Transforming Customer Experience: What Does The Future Of CX Look Like?

Gibu Mathew, VP and GM APAC, Zoho Corp. (Photo: Special)

JAKARTA - Two years into the pandemic, organizations, and employees are now permanently adopting practices that will forever change the workplace as we do today. Meanwhile, the company has been perfecting their services to ensure a better customer experience. Therefore, Customer Experience (CX) is now constantly changing.

Gibu Mathew, VP, and GM APAC, Zoho Corp said: "We have ushered in a new era of customer experience (CX). Customer service has evolved across multiple channels and has developed new practices to reach a wider audience. Many companies have strengthened their customer experience efforts to differentiate their brands from competitors who offer similar products and services and share the same audience.

Business leaders are beginning to determine which habits adopted during the pandemic will wither and which habits will endure. So, what will the customer experience be like in 2022? Here are our top predictions:

1. CEO will lead digital transformation

While digital transformation has been going on for several years, the last two years have seen it go faster than ever. Now more than ever, the urgency to prioritize DX is pushed to an existential challenge. This not only applies to IT infrastructure to optimize internal operations anymore but has extended to the entire business ecosystem, primarily driven by the way customers now consume content and make purchases. This has resulted in a fundamental transformation for many organizations as a whole, especially as customers now prefer to interact with brands through digital channels.

According to a Consumer Insights report by PwC, among Singaporeans' top preferred channels for purchasing products are online via smartphones, online via smart home voice assistants, and online via tablets. Thus, in 2022, from CIO responsibilities, DX is likely to shift to CEO, who has a strong focus on improving customer experience. As customer consumption behavior evolves rapidly, it is now up to the CEO to articulate a technology-led and results-driven business strategy, rather than finding ways to back up existing strategies with technology.

2. BizOps will be raised to a strategic level

Digitization and improving business strategy go hand in hand. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of BizOps, a strategic direction to unify the flow of information from various business functions such as sales, marketing, and customer service, so that decision making is not carried out in a silo between businesses. 2022 seems to be used at a strategic level to optimize internal operations. As technology becomes a key driver of growth, rather than an afterthought, the importance of the BizOps team will only increase.

While companies have adopted the BizOps model, they will soon be leveraging it to gain a better competitive advantage to improve customer service and create a better customer experience. Given the speed at which brands operate today, the BizOps team will equip the business team and IT team to manage internal change more smoothly and engage customers in this positive change.

3. Self-serve experience as well as communication system experience will be a priority

Brands have started implementing self-service digital experiences, which customers already prefer for simple and transactional needs. From trading and account management to compliance and personalization, customers now choose to have as much direct control as possible. All of this will be simplified with a conversational interface, which mimics conversations with real people to provide a more comfortable and more human interaction.

The Zero UI era has begun. Invisible user interfaces triggered by natural gestures such as gestures, sounds, and Gestures are already implemented, and will soon receive and raise requests from more organizations. On the consumer side, the increasing adoption of Zero UI in smart home settings is a definite indication of what will be the hope for more consumer products in a few years.

4. Trust-by-design will be the expectation of customers and the main goal for the company

According to Forrester, 59 percent of marketers in Asia-Pacific only meet the minimum requirements for complying with data privacy regulations and only 30 percent have developed specific strategies for communicating with consumers about their data privacy. These numbers are likely to grow and consumers will start switching to brands that offer better privacy and take consumer data security more seriously. They also tend to pay a premium for such offers. This has already started for many consumers and will only get stronger as a trend.

5. Unified technology platform will be the first choice

As organizations accelerate digital transformation, they adopt a unified technology platform to ensure seamless change. On top of the best integrated application landscape, unified platforms will become the norm as they serve as one-stop shops enabling businesses to perform multiple functions, such as customer context cross-reference, automation, customer data collection and analysis, on a single platform.

In the long term, a seamless unified platform reduces the potential technology and financial risk of patchy application implementations from multiple solution providers.

Overall, we believe that 2022 will see brands elevate their CX efforts a few notches. As customer expectations and behavior have changed, we see them have an increasing focus on improving customer digital experiences and making them as perfect as possible. At this stage, while we are still adapting and facing rapid change, we predict that next year will be a significant year to continue, simplify and permanently incorporate the best CX practices adopted in the transformation journey.