Whale Cloud

5G Operation

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Digital Sales Channel Management (DSCM)

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Whale Cloud real-time billing solution improves operational efficiency and customer experience

Eric LI
Business Advisor, Whale Cloud

Challenges in traditional billing

Given billing processing provides data for credit control, enterprise revenue, business insights and financial management, the timeliness and accuracy of billing generation has a direct impact on the follow-up work. And for customers, keeping track of their spending in real time contributes a lot to customer experience and satisfaction improvement. Therefore, to stay relevant and competitive, real-time, efficient, and accurate billing system is critical for operators.

At present, bills generation tends to be carried out at the end of the billing cycle, and during the billing period there is no data preparation for bills generation. The centralized processing of massive bills consolidation, discounts and tax calculation at the end of the month will lead to a sharp increase in the workload and resource pressure, even affects the availability of the entire billing system and related businesses.

In addition, the development of 4G business and penetration of smart terminals have brought an exponential rise in data consumption, along with 10 times bills calculation. As 5G network deployment gains up, operators will usher in a dramatic increase in the CDR, which will pose challenges to both billing system capacity and operations staff. Now, more than ever before, traditional billing mode needs to be changed.

Whale Cloud real-time billing solution, with event-driven microservice architecture, can flexibly allocate resources based on business load. By leveraging message queue, distributed cache, and other advanced technologies, as well as automation tools for mock-up billing, auditing, billing issues can be handled in real-time. And the performance and reliability of Whale Cloud real-time billing solution has been verified by multiple projects.

Main problems to be solved

Traditional billing mode involves ledger collection, bill discount, tax calculation, ledger export, and bill generation, which are executed at the end of the billing cycle in sequence and depend on each other.

According to the projects practice, ledger collection and bill generation are time-consuming.

Ledger collection aggregates all kinds of service charges including usage fee, recurring fee, and one-time fee during billing cycle according to elements such as subscriber ID, account ID and account item type. Generally, for million accounts, the pieces of ledger records during a month billing cycle needs to be collected can reach 2 billion, which takes T1 accounting for about 30% of the overall process.

Bill Generation extracts the account data related to CDR, spending, and customer profile as XML file, serving as the data source for bill templates to generate final printable statements. The main bottleneck at this stage is to quickly read and correlate all data on customer bills, which will take T3 accounting for about 50% of the overall process.

Therefore, optimizing these two nodes is critical to improving the overall billing efficiency.

Whale Cloud approach

From the above-mentioned billing process and the functions of each node, the entire bill generation can be divided into two parts: bill data preparation and bill generation.

Bill data preparation

The efficiency improvement of bill data preparation can be achieved by increasing computing resources. But these resources rarely generate any business value during the traditional billing cycle, which leads to a waste of investment to a large extent. On the contrary, carrying out data preparation in daily work can distribute the system load with less resources, that is to say exchanging time for resource investment.

In fact, some billing systems adopt daily ledger collection to accelerate the billing process at the end of the billing cycle. However, daily ledger collection only merges the expense data, while the discount and tax calculation are still performed at the end of the billing cycle which requires a lot of audit work. The situation of short-term high-pressure billing has not been effectively improved. In addition, the shortage of IT technicians will make the matter a lot worse, especially when a large number of tasks are concurrent.

The method adopted by Whale Cloud is to convert event-driven charging data into internal messages, and through the message queue to trigger the end-to-end billing procedure – the system merges usage, recurring, one-time, and external fees, calculates discounts, taxes, and splits bills in real time, along with credit control.

In addition, Whale Cloud provides preset audit tools to set balance and floating audit rules based on different cost dimensions, and automatically trigger audit inspections daily, hourly or at intervals through timed tasks. Hence, the problems in data preparation can be found and corrected in far less time, greatly improving the billing accuracy. Besides, it provides unified, intuitive view of system KPIs, such as TPS, time consumption, number of messages, etc. in real time, with detailed statistical daily reports spanning the number of merged records, voice/data services expense, one-time charge, etc. to achieve visualization and transparency of daily billing processing.

