With insights gained from this data, media, app, device, providers will increasingly perfect the user experience as they shop, learn, and play online.