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Creating customer-centric marketplaces for the metaverse

New industry Catalyst builds on successful AI deployment to help create a metaverse rich with customer-centric marketplaces

Alasdair Riggs
02 May 2023
Creating customer-centric marketplaces for the metaverse

Creating customer-centric marketplaces for the metaverse

What: The Catalyst project The Metaverse experience: Re-inventing Telco business, is working to advance the customer experience in the metaverse by offering personalized customization in a metaverse storefront and a metaverse conference hall. This will empower telcos to reimagine the customer experience they can offer and give them insights into their feasibility.

Who’s involved: China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, SLT Mobitel, AsiaInfo Technologies, Beijing Tianyuan DIC Information Technology, Whale Cloud.

The story so far

Recent deployments of AI by popular search engines have demonstrated how rapidly this technology is advancing – not just as a means of resolving queries, but also as a way to support executional tasks such as web development and creative writing. Yet last year, to less fanfare, other important ground was being broken in the world of AI: the industry-wide Catalyst project Customer avatar unlocks metaverse experience successfully applied AI to the metaverse by using GPT-3 and Web 3.0 technologies to produce a human-like avatar capable of serving customer needs in a digitally created world.

The motivation for this Catalyst was to increase adoption of metaverse services by demonstrating how they support advanced, customer-centric AI that results in more engaging and customer-focused services than real-world equivalents. This is part of a major push by communications service providers (CSPs) across the globe to provide cost-effective engaging digital services that are more intuitive for both customer service employees and customers.

This year, the same project group - composed of teams from China Telecom, AsiaInfo, China Unicom, China Mobile, CAICT, SLT, Whale Cloud and Tianyuan-DIC - has been working on the second phase of their project The Metaverse experience: Re-inventing Telco business. This Catalyst uses the TM Forum Customer Experience Management (CEM) maturity model and Open API to facilitate the development of enterprise and improve operational efficiency in the metaverse.

Two key steps towards customer-centric marketplaces for the metaverse

Firstly, the project team has been working on an alternative to physical business showrooms which instead showcases products in a 3D environment. This is particularly relevant for modern, data-driven IoT solutions which can have their advantages more clearly and easily observed in simulated domestic and enterprise scenarios. The Catalyst’s ‘Metaverse Business Hall’ relies on intelligent, digital twins created in phase one to demonstrate and explain the value for a variety of products – and are capable of doing so 24/7. Currently over 20 online channels have been integrated into the Business Hall, generating revenue exceeding 100 million RMB.

As well as the Business Hall, the Catalyst team has been working on a means to improve the seamlessness and efficiency of metaverse operations via an ‘AR-enhanced network operation and maintenance system’. This involves using augmented reality displays to provide data center personnel and network engineers with real-time information and analytics about the status of equipment and systems. Overall, it helps to create greater visualization of business processes, network devices, operation instruction and detection, thereby greatly improving network operations and maintenance.

One of the leading experts in the Catalyst – Nan Xu, Director of Empowerment Division of IT, Cloud & Network Operation Department Big Data and AI Center for China Telecom - explained that “the customer-centric business innovation will be the key driver for the success of metaverse and will inspire and encourage inventors to create valuable and imaginative digital assets to meet customer expectations. This Catalyst will impact future technology by transforming experience and economy of the metaverse. It proves that a CSP metaverse will deliver disruptive technologies which will greatly reshape underlying compute and network infrastructure, the customer-centric business model and empower business development and customer marketing services in future.”

With the widespread deployment of 5G, CSPs have the cloud and digital infrastructure capable of supporting next level network convergence and metaverse applications. By demonstrating the success of these new applications, CSPs have helped the wider industry take a step closer to realizing a metaverse which is populated by engaging customer-centric experiences otherwise unreachable in the physical domain.

The project was the winner of the Catalyst team award at DTW Asia 2023 for Best Innovation and Future Techco, and a finalist in the category of Outstanding Catalyst Showcase.

Visit the project here to find out more: Channels & markets - Phase II - TM Forum