The past two years have seen consumer preferences shift significantly, especially when it comes to their interactions with brands. There’s an increasing demand for a more personalized customer journey, and the combined use of multiple channels has become a standard.
“There are numerous touchpoints, and there have never been as many channels in the customer journey as there are now,” notes Toku CEO Thomas Laboulle.
“In the past, the customer experience was secondary to whatever a company was selling. Today, it’s CX-first. Organizations are becoming customer-centric, rather than product-centric.”
How does this shift in perceived customer experience affects the business communication market? And what key trends does it inspire?
1.Omni-Channel on the Rise
A returning trend that will be dominating the business communication market in 2022 is the omni-channel approach. While not new, this trend continues to gain traction.
“It’s important to understand the difference between ‘multi-channel’ and ‘omni-channel’,” Laboulle says.
“While multi-channel simply refers to the use of various channels, omni-channel also means that the customer experience you aim to provide is as much as possible identical across all these different channels.”
One of the key requirements to provide consistent customer experience across the board is integrations between communication channels and a company’s CRM and ticketing system.
“These integrations lie at the base of a good customer journey,” Laboulle notes.
Equally important is the ability to control how the different channels will interact with one another.
“Part of that is manifested by the fact that many solution providers (like Toku) provide the same interface for most if not all the channels they’re helping to manage.”
2.In-App Communication
Another trend that we’ll be seeing in 2022 is a growing movement towards embedding communications channels inside the apps themselves, using communicating APIs.
“Sharing economy players like Airbnb, Uber and Gojek have already adopted that approach a couple of years ago. But now, more and more companies realize that this is the next stage in providing seamless customer interactions,” Laboulle explains.
“If you want to have a chat conversation or a voice call with your customer, the best way is to do it from within the app. This way, the user experience is uninterrupted and seamless”
3.Maintaining the Human Factor
One of the riskiest traps for a brand using multiple channels is automating too many processes, forcing a specific customer journey that isn’t a good fit for all uses cases. Therefore, another key trend in 2022 will be ensuring that agents are still part of the customer interaction equation.
“Not being able to talk to a real person from the organization they are interacting with might make customers feel that the brand cannot perceive their frustration. That’s why it’s critical to maintain a good balance between automation, self-service, and human intervention,” Laboulle says.
“If you don’t provide the customer with the opportunity to interact with your team, unless behind technology, you are missing an opportunity to relate to them. This is something that companies must consider when they are taking an omni-channel approach.“
4.Leveraging Data to Create Actionable Insights
The fourth trend is all about using the abundance of customer data that becomes available thanks to the integrations in order to improve the brand’s customer experience even further. According to Laboulle, there are two parts to that process.
“First, there’s the manual leverage done by the agent, who suddenly sees everything in the same interface and can be much quicker to connect the dots, having all this useful information about the customer,” he explains.
“Second, more and more companies are applying machine learning and AI to identify trends which will help them improve their mix of channels. Once they’ve done that, they can also start investing in automation.”
If you’re an APAC-based organization going through any of these stages, you can reach out to Toku here.
