Artificial intelligence (AI) is gradually integrated into any company’s operations. Businesses leverage it for various purposes, such as:

- Improving brand perception;
- Reducing expenses;
- Raising revenues.

For example, AI helps handle personal information, consumer preferences, and interaction history. Why do companies need to not only store but work with this data?

These details become the basis for an AI solution to predict:

- customer behavior;
- products that will be in demand in the future;
- and much more.

AI also allows customers to have a more tailored experience while developers create an algorithm mimicking human-like communication based on voice recognition.

Here is how the state of AI development looks today. Which course will it take in the future? Let’s dive deeper into the customer experience and conversational AI trends of 2022 and beyond.

Customer Experience Automation and Conversational AI Trends

1) Adopting an Omnichannel Approach

A more sophisticated customer experience (CX) will bring advanced interaction strategies. CX channels are becoming more diverse and include more than offline and online interactions.

Statistics prove that the minimal number of communication channels is eight. It applies to at least 51% of businesses, meaning almost half of the respondents utilize even more media.

But when customers interact with the brand, they expect recognition no matter what channel they used before. That’s why companies fine-tune their customer service strategies with an omnichannel approach. According to Marketing Charts, it brings more sales than opting for offline-only or online-only experiences.

For example, potential clients talk to a specialist on the phone, interact via social media, and visit a brick-and-mortar store. At the same time, their history remains in the system and helps to identify their place in the sales funnel quickly.

It requires transforming existing infrastructure into advanced architecture. One of the examples is a Magento headless solution, while other top eCommerce platforms also develop to provide online sellers with such a technology that allows adding multiple frontends to a backend.

2) Customer Experience That Is Personalized

As time becomes an invaluable asset, you need to go the extra mile to capture the client’s attention. Tons of gigabytes of content make us prioritize the most relevant and trustworthy brands and abandon the rest of them. That’s why you can’t afford a generic approach in 2022.

With audience segmentation and a targeted strategy, businesses may now refine their marketing campaigns. Of course, with the assistance of artificial intelligence.

How can you personalize communication? The collected data plus AI allows for the analysis of future and actual customers. It helps you tailor everything from content to reviews to product and service recommendations.

How do you segment the audience? Start with considering whom you target, their interests, demographics, and behavior. Define the number of people who will receive information. If you find similar patterns, you can leverage client preferences to recommend more relevant products, up-sell, and cross-sell.

Let’s take the “You may also like” sections as an example. These tailored recommendations aren’t just a random assortment of items. It’s a selection of related products a person may find appealing so that you can increase customers’ average checks.

The illustration below is a screenshot from the Umbra online store with such a section. The goods are similar to what I searched on the website and what other buyers generally order with the items I want to buy. I can observe their ratings, price and change the color without going to each separate product page.

3) Chatbots Will Be More Intelligent

Customer data growth will influence chatbots. As a result, more innovative alternatives will replace primitive chatbots.

The currently used chatbots have flaws and have to address customer service specialists if they fail to understand the conversation with the client. It spoils the impression and casts doubt on the necessity of such bots.

That’s one of the aspects developers try to improve. Modern chatbots will react to more complex questions with less human intervention and make communication more personalized. It means they will adapt to the individuals by:

- Processing their communication history;
- Retrieving data for sentiment analysis;
- Identifying keywords in their speech to understand the context of the dialog.

Chatbots will focus on action rather than on just informing customers on their order status or something simple along those lines. For example, you can ask them to book a hotel stay, reserve a table in a restaurant, or order food delivery.

Dom, the virtual assistant for Domino’s pizza, is one such example. Customers benefit from the service since it allows them to save time.

You don’t have to browse the website or install the mobile app and fill out the form, as the chatbot asks all the questions about the order and sends them to the system. You can type the answers or use voice commands to interact with the virtual assistant.

Another aspect of chatbot development is voice recognition. Conversational AI will make chatbots understand accents, slang, and speech in noisy environments.

High-quality systems also use voice biometrics to identify the customer. That is, they recognize the owner of the voice. It streamlines the login process and prevents credential theft and loss.

Some more chatbot trends for 2022 and beyond are:

- Self-learning, i.e., the ability to gain information from conversations and act according to the previous outcomes;
- Cross-communication between other chatbots to share “knowledge” and “skills”.

To Conclude

What should we expect in terms of conversational AI and customer experience automation in the 2020s? The answer is integration. AI will be combined with customer service infrastructure to provide an unprecedented customer experience.

The more technologies evolve and get smarter, the fewer mistakes they make. It increases trust and adoption by the companies. Conversational AI will accumulate data and ensure:

- Personalized communication;
- Cohesive omnichannel experience;
- Behavior prediction based on the conversation history.