From Generative AI to refining hyperautomation, the upcoming year will focus on information and how it can be intelligently combined to gain new insights, improve processes, and take the customer experience to a new level.

Daniel Fallmann, Founder and CEO of Mindbreeze, briefly summarized the seven most important trends for the year 2022. The entire version of the Trends 2022 with more information and the strategic value can be downloaded here.

1. Generative AI against shortage of skilled workers

The trend to use AI is consistent worldwide. In addition to the right products, the introduction of AI systems also requires qualified specialists. However, these are hard to find. Generative AI works against this. Generative AI refers to machine learning methods that derive information from existing objects and data without manual and resource-intensive training of the AI models. This means that companies are able to extract valuable information from existing data with an out-of-the-box AI system and use it for further learning.

2. Customer engagement: flywheel instead of funnel

Instead of the familiar "purchase funnel" (funnel model), today's sales process is referred to as a "flywheel". Here, companies enter into a partnership with customers and exchange information on an ongoing basis.

How successful this model is dependent on the company's level of information about customer needs and on the employees' knowledge about developments in their own organization. In order to meet these requirements, an information-driven system is needed in the background to provide the necessary information with just one query.

3. Total Experience

Total Experience (TX) is about linking the discrete areas of Customer Experience (CX), User Experience (UX), Employee Experience (EX) and Multi-Experience (MX) for an overall experience.

One use case in the area of total experience is so-called case deflection: even before a customer completes his inquiry and contacts the help desk about a technical problem, they receive automated assistance from a smart system based on the problem description. Ideally, the customer can solve their problem immediately and the helpdesk does not have to process a ticket. Practical experience shows that this reduces the support workload by roughly 35 percent.

4. Interdisciplinary innovation is becoming increasingly important

Today, departments are increasingly being replaced by functional areas. One reason for this is that projects are increasingly being thought about and implemented across departmental boundaries.

This development creates new challenges in data preparation. For example, functional areas require cross-departmental information that is available in the company but is not appropriately linked or visualized.