5 Customer Experience Trends for 2022

Trends that will break the sea of digital sameness

For some time now, people have experienced the blue sea of digital sameness. One brand looks like the other with often irrelevant, undifferentiated, and immemorable appearances. A digital presence today is not enough to create experiences that meet customers’ expectations in 2022.

Instead, brands must deliver ever strong, differentiated digital experiences to stand out. To be something else – something better – than all the other brands who compete for buyers’ attention.

In an attempt to quantify the value of customer experiences, Harvard Business Review found that customers with the best experiences are likely to spend up to 140% more than those who had the poorest experiences.

A good customer experience can consist of several elements that are different across industries and even countries. Yet, no matter the nature of your business, it is an indisputable fact that the world is digital and has been for a long time.

We have identified five customer experience trends that are key for brands who want to create customers’ experiences of tomorrow and break waves in the sea of digital sameness.

• 5 Customer Experience Trends for 2022

  • Create an omnichannel customer experience

  • Deliver immersive and enriching experiences

  • Apply virtual and augmented technology

  • Deliver personalized experiences in micro-moments

  • Enable buyers to self-help through meaningful interactions

Omnichannel customer experience: a non-negotiable expectation

Today, a customer buying journey, across B2C and B2B, is unlikely to consist of one or two touchpoints. Instead, it consists of several touchpoints across channels and formats. It may start on a website, continue in-store, be followed up by an email, discuss with a family member, and purchase through click-and-collect.

It implies a real challenge for businesses. Service customers by making sure that previous interactions match future ones, no matter where and when they may occur.

In this regard, omnichannel and multichannel are often thrown around as the answer. But it is important to distinguish between omni- and multichannel, as they are not the same.

Multichannel is straightforward in its purpose: It aims to make content accessible in as many offline and online channels as possible. But the channels are not integrated.

Omnichannel does not stop with content across channels. It aims to make buyers move across channels and devices seamlessly and create an omnichannel customer experience.

But leading brands who break the sea of digital sameness do more than integrate the channels they’re present on.

They make their content excessively personalized and rich across channels as well.

While personalized and enriching experiences are worthy of attention, let’s start with why integrating channels is important to realize consistent experiences.

For now, multichannel presence does not create customer experiences that go beyond endless waters. Being able to create consistent, omnichannel interactions does.

• To succeed in creating an omnichannel customer experience, you must follow three key steps:

  • Customer journey mapping: Understand the journey for core segments is key to gain visibility to design end-to-end across digital and live channels.

  • Identify the channels: Generate insights into where customers prefer to engage to ensure resources are spent optimally.

  • Create consistent experiences. Whether a customer is in-store, on a mobile device, website, a unified experience of the brand is the first step to set it apart from competition.

More and more favor rich experiences over products

For every day that passes, the share of buyers consisting of millennials and even younger generations increases.

A fundamental difference between this generation compared to older generations is the increasing perceived value of buyer experiences in comparison to material goods.

75% of millennials say they value experiences over things, according to Forbes. That means brands must turn the buyer (and customer) journey into a thoughtful and memorable experience.

One way to deliver such experiences is rich content.

“It needs to make an impression that lasts, or the buyer is quickly off to yet another seller.”

This is one of the reasons a digital asset management platform can help drive revenue growth.

A platform that acts as a single source of truth for all rich content – be it videos, graphics, animations, and 3D objects, enables marketers to push out the right content, to the right channel, at the right time.

Besides the abovementioned, DAM software can support the content lifecycle of highly advanced content such as virtual and augmented reality.

Read along to learn how such content is a core part of creating rich experiences.

Deliver rich experiences with virtual and augmented reality

The sudden requirement to socially distance in 2020 and Facebook’s recent repositioning to “Meta” in October has brightened the spotlight on virtual and augmented reality.

Where virtual reality represents the total immersion into a new digital world, augmented reality overlays digital features onto reality to create an augmented perception of the world.

Both concepts take the ever-digital customer interactions that have become trivial to buyers into well… a new reality, as it changes the landscape of possibilities to experience and interact with products.

It offers an opportunity to engage with customers on a deeper level and create experiences beyond buyers’ expectations.

It breaks the sea of digital sameness.

The option to engage more deeply with customers allows sellers to bolster customer connections in the new normal, where customer connections are short and temporary – perhaps even at the risk of being superficial.

The possibilities of what virtual and augmented reality present also cut across industries. For example, most people buy a couch at some point during their life.

