Improving customer experience (CX) – a concept that involves everything from the level of service to how well products fit into their lives – is a huge focus for businesses in 2022. Over the next year, brands will build on their successes (and learn from the failures), leveraging technology-driven solutions to the challenges of building deeper connections and relationships with their customers.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and internet of things (IoT) platforms have been enthusiastically adopted in marketing, product design, and customer services, primarily because they enable businesses to improve the experiences we have when engaging with brands or using their products or services.

Immersive, hybrid experiences

This might mean marketing-oriented experiences designed to help companies communicate their message in new ways and connect with new audiences. But it will also be increasingly visible in sales, customer services, and product support.  Allowing brands to deliver new and interesting customer experiences over virtual platforms is likely to be a key reason the concept will be attractive to businesses, particularly as integration with virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) will be a core feature of the metaverse. In 2022, businesses will look to these experiences to create new opportunities for us to interact and engage from our homes

Brands competing primarily on customer experience

Providing a superior customer experience is swiftly becoming the priority for brands attempting to differentiate themselves from their competition. Partly because they know people will pay more for great experiences. Another major factor is that they understand that experience includes building trust, and when we trust businesses, we are much more likely to be willing to share our data with them. Technology creates countless ways to create and deliver these experiences. They could come in the form of a good customer service delivery, an on-target experiential marketing connection, or simply discovering that your products and services are a good fit for their lives.

Smarter products and services

Thanks to the IoT and wearables revolution, devices we carry and interact with are increasingly capable of collecting data from us and the world we live in. In fact, Gartner estimates that by 2022, the value of the global wearables market will hit $81.5 billion. The additional free time many of us are enjoying thanks to switching to remote and from-home working is a driver of this, as well as an increasing interest in personal health. Experience-focused businesses are quickly becoming adept at taking this data and using it to improve the richness and usefulness of our interactions with them.

Automation in customer service

The level and quality of service that customers receive from companies is a key feature of the experience it provides. Contact centers play a big role in this – if customers know they will spend a long time “on hold,” be passed between multiple departments, or end up speaking to poorly trained advisors who can’t help them solve their problems, they are unlikely to rate their experiences with that company highly.

Businesses are counting on their ability to augment these systems with AI – customer service chatbots employing natural language processing (NLP), for example – to alleviate these issues. This should mean chatbots that get increasingly better at understanding our input and predicting the response we require. One application we may start to see becoming a reality in 2022 will be voice assistants in offline retail -for example, in a supermarket, we might ask Alexa to tell us where to find the products we need in the aisles.  And sentiment analytics will increasingly be used to understand the content of written and spoken communications and more efficiently route it to the people or machines that will provide the best solution.

Personalization

Increasing levels of personalization are going to be a very strong trend this year, with brands getting to grips with the idea of using technology to develop closer and more personalized relationships with their customers at scale. Personalized email headers and subject lines, for example, are known to improve click-through rates, but that’s only the beginning. Also  finding the right time to send a personalized offer that will help solve whatever problem is facing the potential customer at that time. This is about being able to reach the right customer at the right time – a cutting-edge marketing challenge but one that’s increasingly solvable thanks to the technology solutions at our fingertips today.

These five CX trends represent very real opportunities – and risks – for businesses, it cuts through the hype to present the key trends that will shape the businesses of the future.