From the perspective of operation management, this method can provide data for credit control calculation in a real-time and accurate manner, to prevent bill shock risk, bring real-time consumer perception to users, and allow operators to timely understand the financial status of daily operations.

Whale Cloud project practice shows that billing process will be sped up by 50% owing to real-time ledger collection, discounts, tax calculation. In addition, in figure 1, we only analyzed the time consumption of billing process without considering the manual audit afterwards. And for different operators, due to bill accuracy, customer service capabilities, and other considerations, the audit task may takes several days, even exceed the time consumption of the whole billing process. Through daily audits, this part of time consumption can also be greatly reduced.

Bill generation

With the help of daily real-time processing, billing system can directly generate the final bills at the end of billing cycle combined with the prepared expense data, customer information, etc. The efficiency improvement of customer bill generation, as described above, requires close attention to be paid to the efficiency of customer profile addressing & input/output, and XML file & final bills generation.

However, with regards to those accounts who have no consumption, or no subscribers, there is no need to generate bills for the current month. Whale Cloud billing solution supports bills generation only for users who have consumed during the billing cycle, which can also improve the overall billing efficiency. Based on Redis, the system builds distributed cache to synchronize customer data from CRM in real time, and its Key-Value-based query method greatly improves data reading efficiency. Compared with the traditional way of frequent reading physical database, it avoids the impact of database performance on bill generation efficiency.

In addition, the generation efficiency of final bills can be improved through the expansion of computing resources. From the design level of the system, Whale Cloud billing solution adopts distributed architecture to build business capabilities in the form of microservices, breaking monolithic applications down into a set of small, loosely coupled, autonomous components, managed in a unified way by Kubernetes cluster. Then the system can timely shut down redundant applications and release resources based on real-time performance indicators to dynamically deploy applications in need, thereby enhancing the application concurrent processing capability and the utilization efficiency of system resource.

For example, at the end of the billing cycle, the system will allocate available resources to deploy bills generation application. The optimization of data cache and system architecture can speed up bill generation by over 50%, and with daily audit preparation, final bills can be sent by a small amount of audit work.

Conclusion

By leveraging distributed architecture, open source components, and real-time billing logic, Whale Cloud billing solution improves billing efficiency by nearly 80%. It’s proved that the bill generation of million accounts can be completed within 1 hour. Moreover, as the host computing capacity enhances, bill generation time can be further shortened.

Real-time billing solution is win-win. For enterprises, the solution relieves the strain on system resources and solves bill backlog, significantly improving the efficiency of bill generation and daily work., What’s more, it provides actual data for business analysis and market decision-making. For customers, they can keep track of their real-time spending in a convenient manner, which greatly improves customer satisfaction.

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Customer Experience: Next Frontier of Digital Transformation

Elisa ZHANG
Consulting Director, Whale Cloud

Digital era presents challenges to operators on all fronts while at the same time opens more racing tracks to them. Operators can locate their strategic position and find their own approach to transformation in connectivity layer, business layer and ecosystem layer. However, customer experience is given the top priority for digital transformation to most operators except pure infrastructure service providers. It’s evident that whoever wins customer wins the market. From a long-term perspective, the ultimate goal of digital transformation is to drive new business models for revenue growth and ecosystem creation where customers are always at the heart.

The customer journey is a series of interactions between customers and operators for specific goals. It consists of one or more business scenarios that occur sequentially, focusing on what customers see, gain, and feel during this process. To a large extent, the customer journey influences and even determines the customer experience.

Customer journey: customer D’s top priority

Operator D is a Southeast Asian operator jointly established by multinational investors. As a challenger to the dual monopoly of local telecommunications market, operator D is determined to compete for market dominance and provide local users with better 4G and 5G telecommunications services.

