Today’s acceptance of (and growing demand for) the remote and hybrid workplace has changed the way we communicate and collaborate. Company cultures everywhere are being reimagined for the work-from-anywhere experience. Hacking has become a business, and every home computer, a threat vector.

These considerations and others lead to our curation of eight business communications trends that will be prominent in 2022. Read on for a synopsis of these trends or download the full report featuring essays from industry analysts and subject matter experts about what your organization should keep an eye on over the coming year.

Agile Workplace 2022 Experience Trend

Agile Workplace

Enabling remote work is so 2021.

Whether the future will bring remote workplaces, hybrid workplaces or traditional workplaces is unknown. Therefore, agile workplaces are the future. Agile workplaces deepen business resilience to evolving economic and competitive conditions. They support a distributed workforce that allows companies to reduce labor costs and deploy advanced security measures to mitigate ongoing threats.

Agile workplaces also enable organizations to imagine and create innovative customer experiences from both product and support perspectives.

🔥Hot Trend🔥: Having generally solved basic employee connectivity issues, in 2022, organizations will take communications to the next level by looking to solve operational issues including cost-cutting plus placing emphasis on innovating around products and experiences.

Connected Culture 2022 Experience Trend

Connected Culture

Business leaders are facing new challenges to keep employees engaged and productive. Replicating watercooler conversations that lead to Eureka moments or building team chemistry on video is notoriously difficult. Additionally, recruiting and retaining workers is rising on corporate priority lists as The Great Resignation continues indefinitely.

🔥Hot Trend🔥: In 2022, employee experience (EX) will gain equal footing in the total experience equation (TX) where TX= customer experience (CX) +EX + user experience (UX).

This means companies will devote more resources to reduce communications silos, improve employee satisfaction and create career opportunities.

We expect more cross-functional teams to emerge including alliances such as among IT, facilities, and HR. We also expect greater utilization of apps and activities designed to strengthen team unity and chemistry as well as investments in employee recognition.

Composed Experiences 2022 Experience Trend

Composed Experiences

You are attending your best friend’s wedding in 2022. Would you prefer an off-the-rack suit or dress or one custom-tailored to your body? Now that the benefits of using an integrated cloud communications platform for communications are established by customers and the industry alike, the question is what comes next.

🔥Hot Trend🔥: In 2022, the next big cloud communications trend will be composed experiences, meaning custom features tied to specific roles or vertical industries that are adapted to the future of work and the evolution of traditional roles.

Organizations do not want to purchase comprehensive, catch-all licenses for every employee. They want to be able to target capabilities to empower employees to be more productive and effective. 8x8 released its first composed experience for employees like office administrators who manage large volumes of phone calls called Front Desk. Expect more in 2022 for different roles and industries including health care. By 2024, 80% of CIOs surveyed will list modular business redesign, through composability, as a top-five reason for accelerated business performance. Source: Gartner

Era of Integrated Communications 2022 Experience Trend

Era of Integrated Communications

In 2021, the single-vendor integrated communications platform versus multi-vendor approaches to cloud communications debate came to a head with the proposed and failed acquisition of Five9 by Zoom.

🔥Hot Trend🔥: 8x8 believes the future of engaging both customers and employees relies on an integrated cloud communications platform that connects all employees within an organization from the front office to the contact center. The future use of data also tilts toward seamless integration.

Siloed data is less valuable than integrated data. Therefore, in 2022, the vendor battlelines will continue to be drawn and redrawn. 8x8 platform is born out of bringing UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS plus APIs together to let customers reap the benefits of integration including composable applications, cross-application AI, innovative customer experiences, and more. The big communications vendor winners and losers in 2022 could be those who offer a single, cloud platform and those who do not.

Hyperautomation 2022 Experience Trend

Hyperautomation

Everyone has their favorite combination. Could be PB&J, mac and cheese, or maybe pizza and beer. In 2022, automation and personalization will be best buddies. Organizations seeking to deliver great experiences are looking to push speed and efficiency while also cutting costs. AI/ML plus open APIs are driving advances in automation for serving customers, employees as well as securing corporate data. Some automation trends, like robotic process automation, will focus on operations, others will focus on customer self-service and support.

🔥Hot Trend🔥: In 2022, bots are getting smarter and more adept at solving problems

and handling e-commerce transactions.

While they may not yet go full Alexa, that is the direction they are heading. It will provide organizations to scale their capabilities, address labor shortages, and give smaller businesses a way to compete effectively. Analysts are studying every business process including digital interactions to see how automation can bring more value and better experiences.

Hypercommunication 2022 Experience Trend

Hypercommunication

In today’s world, nobody likes to wait...for anything. Delays often cause frustration which can lead to a consumer giving their business to someone else. Consider manufacturers that have to keep customers happy amid massive supply chain shortages clogging seaports globally.

🔥Hot Trend🔥: In 2022, companies are attacking this challenge by pushing real-time capabilities to the limits for inbound and outbound communications.

Expect SMS and text messaging to play an increased part in business and customer interactions. Companies will leverage every communications channel to serve the different ways customers like to interact. Combining channels will also accelerate responsiveness from employees and open up self-service opportunities to give customers what they want faster and cheaper.

Hybrid Work Security Challenges 2022 Experience Trend

Hybrid Work Security Challenges

Now that homes and coffee shops are effectively corporate branch offices, implementing stout security controls has never been more critical to a company’s health. An increasing number of organizations are taking an assume-breach posture so they can plan recovery activities and prevent severe consequences from ransomware and other attacks. At the same time, human behavior intentionally or otherwise is still the biggest security risk to businesses.

🔥Hot Trend 🔥: In 2022, security will be baked into the design of every communications solution.

Wide AI deployment for security will be a must to keep up with the growing sophistication of bad actors. One of the best ways to reduce risks will still be to require mandatory employee training on a quarterly basis. Multi-million dollar security investments can be ruined with a single click. Companies have to factor the rising numbers of potential threats from the increased use of SMS and text messaging in business-customer interactions.

Digital Transformation Acceleration 2022 Experience Trend

Digital Transformation Acceleration

Digital transformation is a broad category that could conceivably be considered a trend every year as businesses typically want to improve continuously. It also includes elements of all of the aforementioned trends. At the highest levels, three points about digital transformation will be big in 2022.

🔥Hot Trends🔥:

  • A majority of communications seats are part of on-premises solutions. With two years or so of learnings since the beginning of Covid, the migration toward cloud-based communications will only continue to accelerate. This presents significant challenges and opportunities for all of the cloud communications market players.
  • Expect, in 2022, for companies to really see the fruits of their labors of early transformation projects. We see lots of clients now taking those early initiatives and working to optimize them including enhancing workflows, reducing clicks and costs, and innovating wherever possible based on their results.
  • Digital transformation never stops. Companies that focused efforts on one area such as telephony are adding more transformation activities like transforming their contact center or embedding video into their e-commerce projects. You eat an elephant in small bites rather than swallowing it whole. Many organizations are moving on to their next bites.

For more analysis, 8x8 asked eight experts to author essays about these trends. Read what they had to say.

Get 8x8's 2022 Business Communications Trends Report