Let’s just start by saying 2022 is more like 2021, only a bit advanced in terms of CX trends! Customer experience trends are the driving force for businesses, allowing them to focus on what really matters for customers and helping them evolve more customer-centric.
Since the onset of the pandemic, businesses had to ramp up their ways to keep in touch with their customers and most importantly, retain and keep them satisfied! As a result, the adoption rate of the “digital-first approach” became significantly higher.
More and more businesses shifted to social media and other digital platforms to provide customer support. In fact, 2021 was the year it was put into practice largely! And 2022 is going to be a step above with everything laid solid from 2021!
So, in this read, we’ll be looking at the biggest customer experience trends businesses should be expecting in 2022. But before that, we’ll have a quick look at the CX trends of 2021 – a recap should help you stay connected!
Customer Experience Trends of 2021 – A Quick Recap
1. Accelerated Social Media Customer Service
With the pandemic hitting hard, more and more businesses will turn to social media to offer customer support. With the increased number of social media users, this is a viable option for businesses to offer support and keep their customers engaged.
2. Customer Insights Mattered More
In order to deliver a better customer experience, businesses would want to know more about their customers’ journey and insights. Businesses would invest in listening tools to gain access to real-time metrics to understand customers’ sentiment, their take on the brand and more.
3. The Proactive Customer Service Approach
This was one other important CX trend of 2021. Businesses will start to solve customer issues even before they appear. Called “Proactive Customer Service”, businesses would want to anticipate customer issues beforehand and fix them before it becomes a problem.
So, that’s a quick recap of the CX trends of 2021. Businesses have already started to adopt all the trends mentioned above. There are other important trends that include chatbots, metrics to measure ROI and more. You can know more about them in this read.
👉🏻 7 Customer Experience Trends for 2021
Now that you’re up to speed, let’s start looking at the customer experience trends for 2022!
Customer Experience Trends for 2022
1. The Digital-First Approach
Today, we live in a world where digitization isn’t optional anymore. In short, we’re in a digital-first phase.
Businesses are shifting towards the process of leveraging digital media channels for their growth. In fact, in the previous year, businesses started to offer customer support on social media. And it has helped them stay in touch with customers!
The ongoing pandemic has really pushed businesses to go digital, especially on social media platforms. The digitization which already started out as a small thing the previous year will now become huge!
A survey by McKinsey & Company revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the digitization process forward by years now! Customers have started to reach out to a brand mostly via digital channels.
An increased number of businesses will start to make them available on digital platforms and try building better customer interactions – social media platforms, mobile applications and anything that would pave the way for better customer interactions.
2. Smooth Omnichannel Experience
The term Omnichannel has been around for some time now. And businesses are still getting their way around it!
Today, consumers get in touch with brands on channels they prefer. And this doesn’t have to be from the same channel always – it can be a different one every single time! But they expect an uninterrupted journey even when switching between channels.
What businesses should do is, they should start unifying customer experience across channels. A consumer should be able to continue his or her journey irrespective of the channel they choose to go with.
This applies to customer support as well! If an agent has all prior information about a consumer reaching out for support, the customer experience is going to be on a whole new level!
Speaking of omnichannel support, Simplify360’s omnichannel customer support platform allows you to manage all your customer interactions from one place – integrate all your communication channels (Social Media, Email, In-app chat, Web chat, Instant messengers, Google My Business, etc) and you’re good to go!
3. Customer Service & Automation
Customer service is a key factor that is directly related to customer experience. The better the support is, the better the customer experience is going to be.
Earlier, customers weren’t really benefited from the automated call handling systems as there were long waiting times and the interaction wasn’t really pleasant. And in 2022, businesses will look forward to providing better customer support by incorporating AI technology and automation.
Businesses will start investing in tools that’ll help reduce manual effort and increase customer experience – AI Chatbots, Helpdesk Softwares and more.
The usage of AI chatbots has been steadily increasing and statistics say that 80% of businesses will have some form of chatbot system by 2022. The reason being chatbots provide instant and accurate responses. And setting them up doesn’t require much effort as well!
Chatbots can understand better (thanks to phrase detection & sentiment analysis) from the queries it gets and provide more appropriate responses. They also constantly learn from the queries, making them smart – more like a one-time solution for trivial questions. You can simply train them and the automation takes care of the rest! Customers can self-serve themselves instead of waiting in long support queues.
This year, a huge number of businesses will be adopting chatbots to automate support their customer support and save time, effort, costs and most importantly, deliver a greater customer experience.