As a greenfield operator, with the advantage of “digital gene”, operator D can enter the market in a more flexible and agile way, and win customers with its products that meet the expectations of target customers and highly competitive marketing methods. But at the same time operator D is also faced with many challenges such as network infrastructure construction, IT support system readiness, organizational structure construction, and internal operation process definition. Among the challenges to be solved, D recognized the criticality and urgency of defining “customer journey” with an emphasis on customer experience, and formally launched the “Customer Journey” project.

However, defining customer journey is not easy for operator D. The biggest challenge facing customer D is to find the way to introduce global advanced concepts and best practices based on local market situation, to build a customer journey that truly meets the needs of users and brings a high-quality customer experience.

Whale Cloud: “hardcore” digital transformation consulting expert

Customer D established a cooperative relationship with the world’s top strategy consulting companies in its infancy, and solved the business planning problems it faced through professional consulting services in many aspects. However, when it comes to customer journey definition, customer D still encountered obstacles. A good customer journey requires designers to have a customer-centric industry perspective, and to find the optimal way in an outside-in manner to interact with customers in various scenarios throughout their life cycle. It also requires designers to have a thorough understanding of the overall telecom business framework with professional knowledge of telecom business supporting systems and the ability to evaluate the implementation of business design.

The key to the customer journey is “deliverability.” Deliverability represents the final realization methods of all top-level designs from strategic direction, blueprint planning to tactics formulation. Deliverability also represents the actual interaction process that customers ultimately see and experience. To a great extent, these experiences determine whether the operator can win customers.

In short, a good customer journey can’t do without professional design. With nearly 30 years’ experience in telecommunications, Whale Cloud serves as an ideal partner who can provide D with journey design consulting service. Whale Cloud’s digital assets DTMM, SOP and Metrics, bring together the latest concepts and practical experience from international operators’ digital transformation, to provide our customers, especially greenfield operators like operator D, best practice references that are ready to use. At the same time, Whale Cloud is also the main IT system provider for operator D, which ensures a smooth connection from journey design to implementation.

To start the project: focus on the bullseye

In operator D‘s customer journey design consulting project, Whale Cloud focuses on the business layer. Upwards, it connects corporate strategy and business blueprint design, which defines customer journey spanning the full life cycle of customers and covering omni-channels based on D’s channel scope, strategic, and product planning roadmap. Downwards, it connects operator’s IT supporting system capabilities, and maps customer journey business requirements to system capabilities combining top-down and bottom-up design methods, thus bridging the gap between IT capabilities and business strategies.

Whale Cloud first analyzes the status quo of operator D to understand the strategy and business blueprint, and identifies the internal and external conditions and overall goals related to customer journey design. What’s more, combining with customer’s product launch roadmap, market positioning, channel strategy and overall business planning, the basic blueprint for customer journey design is further clarified. Putting network access, payment, and engagement as primary tasks, Whale Cloud designs omni-channel customer journey for both prepaid and postpaid customers in a fully digital way to provide end users with optimal experience.

As a result, we have clarified the complete set of business processes involved in customer journey design, made business process design plans, established agile and efficient process design promotion methods and interaction mechanisms, as well as created process design metrics.

The key to consultation: draw upon the strengths of other operators

Customer journey design is created from scratch for D, but the design itself relies on extensive efforts, such as customer’s strategy, the definition of MLR and the analysis report from the Focus Group Discussion. Meanwhile, the design process can’t do without:

• Whale Cloud’s digital assets
  SOP (Whale Cloud Standard Operating Procedure for Telco Business) provides a set of basic business process framework and typical business rules for customer journey design. DTMM (Digital Telco Maturity Map) provides rich digital features and best practices references at the scenario level, business process level and process element level of the customer journey, while Metrics (Whale Cloud Digital Transformation Metrics) provide a complete set of metrics library and metrics measurement framework, and an overall solution to quantitatively monitor, measure, analyze and optimize customer journey design.