Try and imagine being in the furniture store, considering the options and having trouble making a final decision.

Augmented reality allows buyers to experience a digital twin of their preferred couch in their living rooms through their phone’s camera.

Virtual reality allows buyers to experience a virtual 3D showroom world where they can walk around and experience the couch in a fully immersive way – even in the comfort of their own home.

In B2B, sellers can help customers truly understand their complex products.

With virtual reality, customers can immerse themselves into the product at hand, and explore the details of an elevator or a huge wind turbine.

It allows them to visually see and understand how the product is configured, what components are included, and maybe even get the ability to configure it themselves!

In other words, rich content not only helps customers understand but also makes them remember, apply and create because it is so immersive and can place them in whatever context they like, be it at home or in a factory.

Arguably a customer experience beyond a simple picture or a product on the phone.

Personalization and micro-moments

Societies have never been as individualized as it is today. People want to feel special. Buyers are no different.

While buyers are channel-agnostic, they are not in love with all types of content. As generic content is a thing of the past, now, at a minimum, content must appeal to them in a customized, but preferably, individual way.

For companies, customers’ need for personalization has been difficult to accommodate. However, with the rise of AI, companies are realizing that personalized content can and should move to the forefront, as buyers want it.

One thing is to ensure you are communicating to customers in a tailored way, another is to get ahold of buyers at the very moment they are actively exploring. Google recently introduced the phrasing’ micro-moments to describe that buyer sentiment.

What does the moment look like? According to Think with Google, it is very often an impulse to want something to happen instantly. It may be an “I want-to-know“, “I want-to-go” moment, “I want-to-do“, or “I want-to-buy” moment.

The impact is unambiguous: If companies deliver on the ‘I want-to-X’ sentiment, you provide instant gratification for the buyer and deliver the desired experience. In that way, you may earn an extended span of attention or perhaps even make a sale.

“If you deliver on the ‘I want-to’ sentiment, you provide instant gratification for the buyer and deliver the desired experience.”

M/I Homes, a house building company did exactly that through digital asset management. As a new build company, potential buyers need to experience what a brand-new home looks and feels like.

That meant that M/I Homes had to deliver high quality, personalized experiences to potential homebuyers.

With DAM, they were able to do so, as the platform sources all digital content and automates workflows to guarantee timely delivery of notifications and relevant imagery to customers.

Enable Buyers to Help Themselves

67%. That is the share of buyers that would rather self-service instead of speaking with a company representative. Stop reading for a second and let the number settle with you. Two out of three.

“67% of buyers do not want to speak with you.”

Many sellers perceive their interactions with buyers as the most powerful experiences. They’re personal, 1:1, and engaging, right? Unfortunately, that is not what buyers look for.

This fact sets new standards for the demand for accessibility. But it also raises the bar for what is required from companies in terms of digital presence. It means they must create a digital presence that, to some degree, frees up salespeople’s time.

Leading companies lift the challenge using a digital asset management system.

Does this mean that sales reps are no longer needed? Not at all. It means that they can now spend more time on more value-adding tasks such as prospecting, social selling and more , while the experience of the company’s digital touchpoints ongoingly makes waves in the sea of digital sameness.

How big is the splash as you break the sea of digital sameness?

It is not realistic to become best-in-class on all customer experience trends from one day to another.

Some elements are likely imperative to your business. Some are probably not.

None the less, we recommend you prioritize what matters most to your buyers. That is a critical decision to make as you head into 2022.

And what we do hope you take with you from this piece is that:

It is not impossible to stand out.

Many businesses are too focused on doing what they have always done, especially as things went back to normal post lockdown. The good news is, that it leaves room for companies that dare and have the capabilities to innovate. A first-mover advantage, if you will.

So, if you get started before we say goodbye to 2021, chances are your competitors will never have a fighting chance to catch up. Buyers are likely to return to businesses where customer experiences are better than what others have offered them.

We are looking forward to see you create break waves in the sea of digital sameness. And if you manage to, we believe you will be amongst the winners of 2022. Because as time goes on, more and more customers will care more about the experience than anything else.

Ready to excel in delivering strong customer experiences in 2022?

We would be happy to give you a tour of our Digital Asset Management platform and showcase how it creates value to your company.

Feel free to schedule an online demo, ask all the questions that you might have, and find out exactly how we can help you enable your business to deliver personalized, consistent and rich customer experiences, fit for 2022.

We look forward to hear from you!