It is undoubtedly true that the year 2020 had a tremendous impact on businesses from all over the world. With the digital transformation of the workplace, organizations maintained their pace with many evolving business communication trends and focused on providing a seamless customer experience.
While we don’t have any idea about what 2021 holds for us, there are some business communication trends that organizations should expect to see this year.
8 Business Communication Trends that will Emerge in 2021
1. Internal Communication
With the pandemic resulting in scattered employees working from beyond offices, the need for proper communication has become more crucial than before.
For encouraging your staff to share their experiences and ideas, it is important to keep them updated with any kind of changes in work related activities. The more transparency in communication, the more smooth flow of work.
While 2021 is expected to be the year of returning to normalcy, organizations are expected to make transformations in their corporate culture to strengthen the communication between the team leaders and employees.
2. Personalization
Marketers observe an average increase of 20% in sales of their products when they use personalized experiences.
By personalizing customer journeys, your business can effectively move towards driving more growth and retaining existing customers. It lets you divide the segments of visitors on the basis of their needs and preferences then create an individual experience for them.
Today, customers live in a world where they are bombarded with thousands of emails every day from different brands competing to sell their products. The perspective here lies in how is your brand making a difference?
For instance, asking the customer at what time they would like to be contacted can make a customer feel more valued. Also, you can come to know about their preferable timings and can avoid frustrating them with your calls.
3. Social Media
Social media has been consistently used since the year 2020. Whether we talk about routine posts on different channels or live streaming to interact with the customers, companies have been utilizing social media to their best social media advantage for keeping the customers engaged.
Looking at the present situation caused by COVID-19, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that the use of social media will continue to hike in 2021.
As more customers use their social media accounts on a daily basis, organizations will implement strategies to provide more personalized customer experience.
4. Multichannel Approach
90% of customers engage with a business on multiple platforms before buying a product.
A multichannel approach suggests that data is shared between various online platforms and sales channels. If your business uses this approach, you’ll be able to reach potential customers where they already are.
As customers expect to get a consistent experience on all platforms, using a multichannel approach can help your business to engage with customers on all platforms which will further help in generating leads.
5. IP Messaging
Building IP messaging into your app allows you to send message pop-ups to clients outside your application and in-application when the client is in your application. Instant messaging platforms like WhatsApp, consumers can send and receive messages to anyplace over the globe.
In today’s world, where consumers expect businesses to provide services from any part of the world and at any time, IP messaging dominates because it is ten times less expensive than SMS.
In the year 2021, we can expect companies to switch to IP messaging as it offers flexibility in user conversations, functionality within your app, and a better user experience.
6. Voice AI Chatbots
Voice chatbots use speech recognition technology which includes natural language processing, or NLP.
Through Speech recognition, voice chat bots can recognize when they’re being spoken to and NLP further enables them to understand language as it is spoken naturally. The examples of voice chatbots can be found in Facebook messenger and Slack.
The key benefit of a voice chatbot in most cases is that they represent a hands-free automated service. For example, booking a flight, placing an order can be easily done without even typing a word.
While the utilization of voice chatbots depends on the customer and specific service situation, customers would like to use them as another approach to interact but not as substitution of your service team.
7. Business Cloud Integration
Cloud integration consists of a system of technologies that connects numerous cloud conditions, applications, or systems for the real-time exchange of information.
As cloud integration connects different communication systems for the digital workforce, employees don’t have to worry about losing customer data in interpretation between the different touchpoints.
8. Video for Contact Center
As the quality of mobile networks have improved and consumer video chat services like Facetime are more popular than ever, making video calls has become almost as natural as making a phone call.
With video calls, customers can get assistance in a more personalised way that surpasses all other existing channels. Taking this into consideration, many businesses have started taking video into their contact centers and this adoption is surely expected to rise in the coming years.
Conclusion
The upcoming year is going to see a lot of business communication trends emerging in the market. While we are excited to see how these trends are going to evolve in your business, we are focused on providing our clients with effective tools to enhance business communication. Which trend will observe more surge? Let us know what you think.