• Customer journey research of local operators
  Making full use of local resources, we conduct in-depth research on product design, channel capabilities, process experience, strategies and rules of the existing operators in the country where D is located, and flexibly utilized their advantages and benefits during the journey design. These flexible localized designs determine the “individualization” of the customer journey, also are the root of diversification of business process, especially customer-oriented business processes among different operators.
• Global practice case analysis and introduction
  In addition to Whale Cloud‘s digital assets and the analysis of local competitors, we also refer to the customer journey and process design plans of other operators at home and abroad to ensure the optimality of the process. Especially for key journeys and specific scenarios, we have carried out several best practice thematic analysis. For example, in the prepaid online purchase process, to reduce impacts of process branches on customer experience, we refer to the practices of European operators to simplify complex customer operations as much as possible. While for the post-paid customer validation process, we analyzed the actual business processes of many operators in China, Malaysia, Europe and India, and found the best solution for our customer. In the design of the customer service journey, to judge and choose customer service entrance manner, we also combined the functional design of the mainstream e-commerce platform and made a full argumentation…
• Whale Cloud BSS platform capability analysis
  Whale Cloud provides D with a powerful digital transformation enablement platform, whose process orchestration and rule engine capabilities, as well as out-of-the-box business processes, are the starting point of customer journey design.

Design road: pursue optimal customer experience amidst contradictions and changes

In the process of customer journey design, we refer to the basic methods and guiding principles of business process orchestration in TM Forum’s business process framework (eTOM), use customer journey definition based on the customer life cycle model, and take the basic framework of Whale Cloud business process design as the main design method, which combines the top-down model led by top-level strategy input and business scenario definition, and the bottom-up model based on the basic capabilities of current business processes and business requirements to design the customer journey.

• Ease moment of pain
  In some specific business processes of the customer journey, there exist some parts that will only increase the complexity of the process without any bonus to customer, such as the suitability check of the customers’ terminals. To resolve this situation, we have adopted methods of reducing customer perception, emphasizing business guidance and presenting customer benefits to ease the moment of pain, so as not to diminish the overall customer experience.
• Design “critical moments”
  The key customer interaction determines a customer’s overall experience, and even whether the customer is willing to continue on the journey. We keep optimizing the “critical moments” in the customer journey, so that business highlights can be presented to customers in a best way and in a coherent and smooth business process, bringing customers a moment of wow. For example, the “number selection” part in the process of online purchase is the “critical moment” that we focus on.
• Deal with “uncertainty”
  The feature of the greenfield project is that there is no customer data or operational data for analysis to support business design. External Focus Group Discussion, market research and other methods can provide qualitative reference input, but they are not sufficient enough to settle specific problems in business design. In response to it, we find designs which have been fully tested in practice and meet the actual needs of our customer through a large number of researches on industry practices, and verify these designs during friendly user test. Meanwhile alternative options are well-prepared in journey design to enable the processes to be quickly and flexibly adjusted and switched based on the customer’s actual use feedback.
• Customer experience VS operating cost
  The optimal customer experience requires not only the “front-end” presentation, interaction and operation process, but also the extreme tilt of the “back-end” in business design, channel strategy and operation strategy. When we design the business process in the customer journey, there is also a process of finding a balance between experience and operation. With the continuous clarification of the responsibilities of customer’s operation support team and the repeated deduction of the market and customer expectations, the overall customer journey design has evolved from relying on customer effort to a journey design that simplifies the customer process by paying more operating costs. An obvious example is how the customer obtains the available SIM in the self-service card purchase process. After full discussion of the scenario, the process is designed to minimize customer operations through more internal operations.
• Optimize interaction design
  The touchpoint is the carrier that delivers all customer experience. In the customer journey design, we put a lot of energy into the UE/UI design of the online self-service channel, and constantly polish the design details to achieve perfect customer perception. We optimized the design through customer evaluation organized by a third-party Usability Test Consultant. We also have the UI designs localized by local designers to make the interface more in line with the local people’s habits.
• Redefine “digital”
  When talking about digitalization, we talk about digital channels, digital experience, digital business innovation, and so on. For the customer journey, online channel touchpoints are undoubtedly an important manifestation of digitization. However, digitization is not the copying of the business operation process from offline channels to online channels, but the redefinition of customer journey with the help of online and electronic means. The existing customer interaction actions are rationalized, selected, and reconstructed, and the unique customer interaction methods of digital channels are also derived. At the same time, the digital omni-channel is implemented to specific business scenarios through the combination of the respective advantages of online and offline channels.
• Continuous process optimization
  A good customer journey needs to be verified by the end customer’s experience. In the CJ project, we help customers define experience metrics and measurement feedback mechanism for metrics, to ensure that real data analysis can be used to monitor and measure the final effect of the customer journey after subsequent trials and commercial launch. In addition, we conduct the continuous optimization and iteration based on the measurement result, to satisfy customer’s expectations and bring an excellent experience to customers.

