Eight trends shaping how businesses communicate with customers in 2023

Successful companies need to continue to evolve to meet changing customer behaviour — and today's customer wants to engage with businesses whenever and wherever they choose to.

With that in mind, here's a closer look at the major communication and collaboration trends that'll shape how businesses interact with customers in 2023:

1. A rush to omnichannel solutions

The need for businesses to “meet” customers at the time and on the digital channel of their choosing has led to increased adoption of fully-fledged, cloud-based omnichannel solutions.

These solutions see businesses using websites and social media channels alongside email and audio/voice — which is about to enjoy a huge resurgence — to improve the quality of their conversations with customers, suppliers and staff.

This adoption augments two core strategies in most businesses:

1. Enhancing customer intimacy and extending the lifetime value of a customer; and
2. Operational efficiency.

It's important to note that omnichannel solutions aren’t just important for selling products and services, they're also crucial in gathering information in the lead-up to the customers' buying decision. This necessitates the seamless integration of communication channels such as email, chat, voice, social media and more. 

As such, 2023 will see increased reliance on integrated systems that can interoperate with other cloud-based solutions.

2. Demand for asynchronous communication to surge

If we cast our minds back to when we had only email as a means of written communication with customers, it was acceptable to reply the next day. The text generation has ended this.

Today, the first five minutes are crucial. If you fail to respond within those golden five minutes, there is a 90% drop-off of engagement.

This need to strike while the iron is hot has opened the window for asynchronous communication systems which give businesses the ability to respond almost immediately.

3. API integration to become more sophisticated 

As the new era of communications comes fully into effect, the future uses of application programming interface (API) integrations — which allow two or more computer programmes to “talk to” each other — are becoming clearer.

Many businesses are embedding pivotal unified communication features in their websites and applications.

API integrations to unify communication platforms will become more sophisticated throughout 2023 and beyond, and will expand as time progresses. 

4. Social buying to reach younger shoppers

Social buying or live stream shopping, where shoppers can buy through a brand’s website or through social media platforms themselves, is a global trend that's expected to speed up rapidly in the coming year.

As such, businesses should consider spending more time investigating and including social buying in their e-commerce strategies.

5. Voice-activated shopping to change the game

Voice-activated shopping has enjoyed huge global growth. Last year, its value was predicted to increase from $5bn to a staggering $19.4bn by 2024. Any business planning an e-commerce strategy and overlooking this trend will be missing out on a huge opportunity.

Remember, customers want to engage with businesses whenever and wherever they choose to, and voice-activated shopping means they can search for, and buy, products while on the move or performing another task. 

Retailers that have kiosks or showrooms in retail centres may well look at installing voice-activated systems or interactive touch screens for walk-in customers so they don’t have to wait to be helped by a person. For the ever-digital savvy shopper, these are appealing options — especially in the aftermath of Covid-19.

6. Silos to fall faster

The evolution of customer relationship management (CRM) platforms into fully-fledged enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions was one of the trends that gained the most momentum in 2022, with the two most obvious examples being Salesforce and Zoho.

Cloud-native systems such as these will continue to go head to head with, and increasingly replace, legacy ERP systems such as SAP and Oracle in 2023.

The main driver behind this shift is that reliance on legacy systems can become a “handbrake” for organisations in that their time to change is too slow for the ever-evolving environment.  This may not be the case for some industries, such as manufacturing, but definitely is the case in businesses relying on customer engagement.

7. Security, security, security

There was the increased reliance and need for businesses to invest in cyber security in 2022. This trend will not slow down; cyber criminals and high-profile breaches — both in SA and abroad — will continue to keep business on their toes, making cyber security one of their biggest priorities.

Equally, compliance will continue to attract attention due to the large amount of data being harvested. As it stands, there are clear regulations protecting consumers on some channels, but not on others. The regulation will continue to play catch up.

8. Rise of the machines?

While automation has long been touted as a big trend, it has seen somewhat lacklustre uptake. This is not through any disinterest or a lack of desire, but has everything to do with the underlying infrastructure and systems automation relies on not being ready to fully support it. 

In 2023, however, both vendors and end users will look to build on the basic capabilities of robot process automation (RPA) software and it will become more integrated with other technologies.

Thus the concept of the digital assistant will continue to evolve, whether this is in the form of virtual assistants, such as a chatbots, or actual physical robotic assistants as seen in restaurants in Japan among other places. 

Machine learning and AI-powered technology has given chatbots greater power than ever before. Currently, it's estimated that chatbots could handle up to 69% of chats [with customers] from start to finish. However, if businesses want to exploit this, they need to ensure their underlying operational and business support systems can support machine learning and AI capabilities.

The poor use and deployment of chatbots remains an obstacle to full-scale adoption.

This article was paid for by Telviva.