The following blog post was submitted by Thea Rasmussen, Cloud Communications Architect at TBI, Inc., and was first published in Talk CMO.
Businesses are undergoing a collective transformation in relationships as a new era of post-pandemic thinking begins. Businesses should address how people feel about work, consumerism, and old and new places at the same time in order to maintain growth and relevance in the present and future. Brands that do not adapt to these societal developments in the experiences they provide will be obsolete by 2022.
Customers have been severely impacted by the outbreak of COVID-19. To get what they want, they have had to adopt new behaviors and technologies. It’s also pushed social, political, and environmental considerations to the forefront, which are now influencing many customers’ purchasing decisions. While it’s true that the last two years have seen significant changes, customers have never been a static and homogeneous group. Customers change on a regular basis. Thus, leading brands recognize this and interact and expand their understanding of their customers on a regular basis to stay ahead of the competition.
Here are some forecasts regarding customer experience for 2022 and beyond.
Increase in Contact Center as a Service CCaaS
Moving into 2022, we expect to see a huge shift from a consumer focus to an employee focus when it comes to voice platforms, specifically Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). Providing the most advanced tools to keep staff satisfied and feeling supported will be top of mind for organizations. That said, there will still be a lot of outsourcing taking place as companies struggle to hire and retain talent.
In recent years, CPaaS solutions have grown in popularity, particularly as businesses engage more in digital transformation. According to a 2020 report by IDC, “Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide Communications Platform as a Service, 2020”, the CPaaS market is expected to be worth $17.7 billion by 2024, and new providers are constantly entering the market.
AI and automation tools
AI and automation tools will be king for cloud communications moving into 2022. This past year, and even in 2020, we saw a push for all-encompassing omnichannel solutions designed to meet customers where they wanted to be met.
But this became overwhelming to both customers and employees. What consumers really want is effective self-service solutions. To accomplish this, we will start to see a segmentation of the contact center product suite to emulate the flexible and consumption-based modeling of CPaaS. In conjunction, the CPaaS world will continue to become more productized, further blurring the lines between the contact center and communication platform as a service (CPaaS) solutions.
Zero trust and mobile device management
As far as security implications of these cloud communications offerings, there is going to be a huge push for zero trust and mobile device management. When the pandemic first began, there was much more emphasis on convenience and access than there was for compliance. Suddenly, we were all working from different locations on different devices, some not even affiliated with our organizations. Now that we’re two years into a hybrid/remote workforce, we’re going to see more of an effort being put towards mitigating the risks associated with BYOD, such as single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) solutions, phishing attacks, and malicious downloads and mobile device management (MDM).
In addition, integration points will also be a big topic this year. Pre-built integrations provide convenience and productivity enhancements but can be serious blind spots in a company’s security landscape.