At the end

The design, reconstruction and optimization of the customer journey are important for operators to do customer-centric business. The design of the customer journey represents the customer’s perspective and is essential for operators to win customers. With rich practical experience in digital transformation, Whale Cloud can help operators complete tailor-made customer journey design to enable them gain an edge over the wave of digital transformation.

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Leverage 5G Technology to Grapple with Business Dilemmas

Yuan CUI
Business Advisor, Whale Cloud

In August 2019, the three major operators successively released their business reports for the first half of the year. As a result of decreasing traffic dividend, intensified industry competition, and speed acceleration with cost cutting, the three operators are faced with the dilemma of a drop in revenue. China Unicom and China Telecom both recorded a decline in revenue, and China Mobile even experienced a “double dive” in revenue and net profit, the worst performance in the past decade.

Accompanying the dilemma is the surging tide of 5G. On June 6, 2019, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) officially issued 5G commercial licenses to the three major operators as well as China Radio and Television, marking the first year of 5G commercial application in China. “China Mobile has developed more than 6.7 million customers with 5G offer at the end of January 2020, and we are accelerating 5G network construction to promote 5G industry,” said Jian Qin, vice president of China Mobile, at recent MIIT media briefing. Will the long-awaited 5G network turn it around and help operators return to the “golden age”?

As we all know, as the fifth-generation mobile communication network, 5G technology has many advantages such as high speed, low latency, low power consumption, wide coverage, high capacity, and multiple access. Compared with 4G, 5G can create a cross-industry integrated ecosystem to boost new industries, new interactions, and new connections.

Then how to enable users to really experience 5G? 5G services are indispensable. Yang Jie, chairman of China Mobile, once said, “the revenue growth of traditional businesses is close to the ceiling, which makes it urgent to open up new market space, and cultivate new development momentum.”

This article will discuss from ecosystem establishment and business promotion, how operators can leverage 5G services to grapple with current business dilemmas and compete for the new blue ocean to return to the “golden age”.

The characteristics and advantages of 5G technology contribute a lot to solving the dilemma. “Wide coverage” facilitates in-depth cooperation across industries, and to a certain extent overcomes the difficulties of product homogeneity and low competitiveness; “high speed and low latency” empower video-based interactive scenarios, which can help operators get out of the trouble – lack of dominance; “high-capacity and multi-access” allow operators to explore new opportunities in the information consumption market.

In the following, we will discuss in depth how to solve the dilemmas.

Dilemma 1:

In the 4G era, traditional offers are mostly communication services. Homogenized contents and uniform tariffs make the three major operators have to use “price wars” to grab market share.; As a result of “six controls” on price war, operators are under huge pressure, and facing cost, profit, revenue, market share and other factors, they fall into the dilemma: market prospect or revenue growth.

