CTO and Founder at CallMiner. Responsible for strategic direction across business development, research and artificial intelligence.
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For most companies, 2021 was a transformational year. Coming out of lockdowns (at least partially) and the uncertainty of 2020, many of us reconnected with our peers, colleagues and customers in person this year. While customer service and support operations experienced a massive digital transformation, nothing quite replaced the need for one-to-one human conversations.
Looking ahead to 2022, the customer experience (CX) world is poised for some exciting developments that balance humanity and artificial intelligence (AI), as innovation comes from some of the most unexpected places. Here are five of my CX predictions for 2022.
Expect more consolidation around voice applications.
The pandemic-driven growth of certain industries caused a flurry of M&A activity around voice applications in 2021, and there are no signs of slowing down. The experience management industry will take a cue from the contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) market and add voice to its repertoire through acquisitions.
As one example, the virtual meeting industry enjoyed astounding growth in 2020, which started to trail off in 2021. To fuel continued growth and appease shareholders, these companies will attempt to acquire into the CCaaS market, opening up a new communications channel for fully-integrated virtual meetings. Paired with voice-optimized AI technologies, these platforms will become powerful tools for CX teams to connect with customers on a deeper level and evaluate agents' performance.
The 'big five' make moves into the contact center.
Leading the M&A growth for the CCaaS industry will be five of the biggest enterprise tech companies: Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce. All five have gestured toward the contact center in the past, yet Amazon is the only one to make an early move with Amazon Connect, its omnichannel cloud contact center application.
Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms like Salesforce have a lot to gain from acquiring CX technology that includes capabilities for voice. It’s a massive input channel that’s missing from their growing collection of customer intel. With 2020’s wholesale digital transformation, many thought we’d see the demise of voice as a contact center channel. In fact, the opposite was true. While many people sought support through chatbots and digital self-service options, voice remained a primary anchor of the CX.
Humans remain the winning CX interface.
Many pundits predicted that chatbots would overtake human-to-customer interactions. While the natural language processing (NLP) capabilities in chatbots are dramatically improving, they still leave a lot to be desired when it comes to more complex customer requests. What once was deemed a killer app seems more promising for partial automation.
That means chatbots will be far more successful as an interface that gets customers to the right person to answer their questions, eliminating some of the repetitive human tasks that increase average handle times (AHTs) and add to customer frustration. Rather than resolving the entire contact within a chatbot interface, this technology will serve as a seamless transition point to agents. That said, a lot of work has to be done to educate the customer that chatbots can be helpful, rather than frustrating.
More value will be assigned to insights versus AI.
I believe the "shiny object" phase for AI will come to an end in 2022. To move beyond the early adopter crowd, AI companies will have to start speaking to the business benefits of their technology. Buyers are tired of lofty promises. They’re awash in data and don’t know how to take action on it.
As a result, we’ll see a shift in the way AI is positioned to buyers. It’s all about the insights, not the technology itself. Under the hood, many AI companies use common, open-source AI models to arrive at a conclusion. The conclusions themselves are a commodity unless they’re applied to the business context of the customer. To gain a competitive advantage, AI solutions will have to start embedding feedback into their platforms, so customers can take action and close the loop on the most relevant insights to their businesses. The more the industry ties its technology to business performance improvement, the more it will win over buyers.
AI innovation will boom in emerging markets.
Billions of dollars have been spent bringing AI and analytics software to markets like the U.S., Europe, Japan and China. However, some of the major AI companies are opening up their machine learning models to new languages, unlocking more opportunities to develop new applications in emerging markets.
For example, Microsoft now supports more than 100 languages and dialects within its speech recognition models. Before that, similar models supported less than half of these languages. Internationalization, driven by the Covid-19 pandemic, has made more of these markets accessible and available. Because of this, in 2022, we will see some of the most exciting developments happen in smaller, unexpected markets. For multinational corporations, international deployment strategies will involve partnership and growth propelled by some of these exciting new technologies.
While 2021 was a year of transition from the digital back to the physical world, I predict that 2022 will be an exciting time for blending the best of AI with the best of humanity. Doing this responsibly and ethically will help companies solidify customer trust and loyalty for years to come.
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