Top trends for the future of B2C communication

From chatbots to 5G networks, virtual reality, and biometric authentication – the world of communication technology has reached new heights.

Super apps, artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality, and voice interactions are all trends we can expect to see grow over the next few years. And with each new development, businesses will have more innovative ways to interact with customers and build long-lasting relationships. 

Let’s take a closer look at exactly how these tools and technologies will contribute to a more connected future for businesses and consumers.

Consumers are already spending vast amounts of time on “super apps”, otherwise known as mobile or web applications that can provide multiple services. The most popular examples include WhatsApp, Viber, and RCS. Soon, it will become the norm for consumers to complete their entire commerce journey, from instant messaging to payment processing, on these apps. 

Super apps also simplify business workflows, enabling employees to handle all customer interactions in one place. Omnichannel communication platforms, such as Infobip, connect marketing, sales, and support teams on these apps, giving them access to previous customer interactions, profile cards, and preferences to quickly resolve queries while tailoring the customer experience. Super apps can also fuel data-driven business decisions, giving you insight into consumer trends so you can shape future products, services, pricing, and promotions. 

The rise of these apps is the result of an increasing number of consumers, mainly Gen Y and Gen Z, choosing to chat instead of talking with brands or browsing the internet. 

According to a global survey: 

And with new features, including WhatsApp product catalogs and payments, it’s becoming easier to browse, chat, and purchase with only a few clicks. 

We can expect Gen Alpha to enter the consumer market in the years to come as well, demanding fully robust and uninterrupted online experiences due to their digital-first upbringing. 

This will set the foundation for other advances in technology we can expect to grow and appear, including artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and voice capabilities, making it easier to add on new features and experiences without incurring high costs.

Another widespread trend happening in the communications technology market is the adoption of Generative AI (Gen AI), which we see overlapping with what we do through messaging. 

Building on top of predictive and conversational AI, Gen AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can produce various types of content, for example text, imagery, audio, and synthetic data. When used in combination with predictive and conversational AI solutions, businesses can augment and combine the capabilities to deliver robust experiences compared to Gen AI-only applications. Combining algorithms, machine learning, and predictive AI enables you to prepare data for Gen AI to eliminate and significantly decrease the hallucinations and toxicity which Gen AI, by nature, creates. 

Infobip has started adopting Gen AI solutions within its product stack, as well. From augmenting the capabilities of our contact center, customer engagement, and chatbot solutions through Gen AI principles, to launching our advanced virtual assistant, which helps automate the communication between brands and their customers. 

Communication solutions that combine AI technologies can enable businesses to deploy virtual assistants that offload from marketing, sales, and support teams all together. Rather than having a chatbot that only answers questions, you can now build one to assist with promotional campaigns, funnel leads into your sales pipeline, and complete entire processes without any human involvement.  

Using past interaction data provided by predictive AI, Gen AI can generate personalized content and recommendations for customers, and contribute to advertising and product development projects with staff. 

Bloomsy Box, for example, launched a Mother’s Day campaign with a generative AI eCommerce chatbot that created personalized greeting cards to the winners of its daily floral bouquet giveaway. 

Overall, using combined AI solutions can: 

Although the adoption of Gen AI is growing, the biggest challenge remains – its toxicity and hallucinations, along with data privacy. 

Brands don’t want to jeopardize their relationship with customers or expose any private or customer data to third parties, large language models (LLMs), or similar. And the risk of implementing generative AI-only solutions is accidentally exposing data through hallucinations. 

One way that Infobip does this is by isolating all the data within a specific LLM, so that the data is not used to train the main LLM model. This way, the Gen AI tool is not fed any private or customer data, eliminating the risk of using it to generate any new content. 

However, although the regulations for Gen AI hallucinations have been achieved within the application-to-person messaging space, there is still a need for regulations for public Gen AI. We can expect to see advancements in Gen AI regulations within the education industry or similar areas of work where human involvement is high. 

The adoption of super apps and combined AI solutions is growing and is leading to further advancements in voice capabilities and augmented reality. Here’s how we can expect to see these technologies grow in the years to come: 

Although chat seems to be the preferred way to communicate, it’s not to say there is no room for voice solutions to expand and meet consumer demand. The desire to chat that we’re seeing from customers is based on the desire to resolve queries quickly, eliminate long wait queues, and experience the convenience their favorite mobile devices offer. 

Developments for automated voice solutions are underway, and soon we can expect to see: 

Cost, however, remains a barrier since most of these developments require complex solutions including speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and Gen AI. Therefore, solution providers will need to adjust to reduce or eliminate costs for businesses looking to implement advanced voice capabilities. 

We’ve already been introduced to augmented reality and meta verses. But the adoption of these technologies in the messaging space is not yet significant. There is, however, a lot of interest regardless of the small-scale adoption we’re currently witnessing. 

Once further developments come into play, we can expect to see augmented reality impact many areas of B2C communication across industries. Here are a few ideas of what we can expect to come: 

As mentioned earlier, we’ve already adopted some of these trends into our own solutions for which we’ve experienced great growth and adoption among our customers. And their businesses are reaping the benefits. 

When it comes to super apps, WhatsApp is paving the way, helping brands significantly improve campaign conversion rates with its click-to-chat feature. The ad placement on social media platforms, like Instagram and Facebook, immediately connects customers with a chatbot to complete their purchase. This has shortened brands’ time to purchase and significantly increased ROI. Brands using click-to-WhatsApp through our chatbot solution have even increased their marketing spend due to its positive results.

We’ve also helped a dozen brands launch Gen AI virtual assistants that have led to decreases in customer support by almost 30%. However, what we’ve found to be most true for successful AI implementation is the critical component of human involvement.  

Humans are critical for the success of AI in two ways:  

Although artificial intelligence has eased processes and workload, we shouldn’t be threatened by its presence in the workforce. Occupations will not necessarily disappear; they will instead change. We will see shifts in roles, for example, an agent or supervisor might turn into a Gen AI prompt engineer and similar. 

But the main impact combined AI solutions will have, which is already happening today, is on the quality of service. Now that agents and marketers can focus on high-value tasks and chatbots can handle automated tasks, customer satisfaction is increasing and will continue to increase with further technological advancements. 

To set your business up for future success, it’s important to set up a foundation of the right building blocks now. Super apps and artificial intelligence are the starting point to building a customer experience that can be enriched with advanced voice capabilities and augmented reality solutions in the future. 

And you don’t have to do it alone. 

Leaning in on expert advice and leveraging robust solutions can take the guesswork out of setting up conversational experience powered by AI technology. The right solutions will support your business as it grows and requires more bandwidth, storage, channels, and new technologies. And a team of industry experts will make sure you get it right the first time.