Improving the customer experience (CX)—a concept that involves everything from the level of service to how the product fits into their lives—is a major focus for companies in 2022. Next year, brands will build on success (and learn from failure), using technology-driven solutions to meet the challenge of building deeper connections and relationships with customers.

Top 5 Customer Experience (CX) Trends in 2022

Artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) platforms have been widely adopted in marketing, product design, and customer service, mainly because they enable companies to improve our experience when dealing with brands or using their products or services. Fortunately, gone are the days when sporadic focus group tests and customer satisfaction surveys were the only way to get feedback on how they met the needs of our consumers.

Technology and our data-driven, always-on world means deeper, sometimes real-time contact with customers. However, before that, brands know that they need to win our trust and show that they can provide us with value. This will be the strongest trend driving customer experience throughout 2022, and we will achieve this goal in the following five ways:

This may mean that marketing-oriented experiences are designed to help companies communicate information in new ways and connect with new audiences. But it will also increasingly appear in sales, customer service, and product support. The term "meta universe" has become a major trend, driven by companies such as Meta, Nvidia, and Microsoft. It describes a persistent online environment in which we can connect, communicate, and collaborate in an increasingly immersive way. Allowing brands to provide new and interesting customer experiences through virtual platforms may be a key reason why this concept is attractive to businesses, especially because integration with virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) will become a core feature of Metaverse. In 2022, companies will use these experiences to create new opportunities for us to interact and participate at home-such as IKEA's Everyday Experiments. More and more services, such as Snapchat's AR Lab, will make it easier for companies of all sizes to join this trend.  

Brands that compete primarily on customer experience

Forget about trying to undercut competitors' prices; providing an excellent customer experience is quickly becoming the top priority of brands trying to differentiate themselves from the competition. Brands are now very concerned about customer experience, partly because they know that people will pay more for a great experience. Another major factor is that they understand that experience includes building trust. When we trust a company, we are more likely to be willing to share our data with them. Technology has created countless ways to create and deliver these experiences. They may come in the form of good customer service delivery, targeted experiential marketing contacts, or simply finding that your products and services are well suited to their lives. Research has found that one bad interaction with the company is enough to prevent many of us from providing them with our habits again. As society transitions to a service-driven economy, the lifetime value of customers is critical, and 2022 will increase investment in technologies designed to improve our experience and win our trust.  

Due to the IoT and wearable device revolution, the devices we carry and interact with are increasingly able to collect data from us and the world in which we live. In fact, Gartner estimates that by 2022, the value of the global wearable device market will reach 81.5 billion U.S. dollars. As a result of the shift to remote and working from home, many of us enjoy extra free time, which is also a driving factor for our growing interest in personal health.

Experience-centric companies quickly become good at capturing this data and using it to increase the richness and usefulness of our interactions with them. The new smart materials being developed will allow the creation of self-powered smart clothing, which can be washed in ordinary machines, and can transmit many different types of data to apps on mobile phones or watches, allowing you to gain insight into your health. It is also expected that we will see the first results of Google's acquisition of fitness tracker manufacturer Fitbit, which may lead to an increase in innovation in the smart watch field. In 2022, many companies focused on improving the experience will use data to better integrate into our lives by developing products, providing us with more valuable insights and a richer user journey.  

The level and quality of service customers receive from the company is a key feature of the experience it provides. The contact center plays an important role in this regard-if customers know that they will be "on hold" for a long time, passing between multiple departments, or eventually talking to a well-trained agent who cannot help them solve the problem, they are not May be highly appraised of their experience in the company. An automatic call processing system was initially introduced to solve some of these problems, but unfortunately it does not always achieve the desired results, because callers are encountering more and more when navigating menus or interacting with voice recognition systems that try their luck. Frustration.

Companies rely on them to enhance the capabilities of these systems through artificial intelligence—for example, customer service chatbots that use natural language processing (NLP)—to alleviate these problems. This should mean that chatbots are getting better and better at understanding our input and predicting the response we need. One application that we may start to see become a reality in 2022 is the voice assistant in offline retail—for example, in a supermarket, we may ask Alexa to tell us where to find the products we need in the aisle. McDonald's may start to roll out voice recognition in its drive-through terminals this year. Sentiment analysis will increasingly be used to understand the content of written and oral communication and route it more effectively to the person or machine that will provide the best solution.

This year, the improvement of the level of personalization will become a very strong trend, and brands are beginning to accept the idea of ​​using technology to build closer and more personalized relationships with customers on a large scale. For example, it is well known that personalized email headers and subject lines can increase click-through rates, but this is just the beginning. A hot topic of personalization next year will be opportunities to identify "micro-moments" and take action-sales opportunities can be opened for a few seconds, but are a highly profitable scale for brands that understand how to recognize and pounce on them. These micro-moments will open when customers go online for purchase intent or just want to know information about a certain topic (for example, what tools do they need to complete their work). In 2022, brands will invest heavily to identify and use these moments and find the right time to send personalized quotes, which will help solve any problems faced by potential customers at that time. It's about being able to reach the right customers at the right time-it's a cutting-edge marketing challenge, but because of the technological solutions we have at our fingertips today, this challenge is getting easier to solve.

These five customer experience trends represent very real opportunities and risks for companies. Read more about these and other future trends in my new book "Business Trends in Practice: Over 25 Trends to Redefine Organizations." It is full of real-world examples, it breaks the hype and shows the key trends that will shape the business of the future.