Solution: launch differentiated products and services combined with digital benefits by taking advantage of industry trends

In July 2019, Whale Cloud and a branch of China Mobile launched a PLUS membership benefits cooperation with communication benefits and video benefits as the main contents. Combining 5G core network advantages with video APP services, PLUS members can exclusively enjoy 5G high-speed network and membership rights of video APP. Through the exchange of 5G network services, operator does not need to pay additional benefits purchase costs. By the end of 2019, the company acquired approximately 100,000 new members per month with accumulated income of more than 5.5 million yuan, which was an outstanding performance in such an environment of nationwide declining revenue.

• Expand market share taking advantage of industry cooperation
  The benefits cooperation cross-industry allows operators to provide 5G packages including entertainment, shopping, finance, travel, and other services, which transforms price wars into content/service-oriented differentiated competition, unleashing more possibilities in product design. Designing benefits from the perspective of creating greater value for customers can break homogenized product competition and enable operators to gain greater market share.
• Collaborate with enterprises to share risks and reduce costs
  As 5G application gains up, operators have more corporate partners to share costs and risks. Operators can provide customized and personalized network services based on 5G features, to reach benefits cooperation with the enterprises that bear the costs of benefits offered to customers. Thus, close attention requires paying to develop network services to support industry applications and industry applications to promote business innovation, as well as cooperate with enterprises to share risks and seek development.
• Focus on explicit/hidden values of benefits to monetize benefits

Benefits drive market share due to the improvement of product competitiveness. Individual customers pay for benefits requirements out of their own pockets. Enterprise customers bear the fees because they combine benefits with their own network services and they enjoy 5G exclusive service of the benefits. These all help benefits monetization, enriching operators’ income structure.

The value brought by benefits is both explicit and implicit. Short-term income growth, long-term business promotion, brand building, brand communication and construction of benign business models are all monetization prospects.

Dilemma 2:

With the advancement of 4G networks and rapid development of mobile Internet, the industrial chain of telecom operators has undergone radical change, and they are gradually labeled “plumbers”. Obviously, they are not content to it, and hope to create a “new world”, so as to get rid of “plumbers” and occupy a dominant position in the interaction scenario with users. Dominating the interactive scenario is not easy. It requires operators to use 5G features to enhance digital content experience and achieve qualitative change of interactive experience.

Solution: Upgrade interaction and create intelligent scenarios based on content requirements

The high-speed characteristics of 5G technology make users’ entertainment application scenarios more diversified. Users’ needs are also upgrading from basic social, entertainment to convenient, intelligent, and interactive experience. There are also more diverse partners of content business in the process of building intelligent application scenarios and stimulating 5G data consumption.

• 2C: motivate the users with short video interaction upgrade
  Content cooperation with individuals: 5G era will be an era of explosive content demand and creative ability. The advancements of 5G technology can give birth to the content production industry and encourage users to shoot short videos, making video become the mainstream expression way in the future. Operators can stimulate users’ enthusiasm in content creation with the help of multiple media channels, and use User-generated Content (UGC) to promote the development of their own platforms and drive 5G business revenue.
• 2B: empower enterprises with upgraded personalized service
  Content cooperation with enterprises: Operators can use 5G features to empower content producers and media channel providers, thereby enhancing their voice and leadership in the content ecosystem. For example, video APPs can be provided with exclusive high speed and members can enjoy a higher download rate.
• Customize products to make the most of time segments
  Product operation derived from content cooperation: To meet users’ needs related to content creation and sharing, operators can provide users with 5G slice products according to their performance requirements in different scenarios. For example, in one project collaborating with China Mobile, Whale Cloud provides sports users with 5G&VR CBA experience, and to meet the needs of sports fans, designs short-term, low-price, and high-speed 5G slice offers, which makes the most of time segments. In order to boost business growth of content providers and seek win-win situation, operators can integrate content services (such as 16K HD video, extreme-speed download) with communication services to drive revenue.

