What are the latest trends in business communication?

Adopting a digital-first, omnichannel approach has become a priority for businesses – enabling them to personalize interactions, send messages at the right time, automate answers to frequently asked questions, and set up failover options. 

After analyzing over 448 billion interactions that took place on our platform in 2022 compared to 2021, we noticed more brands are moving towards providing conversational experiences.  

These experiences are set up on a variety of channels and use different features, functionalities, and technologies to create engaging interactions between businesses and their customers. 

Read on to learn the latest trends in customer engagement, chatbots, customer support, and business communication. 

Customers want (and expect) to chat with brands as they do with their family and friends, while moving through each stage of their journey – from discovery to purchase and retention – in the same space. They want to engage, be re-engaged, get support, and transact on channels that are familiar and easy to use – eliminating friction and obstacles that have stood in the way between them and a brand’s products or services before digitalization. 

Businesses that implement cloud technology to hyper-personalize and automate customer interactions can: 

Customer marketing and engagement have evolved with the introduction of marketing use cases on channels such as WhatsApp – and the rise of other rich messaging channels, including RCS Business Messaging. Surprisingly, more brands are using Voice as an alternative communication channel – calling customers who are predicted to churn to re-engage them. 

We also expect chatbots will become more intelligent with the rise of generative AI and large language models such as GPT3, GPT4, and ChatGPT – moving from support-only assistants to sales and marketing roles. This will contribute to the predicted increase in conversational interactions between machines and humans – as more automation use cases become possible.

However, a combination of automation and human-to-human interactions will continue to be the go-to formula for successful conversational support experiences. A fair mix between rich channels such as Apple Messages for Business and traditional ones such as Voice will make it easy for agents to work with automation rather than in place of it. 

To build successful conversational experiences, businesses must build a strong omnichannel foundation. We find this to be true, with over half (56%) of brands using more than one channel on our platform. In fact, the most popular two-channel combination in 2022 was SMS and WhatsApp (29%), followed by SMS and Email (14%). 

For most brands, a SMS solution is core to their communications mix – but increases in WhatsApp, Messenger, and RCS across industries show the growing adoption of richer channels that enable conversational experiences. 

Still, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the right omnichannel strategy. Different channels are popular in different countries and regions.  

As B2C brands look to offer conversational experiences – B2B platforms must expand their capabilities with the right digital channels and cloud technology that enable this. 

This explains the 2x increase in CPaaS traffic on our platform – with a 162% uplift in SMS interactions, 121% increase in Voice interactions, and 67% increase in WhatsApp interactions. 

We also noticed more than 20% of platforms across industries adopt an omnichannel approach. 

In other words, platforms aren’t only expanding their offerings with communication channels, rather they’re enabling their customers to:  

The shift from one-way notifications to two-way conversations has opened a new world of opportunities for brands and their customers. Through conversations, brands can learn more about customer preferences, make personalized recommendations, as well as predict and prevent potential churn. 

We’ve entered the conversational experience era, and as we witness further advancements in technology, these conversations will continue to evolve – and so will customer expectations. 

It’s time for brands to rethink their communication strategies, adopt new messaging channels, expand their offerings with new capabilities, and enter the conversational era to meet customers where they’re waiting for them.