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MEF Director of Programmes James Williams shares key takeaways from the Recent MEF CONNECTS Omnichannel event held in London, available to view in full now.

Well, one of the most influential Enterprise Communications related events of the year has come and gone yet again and for those who attended or watched online, there was a lot of stimulating content to digest.

Here are just some of the key points that you can’t afford to miss and indeed don’t have to as everything was recorded for your viewing pleasure right here!

  • The Customer Journey is one that requires multiple channels

The term customer journey can be misleading as it implies a linear progress from point A to point B when in reality, the road to conversion requires all of the varied channels across the Omnichannel working harmoniously.

As Divya Ghai Wakankar, from the event’s main sponsor, BICS pointed out on one of her panels, the consumer is king. They need to have a choice of channels; this will allow them to interact with your brand in THE way that suits them.

  • Attack on Voice presents opportunity

As the oldest channel in the Omnichannel (almost 150 years old), voice is seemingly becoming eclipsed by the likes of data and SMS but as we know there is always opportunity within adversity. Vo5G is on a dramatic rise as projected by Juniper Research during the Vox Solutions’ sponsored Voice related session. With this comes the opportunity for the operators to play catch up with the OTTs.

Voice technologies like AI voice assistants for eCommerce, interactive calling, intelligent call routing and AI-based IVR need to be invested in to rebalance the ecosystem.

  • Fraud. Fraud. Fraud

At MEF, we almost have to stop all the conversations at our events being dominated by fraud for the sake of balance, but it really shows just how pressing this issue is. This Omnichannel event was no exception. Bots have taken over social media and brand sites all across the web and what is the dominant form of OTP authentication? A2P SMS.

At Infobip’s sponsored session, John Murtagh pointed out this leaves the telecoms value chain with ballooning, spurious costs. While these costs may affect only certain parties, every speaker on the panel at one point spoke about trust. Trust is what breaks down when fraud happens which doesn’t just affect some people, but the whole value chain. This is the rallying point that the ecosystem needs to get behind in order to work together by sharing intelligence to flush out fraud. And MEF is the perfect, neutral platform to do exactly that…

  • Differential pricing within the Omnichannel remains controversial

In Haud’s sponsored session, Nick Lane from Mobilesquared pointed out that with mobile advertising, eCPMS fluctuate for a myriad of reason. Ads are auctioned by the billions at dynamic prices depending on geo, device, how many users are loading a given page, the advertiser’s brand safety and targeting requirements and thousands of other factors. Does the current telecoms infrastructure and wider Omnichannel allow for something similar with A2P? Is this something we should even be adopting?

To start with we should at least be looking to see what aspects of this model we should imitate and adopt.

Check out all the recordings of the sessions and we know you will uncover some great insights. We had the likes of Google, Meta and Rakuten Viber with us. And we are not done yet.

We’ve got so many great events lining up for MEF members next year and we will be back at the end of 2023 delivering MEF CONNECTS Omnichannel 2023. Let’s see what the world of Enterprise Communications has in store for us in 2023!

James Williams

Director of Programmes, MEF

  

MEF CONNECTS Omnichannel – watch on demand

MEF Members met in London last week for our fully hybrid (face-to-face and virtual) Business Messaging related event for 2022 – MEF CONNECTS Omnichannel. Taking place at The Kings Fund  in London, Members and guests gathered to review Omnichannel strategies, build new partnerships, identify new target audiences for goods and services, integrate new ideas and expand their knowledge of this fast-growing area.

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