Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Tech Evolution to Shape Customer and Employee Experiences – and Other Predictions from the Pros
By Jeff Ton, Strategic IT Advisor to InterVision
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital transformation, and in 2022, the power of technology will continue to transform society. Automated, personalized digital experiences will meet consumers’ rising expectations, and next-gen technology will relieve hybrid work challenges. At the same time, burgeoning cybercrime will force leaders to rethink their strategic approaches to cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities. And only one thing will remain constant: the value of a skilled and dedicated workforce.
Let’s dive into predictions and tips for navigating the year ahead:
The future is hyper-personalized customer experiences
Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to revolutionize consumers’ digital experiences with increasing personalization. Based on historical data, AI-enabled contact centers will anticipate a customer’s problem or question, provide service through chatbots and virtual assistants and even fix issues without human interaction. Otto Sanchez, InterVision’s director of engineering, says that cloud contact center technologies will enable this rapid customer service and refined personalization. He predicts that businesses will scramble to implement these technologies in 2022, making consumers feel “their time is highly valued and that businesses know them well” and “creating a frictionless experience that drives high customer satisfaction and loyalty.”
Matt Campbell, product manager at InterVision, foresees consumers communicating with customer service chatbots and virtual agents through Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, similar to Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. In the near term, he believes NLP is limited to self-service tasks and information gathering, freeing human agents to focus on complicated interactions. But he adds, “As AI becomes smarter, more advanced and more human-like, virtual agents will provide increasing value to contact centers and more life-like interactions to end-users.”
As the lines between technology and business blur, tech leaders can no longer just be traditional IT people. Dustin Milberg, field CTO of cloud services for InterVision, predicts that organizations will phase out corporate IT. He points out that the pandemic forced employees to address their own end-user computing needs, reducing the burden on corporate IT staffing. “The cost and resource savings will be used for businesses to transform into engineering organizations, strategically aligned to measurable business outcomes.”
Indeed, today’s tech leaders must have a business acumen beyond profit and loss statements and balance sheets. These roles require a deep understanding of the company’s value streams, and most importantly, a crystal clear focus on the problem the organization solves for its customers. And only those manically focused on the customer can successfully lead in the digital future.
The future is next-gen digital tools
The last 21 months brought unprecedented changes to businesses around the globe. Those organizations with a digital transformation mindset excelled, while those who didn’t…well, didn’t. Organizations also accelerated cloud adoption, realizing moving their tech assets to the cloud was a step towards agility. The movement to the cloud aligned many technology and business teams, and this alignment will translate into true digital transformation – not just digitizing existing processes.
Specific tech tools are also answering the challenges of today’s world. As employees continue to work in different office settings, time zones and locations, communication and collaboration platforms will continue to improve their services by adding advanced functionalities like AI. Sanchez envisions that AI will provide “real-time information on projects, interactions, workload and even some personal information, and this context will enable more productive interactions with the person initiating the contact.”
Next-gen tools are going beyond communication and collaboration – they are supporting the remote worker. A new breed of tools based on AI and machine learning (ML) is emerging. These tools can identify, alert and sometimes heal tech issues before the remote worker even knows there’s a problem.
Tools, even those that are built to support employees, can cause tool fatigue. Campbell explains, “Many companies cherry-picked disparate tools to fill a sudden short-term need when the world shifted to remote work, but separate collaboration tools can be difficult to manage.” He says that “implementing a truly Unified Collaboration system where collaboration tools live together will be more fulfilling and productive for remote workers. With fewer tools involved, IT departments will also more easily manage and enforce policy standards.”
The future is heightened cybersecurity
Surging cyberattacks require organizations to rethink their approaches to cybersecurity. Milberg believes “a bad actor” in the software development process has far more potential to do damage than anybody attempting to get in from the outside.” As a result, the future of cybersecurity won’t be keeping bad actors out and developing recovery plans. Instead, organizations will need to ask themselves: how do we prevent cyber vulnerabilities from ever being introduced? He suggests that “this requires organizations to rethink security from the inside-out, adopt a zero-trust model and shift left as fast as possible.”
Cybersecurity is not surprisingly on every executive’s mind, but these concerns can be misdirected. Although some IT leaders believe cloud solutions pose a greater security risk than on-prem solutions, Sanchez points out that “the cloud is only becoming more secure, meeting the most stringent security requirements and standards.” He adds, “Educating customers on the security of their cloud-based environments and data is a critical component of a successful cloud migration strategy in the new year.”
The future is people
There are currently 3.2 million openings for tech jobs and only 1.4 million people to fill them. This staffing storage will only get worse, and America’s colleges and universities can’t keep pace with the overwhelming demand for tech talent. The business world needs to look at non-traditional methods to help bridge this gap, while at the same time re-skilling their existing workforces on leading-edge technologies.
Businesses, after all, are only as good as their people. And people will thrive under steady and direct leadership. As Milberg points out, the pandemic and recent events have taught us that the world can be unpredictable. But amid the instability, businesses must be steady. He says, “The simple truth is: people act unpredictably when they feel like there is a lack of direction, transparency, trust or reward for their efforts. But, by placing an emphasis on the value of an organization’s most valuable asset – its people – and aligning the processes and tooling to predictable outcomes, it will create a culture of success.”
The new year will see technological advances that enable automated hyper-personalization and next-gen workplace tools while forcing businesses to reckon with how to dampen escalating cybersecurity risks. And the world will be reminded that, even as technology advances, the future of business is and always has been the quality of its employees.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeff Ton is the Founder of Ton Enterprises and Strategic IT Advisor to InterVision, a leading IT strategic service provider and Premier Consulting Partner in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN).