4. Finding the Balance Between Humanity & Automation
Since we were speaking of chatbots, we decided to bring in this trend right next to it.
Chatbots aren’t new. A lot of businesses have already started using them – faster resolution times, better support, It’s all good! But one thing they lack is the human touch! While some really don’t mind about this, a huge number of people look at this as a factor.
In fact, 60% of consumers strongly believe that humans can understand their issues better when compared to a chatbot.
Businesses will need to and will focus on implementing chatbots that are able to deliver more human-like interactions as well as have a human fallback option – helps deal with complicated issues without any delays. For instance, SimplyBot is NLP and ML powered, enabling it to deliver the human-human interaction feel when customers reach out for support.
5. Personalization & Meaningful Connection With Brands
There’s too much noise around. And if you’re looking to cut through it, you need to come up with personalized solutions.
In 2022, personalized offers and services are going to play a major role in customer experience. In short, customers want to feel special and have meaningful connections with brands. You’re going to be greatly rewarded provided you crack this right.
A study from Salesforce says that an approximate 52% of customers expect personalized support, offers and services.
Your potential customers are going to be bombarded by a huge volume of content and only anything extraordinary or personalized is going to get their attention! So, make sure you come up with tailored content at the right moment that exactly suits your customers’ needs!
6. Instant Resolutions
Your customer support isn’t up to the mark if instant resolutions cannot be delivered. Gone are the days where customers can be put on hold or made to talk between departments over the same issue. Today, they want solutions. And they want it immediately!
If a customer gets to face a scenario where he or she is being made to wait, they choose to go with an alternative solution without second thoughts. And that’s exactly why you need to provide instant resolutions.
Like we mentioned above, automation in customer service is a good place to start with. Today, all that matters is solutions – quick and appropriate! In 2022, businesses will focus more on providing instant resolutions to customers. And automation is one of the things that’ll be the first option on their mind. Optimize your chatbots to the fullest and have FAQs wherever possible to promote the self-serve approach.
7. Proactive Customer Service, Again
Proactive customer service was one of the important CX trends the previous year. And it’s the same in 2022 as well. In fact, the priority factor has increased multiple folds.
Businesses have clearly understood the importance of proactive customer service. This is nothing but anticipating customer needs in advance and giving them solutions before a problem arises.
Here’s something to help you understand better – instead of making a customer submit a contact form and wait for a response, you can enable 24×7 live chat options.
The point is to put yourself in customers’ shoes, identify what problems they could possibly face and come up with solutions for the same in advance.
Doing it this way can help you deliver the instant gratification customers expect and an overall cohesive customer experience!
This year, businesses will focus on delivering a proactive customer approach at every possible instance.
8. The Rise In Digital Purchases
eCommerce is a sector that witnessed an uproar with the onset of the pandemic. In fact, by the year 2025. eCommerce is expected to account for a massive 23.6% of all retail sales.
The digital purchases trend witnessed an increasingly upward trend the past couple of years and the pandemic pushed it even further. Businesses started to adopt new tech and allowed customers to purchase from the social channels they use. WhatsApp is one of the platforms where this is possible – customers will be able to chat with brands, get personalized recommendations and even receive responses for their queries.
This makes the entire “digital purchasing” process a seamless experience for customers. More and more brands are expected to adopt this and increase their sales figures.
Social media channels like Instagram and Pinterest are also working towards such features where viewers can not only view products but also purchase them.
9. Immersive, Realistic & Hybrid Experiences
Apart from the above-mentioned, this is another important customer experience trend that’s a must mention!
It’s all about businesses connecting & conveying their message to their audience in a new, immersive way with the help of online environments.
The Metaverse trend is increasingly on the rise since late 2021 and in 2022, this is going to be adopted by a number of businesses.
Metaverse is nothing but virtual online environments where one can communicate, collaborate and engage themselves, more like a parallel world of existence. With Virtual & Augmented Reality a huge part of the Metaverse trend, businesses will look forward to making use of this opportunity to deliver immersive experiences to customers which they can experience from their homes. And its application will be visible in sectors like customer service, sales and support.
Though the Metaverse trend is in early adoption, major brands like Nike have already started their venture in the Metaverse digital universe.
This 2022, businesses will prepare for Metaverse adoption, aiming to deliver more engaging, immersive experiences to their customers.
The Bottom Line
So, those are the nine customer experience trends you should be looking out for in 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed businesses to take various measures to deliver a great customer experience in the past two years. And the trend continues to go forward in 2022 as well – more and more businesses will look forward to adopting these trends and pushing to provide better customer interactions and experience. Because happy customers build great businesses!