Dilemma 3:

Operators have developed smart home business for several years. However, on account of home furnishing brands for their own, lack of communication, and poor user experience, the collaborative development of smart home business is struggling. In 4G era, smart home business is only limited to smart home appliance connected by APP, which is far away from operators’ expectations.

Solution: build family network to offer comprehensive information service

In 5G era, everything is connected. The intelligent business connects family members, smart home appliances, and usage information to enable operators to establish digital life service platform centered on customer needs.

• Focus on customers to further explore their demands
  Intelligent service to connect users: The primary foundation of smart home is users’ needs. Through 2H in-depth analysis and scenario construction, operators can carry out user division and management in a more elaborate way to know more about users’ family relationship and consumption ability enhancing customer value. In addition, operators can strengthen 5G products assortment and customize service offers for key family members to reduce marketing costs and boost revenues.
• Emphasize things to explore new revenue models
  Smart home to connect things: The high-capacity and multi-connection characteristics of 5G technology make it happen that smart home appliances can network freely, which responds to users’ urgent needs for digital home products. Operators can enrich the types of access terminals for 5G offers, allowing users to connect home terminals such as tablets, wearable devices, smart home appliances, and smart cars. This has a direct guidance for business development, that is, operators can charge according to the number of users’ 5G devices, and based on application scenarios, adopt different strategies for different devices to enrich the revenue structure.
• Build information-driven marketing community
  Intelligent information to connect information: 5G technology’s empowerment of remote interaction, 2H market’s attention to family communication, and the popularity of mobile Internet video industry, all unlocks opportunities for multi-screen’s information interaction. The small screen serves as the traffic entrance while the large one as the home center. Through the cross-screen interaction (screen projection, screen control, and content sharing), it can build face-to-face application scenarios such as online teaching, immersive somatosensory interaction, and remote consultation with famous doctors, to further increase user loyalty and establish smart marketing ecosystem community.

Then how to get users closer to 5G services? Business development can be divided into three steps.

Step 1: All-around user portraits
The construction of 5G business ecosystem unlocks more possibilities for operators to gain insights into their target customers. In addition to communication data, data associated with industry application usage, content media preference, and terminal device access, all enable operators to clarify user portraits.

Step 2: Immersive experience with full scenarios
In one project, Whale Cloud has created a 5G service experience zone through online channels, covering 5G SIM cards, terminals, benefits members, 5G services, video experience, etc. to provide users with consistent and immersive experience. The immersive experience zone is the place where target users can directly experience 5G services, further encouraging users to purchase and use 5G services.

Step 3: Multi-dimensional business recommendation
The multi-object charging mode of 5G technology makes it possible to enable differentiated and personalized value services. Based on multi-dimensional service recommendation, it can provide services by scenarios, customers, time periods, regions, and quality to realize precision marketing.

For example, according to the user’s behaviors, it recommends the dedicated game channel with lower latency and higher bandwidth, or clearer online video quality and higher download rate. For users in stadiums or concert areas, operators can recommend them in real time 5G data traffic products, so that users can enjoy exclusive high-value networks, and upload videos at higher rate and pixels. For VR/AR enthusiasts, operators can cooperate with related equipment manufacturers to give discounts on offer tariffs to users who have purchased VR/AR terminals, and share the revenue with equipment manufacturers.

In the project with a branch of China Mobile, Whale Cloud combines 5G technology and the application of PCC tools to carry out 5G slice marketing by region, customer and time period. For customers in high-end residential areas, operators will select users with travel preferences whose dataflow of usage reach over 1G, and deliver them live broadcast of scenic zone to build up customers’ 5G usage habits.

5G promises exciting advances for communications industry, but the 5G rollout is going to be challenging. How can operators resolve their difficulties and break through the profit dilemma? On the one hand, by leveraging 5G technologies, operators can empower industry-wide application scenarios, promote in-depth cooperation across industries, create a ecosystem associated with 5G business, and share 5G industry dividends with partners. On the other hand, operators can promote differentiated 5G business step by step, and give full play to the advantages and value of 5G services.