Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022.  Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Communication tech initiatives will be more future-looking

By Matt Thompson, VP of Global Marketing at Soprano Design

Short-term thinking has been king when it comes to communication design. The pandemic necessitated a burst of creativity to address real near-term challenges, and because communication technology was able to address many of those pains, the Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) industry saw a rapid growth over the last two years.

Unfortunately, the pandemic has also meant that many brands have not been thinking very far into the future, the primary objective of adapting and reacting to the pandemic has created habitual near-term thinking. A study by McKensey Global Institute backs this up, showing that most customer experience initiatives are lagging within organizations.

There is some good news to look forward to: 2022 will be the year when the pendulum swings back to a long-lens outlook and brands will begin exploring how to engage their entire organization in exercises about how to deliver better communication experiences to customers.

The most visionary firms will work closely with their communication technology partners to really understand available capabilities and will reveal new use cases during 2022 that paint a more visionary portrait of how communication CX can be achieved.

2022 will open up imaginations for communication CX, and the customers of the most visionary brands will begin to actually feel understood and connected.

Getting back to communication basics will thrive

Last year we predicted that 2021 would see more companies accelerate exploration of augmenting CPaaS experiences with innovation technology such as AI, blockchain and machine learning. We are seeing the exploration of these innovation technologies, but we're hearing they are proving to be more complex to deploy successfully alongside CPaaS than anticipated or are underwhelming vs. expectations.

In 2022, customers will not abandon these technologies, but are likely to scale back their ambitions and focus on getting one or just a few use cases right first. Expectations will be tampered and there will be a shift to a more pragmatic mindset where laying a solid foundation is the focus and just one or two critical use cases, focusing on communication CX, will be enough.

The firms that focus on initial success on just one or two communication use cases will unlock the buy-in for further investments in innovation to augment their CPaaS experiences.

C-Levels will get more involved to ensure communication isn't an afterthought

Development and IT are often the departments where communication technology enters a business. It's a natural byproduct of the technology often needing some lightweight coding or configuration to get it working with other systems in the business.

But this presents a problem for the organization. Developers and IT professionals are not very well known for designing elegant, engaging and meaningful communication experiences for customers or employees. They're great at getting stuff to work, but unless they've got fantastic direction and vision to work with first, they're never going to have a full view on what it takes to deliver an experience.

2022 will be the year C-levels awaken to this problem and step in to get the business thinking holistically about designing communication experiences into everything the business does. The effects of the pandemic have revealed to C-levels how communication experiences are always coupled with any digital transformation initiative, workflow or process that a business engages in.

C-levels will begin getting their direct reports working together up front to deliver more meaningful communication experiences to customers and employees. They'll begin insisting on integrating communication into their design thinking for all digital transformations projects to ensure customers and employees are engaged meaningfully at the most opportune moments. 2022 will be the year when the goal becomes elevating the communication experiences and leveraging technology, such as CPaaS, to do it right.

For the firms that get this right, improved communication experiences will lead to more revenue, brand loyalty and category leadership.

Communication technology will be a business-led purchase

Last but not least, for similar reasons that are driving our other trends predictions for 2022, we are confident we'll see a meaningful shift toward communication technology purchases being more driven and controlled by the business leaders and their business units, rather than by the engineering or IT departments that have been the prevailing buyers of CPaaS for years.

Developer-led communications is resulting in static or unexciting communications experiences for customers, and this is resulting in communication technology often being perceived as a cost rather than an investment. Although developer-led purchasing has been good for the CPaaS industry, it really hasn't been very good for most organizations that rely on meaningful communication to engage customers and employees.

2022 will be the year we see larger numbers of firms approach communications tech purchases from a business approach, with their developers and IT teams alongside, but also with an eye on company strategy and with a preference for broad, long-term interests of the business over near-term objectives.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matt joined Soprano in 2013 to create and lead Soprano's global marketing efforts across all regions, including Asia, Australia, Europe, LATAM and the US. He is a member of Soprano's senior leadership team and helps shape and execute Soprano's product marketing strategy globally.

Matt is a results-driven marketing leader with 15 years of experience deeply involved in the mobile messaging industry, with roles in leading U.S. hardware, telecom and software firms. His global leadership roles spans across multiple functional areas, including senior leadership roles in marketing and product management. Matt's broad range of subject matter expertise in the mobile communications industry includes cloud-based enterprise communications technology, device hardware and software, network-based wireless messaging, voice-over-IP services and global Internet of Things (IoT) network connectivity.

Prior to Soprano, Matt spent nearly 10 years as a B2B product management and product marketing professional with leading mobile industry firms, including Nuance Communications, Tegic, America Online and AT&T. Matt has also founded and ran two successful small businesses, and he holds an MBA from the Terry College of Business, University of Georgia and a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Colorado. He lives and works in Seattle, Washington.