Editorial
The Gist
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AI and network management. AI is transforming network management by allowing predictive analytics and real-time problem resolution.
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Key role of network managers. Network managers are the unsung heroes of CX, as their work maintains network reliability and improves customer satisfaction, especially in AI-powered environments.
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Support for network managers. Organizations must integrate network managers into CX processes and provide them with the best tools to maintain seamless service.
2025 is the year that AI will truly reshape customer experience by delivering hyper-personalized interactions in real time. Businesses are already using advanced generative AI to allow seamless, human-like conversations across channels, enhance self-service and deepen brand relationships through more intuitive and empathic engagement.
Given the technical challenges that arise from integrating so many new advanced digital applications on top of an existing business architecture, a core imperative for 2025 is recognizing the hidden heroes of CX: network managers. If physical networks fail in any way, customer experience and service quality are immediately affected.
And the buck stops with the chief technology officer.
Table of Contents
- The Challenge of Managing Network Complexity for CX
- How to Strengthen Network Management for Better Customer Experience
- From Reacting to Predicting in Network Management for CX
- Core Questions Around Network Managers and CX
The Challenge of Managing Network Complexity for CX
One of the biggest challenges CTOs face is not having an up-to-date and complete hardware inventory. Knowing exactly which components they have — such as servers, routers, switches, wireless access points, firewalls and cabling — and how they are connected is a complex task. Under normal conditions, these components work together to guarantee smooth, secure and efficient business operations.
But when networks start to fail, network managers need to immediately make sense of the many different alarms from their monitoring applications, and more importantly, they must identify the root cause of issues and resolve them immediately. Given the complexity of physical networks and the applications that depend on them, failure to resolve issues rapidly will impact the organization financially. Resolving issues becomes even more challenging when an organization depends on multiple independent outsourced service providers, all of whom must collaborate to find a solution.
How to Strengthen Network Management for Better Customer Experience
A major trend for this year will be AI’s growing influence on network management. It is important to understand the importance of this, since organizations are struggling to find highly trained network specialists with the necessary problem-solving skills. To address this, here is a four-step plan to make sure your organization supports network managers as much as they invest in AI.
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Assess your network. Carry out network assessments regularly to make sure you have continuous and comprehensive evaluations of your IT network infrastructure and its performance, security and scalability.
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Make sure that you have access to both the best monitoring tools and your network’s topology. A topology is a visual representation of how devices, connections and data flows interact within the network. It’s necessary for identifying bottlenecks and failures, troubleshooting efficiently and optimizing performance.
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Integrate your network managers into your CX processes across your entire customer lifecycle. While many CX managers construct and document service maps that include frontstage, backstage and support activities, it is still rare to find network managers actively participating in the design of business processes. When they are involved, they can identify many potential issues in advance, instead of relying on IT teams to continually resolve issues due to bad planning.
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Educate C-Suite on health of network. Make sure all C-suite executives have access to a single dashboard that shows the health of your network across three main areas: infrastructure, application and business components. If your customer experience AI applications are not fully integrated into your network management intelligence tools, you cannot guarantee continual service to your end customers should incidents occur.
Related Article: The AI Advantage: Is Your CX Falling Behind?
From Reacting to Predicting in Network Management for CX
With this level of intelligence in business applications and at the network level, cross-disciplinary teams can shift from reactive to predictive analysis. However, it’s not enough to just be able to predict the behaviors, emotions and requirements of your customers. Your network at every level must also be able to support business growth and new technologies.
Innovative solutions in network management are cutting analysis and incident resolution time from weeks to hours. It’s important that your organization fully supports its network managers to be able to meet the new demands and complexities that they are now facing.
Core Questions Around Network Managers and CX
Editor's note: Here are two important questions to ask about network managers and management.
How is AI changing network management for customer experience?
AI allows predictive analytics, streamlines incident resolution and improves decision-making. As AI helps anticipate customer behavior and network issues, it lets businesses proactively address potential problems and enhances the overall customer experience.
How do you support network managers with AI?
The four-step plan includes conducting regular network assessments, providing top-tier monitoring tools and access to network topology, integrating network managers into CX processes and making sure C-suite executives can view network health through a unified dashboard. This approach improves network performance and supports AI applications effectively.
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