Steven van Belleghem picks out three customer experience trends set to make a greater impact in 2022, and finds out how businesses can use these to shape their strategies
Every year, we see changes in customer behaviour and expectations. The pandemic of the past two years has, of course, forced some of these changes upon individuals and companies, but there are also some significant emerging technological trends that are only going to accelerate in the years to come.
As always, the challenge for business leaders is how to create a customer experience that measures up to these changing expectations. Here, I have picked out just three ideas for leaders to watch in 2022, that well help you get your CX-strategy ready for the future.
Non-fundable tokens and the branded economy
You will have probably seen the hype around non-fundable tokens (NFTs) over the past year, and it is very easy to dismiss it as a gimmick or a fad that will soon pass. NFTs hit the headlines through the sale of Mike Winkelmann’s – aka Beeple’s – digital piece of art ‘EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS’ for no less than $69,346,250. Then there was, of course, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, who sold his first tweet ‘just setting up my twttr’ as an NFT for over $2.9 million USD. It all sounds a bit like madness.
If you’re unfamiliar, NFTs are ‘one-of-a-kind’ assets in the digital world that can be bought and sold like any other piece of property, but which have no tangible form of their own. Some of the news stories around NFTs reflect that it is largely still a gimmick, but I believe that they hold the promise to move beyond the current ‘exciting’ collectibles phase and deeply change the game in customer loyalty.
The reason is that they can hold smart contracts, which could play an important role in boosting customer engagement. Take the band Kings of Leon, for example. They released an album as an NFT and their tokens unlock special perks like limited-edition vinyl and front row seats to future concerts. Unsurprisingly, CX guru Gary Vaynerchuk is also experimenting with this with his VeeFriends collection of NFT animal drawings, which include a smart contract, offering exclusive access to his events.
For me, however, I think perhaps the most interesting potential for NFTs lies in the concept of branded economies. This could really trigger a paradigm shift in customer loyalty.
If you look at most loyalty systems today, they are are out of balance and offer more benefits to the company than the customer. NFTs, however, will make the customer more involved in the whole journey of the company. As a frequent flyer, for instance, an NFT could give me a stake in a company that creates a shared interest instead of opposed ones. If the company does well, the value of the NFT will rise and then I will do well too. If they win, I win. If they lose, I do too. And so I, as a customer, will be genuinely engaged in helping the brand to perform better and become a true ambassador.
In this way, I believe NFTs have extraordinary potential to disrupt the future of CX.
We may well look back at 2021 as the year the battle for the Metaverse really kicked off. Facebook announced it is investing billions of dollars building a VR platform for social, business and commercial purposes, hiring 10,000 extra people in Europe to work on that platform. Just a few days later, Satya Nadella told us that Microsoft is also working on a new collaborative VR metaverse platform called Mesh in Microsoft Teams which should be available next year. It is all part of a big effort to combine the company’s mixed reality and HoloLens work with meetings and video calls that anyone can participate in thanks to animated avatars.
To me it still feels like it will take a while before these types of VR platform will become ubiquitous, partly because of the user experience that is still a little clunky and expensive. However, I also think that companies will need to start thinking about performing commerce and marketing inside the metaverse now. Zuckerberg has already talked about the possibilities of commerce inside the metaverse and expects Meta to make ‘hundreds of billions of dollars through digital commerce in the next 10 years’.
Interestingly, the metaverse is basically taking the social commerce trend we are already seeing in China to a whole new level. It could create commerce that is so much more immersive, contextual and spatial, so it is a good time to imagine how you could expand your offering into that platform too. Could your fashion brand launch a purely virtual clothing collection in the metaverse? Could you create exclusive items used or worn in the metaverse by influencers or movie stars that could then be sold off as collectibles after they were used using NFTs? We’re already seeing stories that Nike’s trademark applications indicate that it might want to offer virtual goods like sneakers as part of videogames and other online platforms.
And how would marketing happen in the virtual world? Will there be metadata for people to click on when they see a fun looking pet they would like to buy? The possibilities are literally endless here and it’s the companies that best understand them now – before they happen – that will have the upper hand in the future.
New habits are here to stay
Hysteresis is a scientific concept that refers to the fact that social systems tend to change permanently after an external shock. And I think that we can all agree that the pandemic has indeed been a shock to our social system.
We have also been seeing that the changes that were initially done in response to this unusual period of our lives are likely to stay, even if the context changes again. Hybrid working, for instance. Or the incredible boom in takeout food. There is no going back to how things were in 2019, and that is hysteresis.
The reality is that consumers actually enjoyed many of the ‘new’ services that became popular during the pandemic, whether it was deliveries, curbside pick-up, special shopping hours for different segments of senior customers in grocery stores or the many other changes.
There is no going back, so the challenge for companies is to think about how they can leverage these to their advantage, to create a customer experience that will help them win the war for customers.
Steven van Belleghem is one of the world’s leading thought-leaders, speakers and authors on customer experience. This is an extract from his latest, The CX Leader’s Manual to Customer Excellence which be downloaded for free at www.stevenvanbelleghem.com
