increased revenue by 12% and more page views by 25%. Slow page loading speeds cost online retailers globally more than $2 billion in lost sales.1 To get this right, a successful approach starts with understanding key architectural principals that result in the most efficient and optimized processes, or digital paths, with a clear focus on those that directly impact the customer experience. Digital paths encompass all the end-to-end application and business logic workflows, including all computations, data, data stores and communication links executed or accessed to complete a specific process. Unnecessary network hops, stateful middleware and multiple database queries make for inefficient digital paths, add to latency and erode the consumer experience, eventually causing lost revenue and customer frustration. In short, delivering a modern customer experience requires understanding the end-to-end digital path for each and every type of customer interaction, from the moment the user interacts with their device, all the way to the network and back again. Complete Availability Of course, the only thing worse than a slow response is no response at all! Traditional solutions offer high availability to the network for service control, but that is often not instantiated to the customer-facing systems. In today’s world, with mobile as the primary channel, you’re offering full transparency to the app so that same “always on” demand is placed across the entire monetization 1 ecosystem. Customer-facing high availability is now equally important as network-facing availability. If a user wants to add or change a package at 1:00 AM in the morning, they expect to do it through the app. Gone are the days when they’d have to wait for the call center to open or get a message that the systems are offline for maintenance. The model is a big shift for most vendors and Telcos, as many aspects of the overall solution ecosystem have never been tested to this rigorous standard before. It not only demands high availability across all user journeys, but also creates the need for “instant and total” recovery from local failures and complete site failures. Many traditional solutions do not replicate every aspect of the user data and experience, so a major failure requires “recovery procedures” to occur that immediately degrade the user experience. Strong Business Agility The new Digital Telco operates in a world moving 100x faster than old world Telco. The monetization platform underlying a Digital Telco must help it operate at this speed, not hinder it. The legacy practices of building custom solutions on top of frameworks will not satisfy an agile approach to development nor provide the business responsiveness required. For example, requiring code changes to implement new services and offerings is instantly fatal, costing months (and unknown $’s) when the solution is needed in hours. All aspects of the evolving business and network environment must be configurable, including: Source: CDNetworks 5G: The Six Critical Monetization Elements page 3 / 5 • New services and offerings • New types of balances, assets and usage/spend meters • New attributes in the subscriber or pricing data that influence the charging/policy decisions • New versions of network protocols Unless all of these activities can be efficiently configured without technical resources from the vendor or SI, the required business agility will not be achieved. Absolute Precision Providing a mobile-first experience that promises the customer instant gratification, absolute transparency and complete control is a great way to build trust, strengthen loyalty and drive up NPS scores, but only if you always tell them the precise truth. If any aspect of that experience contains incorrect or inconsistent data, it instantly erodes the trust you’re trying to build. Precision applies across all aspects of the user experience, no matter who the user is or what they are doing, including: • Exact spending notifications and controls, not just for consumer and family sharing, but for large enterprises and IoT fleets. • Instant visibility and impact of any purchases made, otherwise the dreaded “click again” death spiral results in overcharging and an angry (and expensive) call. • Precise variations in prices and rates based on user-driven parameter changes such as QoS or accepting a promotion or sponsorship offer. For example, with an hour of free sponsored gaming, the customer should be able to see the usage as zero-rated as it occurs (should never hit their balance) and should also see how much time they have left in their hour as they are playing. Extreme Efficiency and Seamless Scalability In the old Telco world, a customer made 10-13 calls per day and each call was worth at least a few pennies. In the new Digital Telco world, transactions are varied and are measured for different reasons (monetization, loyalty, analytics, entitlements, etc.). A ping from an IoT sensor may be worth 1/1000th of a cent and might indicate a change in service pricing or trigger an entitlement. A modern smartphone interacts with the network thousands of times per day across social, video, shopping and email apps. An autonomous car may provide sensor readings thousands of times per second, and a single delivery of service may require retail, wholesale and settlement rating all at once, in real-time. The fact is, the industry is creating an ever-increasing stream of events to manage, and the economic value of each event is much smaller than it was with traditional communications services. A step-change in the cost efficiency of managing these events is absolutely required to maintain profitability. The event load is also much less predictable. The peak/average curves of traditional voice services were quite consistent. Now that the devices and subscribers are instigating interactions with the 5G: The Six Critical Monetization Elements page 4 / 5