There’s no question that the last couple of years has brought tremendous changes in business and society. A combination of the pandemic, shifting consumer attitudes and expectations, the “Great Resignation” and more have forever altered the way we live and work.
As we head into 2022, we don’t expect the pace of change to slow down. Instead, we at CoTé are embracing the opportunity to help our clients deliver better customer communications and experiences in this new world. There’s never been a better time for organisations to ensure their long-term viability and success by engaging and building deep relationships with their target markets.
Here are the trends we think will have the greatest impact on customer communications and engagement in the year ahead.
Composable Applications Go Mainstream
As Vala Afshar recently wrote for ZDNet.com, “We are in a brand new era of digital experiences that are frictionless and highly personalized… The most important currencies in a decentralized and digital economy are speed, personalization, and intelligence.”
Every organisation should now build its key technology and application infrastructures uniquely to accommodate their organisations’ individual needs. This means investing in an all-in-one Customer Experience Management cloud SaaS solution application with tailored CRM, workflow and business process management, product development, and more to ensure your organisation stays agile, increases value, delivers great experiences. Originally, these features wouldn’t always have had the capabilities to integrate with one another, causing organisations to have spent valuable time and resources to build their own bridges. As such, they’re only so effective, and they’re less efficient and limited in how much value they can deliver. CoTé frames solutions around the needs of your customers, your users, and your organisation.
Composable applications are perhaps best equipped to service these infrastructures and drive more functionality and value. These applications contain functional blocks that can be separated from the rest of the application, and then integrated via APIs with other applications or their parts to create new applications with the exact functionality and purpose their owners need. Accordingly, composable applications have the flexibility and scalability to tie together the various aspects of an organisation’s technology suite – and layer other important capabilities and features on top to make everything faster, more secure, and more productive – creating the ultimate digital eco-system.
AI Decision Intelligence helps you understand your customer at greater speed
To further establish efficiencies through composable applications and automation we see a greater focus on AI decision intelligence that will allow AI /machine learning to play a bigger part in the analysis and processing of data like analysing anomalies, forecasting trends, or suggesting courses of action. Gartner predicts that in the next two years, a third of large organizations will be using decision intelligence for structured decision-making, to improve competitive advantage.
Thanks to this evolving technology, we can now create new processes and realize previously impossible efficiencies. With the Decision Intelligence model in place, your organisation has the ability to continually teach itself improvements in your business processes and receive customer needs directly – it’s possible to turn all that data into tangible outcomes, from sales, marketing, customer service, and legal through to supply chains.
Furthermore with live customer-driven actions ever more increasing, AI decision intelligence has the ability to receive data in real-time to make predictions or decisions in real-time, allowing organisations to respond faster to customer requests to increase customer satisfaction and increase profitability.
From a business experience perspective, this means organisations can now tie best-of-breed partners together and optimize the user experience. For example, adding integrating a single cloud platform to with a composable application, that features capabilities such as automated workflow orchestration and AI deciding to automate business decisions, not only runs smoother it can be centrally managed for rapid business adoption, and ultimately free up existing staff to tackle higher-value business activities that include nurturing relationships with customers. New experiences, products, services, and customers can be implemented in days rather than months.
The more that organisations integrate, automate, and streamline business processes, the more efficient they will be and the more they will accomplish.
How digital technology helps to deliver the total experience (TX)
At one point, organisations focused entirely on the end-user experience while neglecting the customer or employee experiences. Now, we’re seeing the intersection of all disciplines in the form of the total experience (TX). The enterprise sees tremendous value in TX because it can shape a customer’s perception of a company or brand, improve employee engagement and efficiency, build trust and offer organisations a competitive advantage.
In 2022, we anticipate that organisations’ involvement with gauging and managing TX will be directly linked to their increased adoption of composable applications. Now that they have the tools to manage and execute the entire sphere of TX at once, we expect an entirely new range of multi-sensory, multi-channel campaigns to begin to take shape. The more organisations can engage their stakeholders in this way, the better their relationships with them will be – and the bottom line will follow. Organizations need technology and strategy that combines people, processes, business, channels and devices – to create shared experiences by interlinking the user experience, customer experience, multi experience and employee experience.
The Emergence of Blockchain
In 2022, we’re going to see greater use of blockchain technology as an increasing percentage of governments, brands and consumers utilize cryptocurrency. As a result, we’re bound to see it used more in everyday business operations.
So how do we build elements of blockchain into our applications to make everyday operations, transactions, and consumer data more secure? How do we create composable applications and blocks that enable better blockchain integration and ultimately unlock more adoption of cryptocurrency among organisatons?
This is likely to be the year that we start to see answers in the marketplace to these questions. However, blockchain technology is still in its infancy, and regulatory scrutiny could pose many hurdles in the future. It’s unlikely that policymakers will deter the advancement of the blockchain in 2022, but it will be interesting to see who the leaders in this space will be and how governments respond.
Incorporating trust, accessibility, transparency, and efficiency throughout the user’s experience will open up blockchain technology to the masses. Currently, the blockchain is a complex market for a few that truly understand its system and technology. The end-user experience is non-existent due to a lack of a central blockchain system or platform from which to build. We saw this occur with the creation of the Internet. In its early years, the Internet had limited functionality, was inaccessible to the majority, and was completely immobile. It took decades of new technologies and networks to form before the first iteration of the world wide web became available to a wider audience. No one would have guessed that the Internet could exist outside of giant, government computers in the ’70s and ’80s. Today, we carry it around in our pockets and check on it while waiting in line for our morning coffee. That’s exactly where the blockchain is headed in the next decade.
Right now, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what is possible with blockchain, but we do believe that a well-designed experience is necessary to bring the blockchain to life for organisations, employees, and customers.
One year from now, it’s highly likely that the organisations that are best positioned for future growth and success will be the ones that have created and delivered the best-integrated customer experiences. We’re committed to ensuring our clients are among that select group. That’s why we’re following these trends, and actively working to stay ahead of them.
Looking to digitally transform your organisation? Contact us today!