As all things digital continue to speed up, which technology trends have the most momentum in the business landscape? We asked business owners and finally identified the trends that will act as force multipliers for digital transformation and innovation in 2022 and over the next five years.
Zoho is one of the earliest adopters of all the trends we have mentioned below. So when you implement Zoho applications, your business can capitalize on these trends and establish a competitive advantage.
“Given how much things have changed amid the global pandemic, technology and intelligent tools is going to play a vital role in the growth and efficiency of your business.”
Zoho’s applications are the result of decades of engineering expertise, priority in R&D investment, responsiveness to customer needs, and a never-ending quest for improvement. By capitalizing on strategic technology trends with Zoho’s unified and intelligent apps, you will unleash IT force multipliers, maximize value creation, and enhance digital capabilities. Read this blog to know the top 2022 technology trends and how these will propel strategic change.
What are the top 22 business and technology trends in 2022 — and how Zoho makes it a reality for your business?
Trend #1 of 2022 – Hybrid Workplaces
The hybrid-working model will reshape the future of work. Businesses require innovative collaboration tools, a talent marketplace, integrative solutions, and the right hybrid work strategy.
✅ Zoho Solution – Zoho Remotely will enable you to take your work to wherever you are. Zoho brings together the most comprehensive suite of inter-connected web and mobile apps that will help you and your team communicate, collaborate and be productive.
Trend #2 of 2022 – Cloud-Native Platforms
Cloud-native technology empowers organizations to use cloud computing to build and run scalable applications. A cloud-native architecture with serverless platform results in quicker time- to-market delivery, lowers IT costs, increases business resilience.
✅ Zoho Solution – Zoho offers a full stack of cloud-native solutions for IT management that are served from Zoho’s own cloud infrastructure. From enterprise device management, data audit & security to DevOps management, Zoho ManageEngine supports your hybrid infrastructure, boosts productivity, and enables seamless business continuity.
Trend #3 of 2022 – Mobility Solutions
With work from anywhere gaining prominence, mobility solutions can help your business take the next big step forward in 2022. Mobile business solutions increase productivity and collaboration, facilitate efficient and cost-effective operations, and enhance customer satisfaction.
✅ Zoho Solution – Zoho offers mobile apps for more than 45 applications that are engineered for ease, speed, and enhanced functionality to manage your business on the go. Whether you use Zoho One, CRM Plus, or Finance Plus – your team can access the power of an all-in-one unified software suite – in just a tap – from anywhere, anytime.
Trend #4 of 2022 – Decision Intelligence
Decision intelligence combines artificial intelligence (AI), automation, business intelligence (BI), and forward-thinking decision-makers to power more progressive decisions. With decision intelligence, you can use your data and tools to analyze nuanced data relationships and ask exactly the right business questions to get impactful answers.
✅ Zoho Solution – Zoho has a number of available AI solutions embedded into its own customer relationship management (CRM), accounting, procurement, talent management, and other enterprise software apps. Zoho’s intelligent assistant – Zia – uses the methods like fuzzy search, NLP, optical character recognition (OCR), object detection, proximity, and more to answer queries and produce intelligent reports.
Trend #5 of 2022 – Hyperautomation
Hyperautomation uses technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotic process automation (RPA), business process management (BPM), etc to automate mundane tasks. As we transition from pandemic-triggered transformation to the next wave of digitization, no-code platforms and hyperautomation will enable operational agility.
✅ Zoho Solution – To deliver customer services faster and work smarter, you need to automate repetitive tasks to make your work easier. Enter Zoho Creator, a workflow automation platform that allows users to automate and execute complex business tasks with the drag-and-drop script builder.
Trend #6 of 2022 – Artificial Intelligence
The breadth and depth of what AI can do for businesses and enterprises are quickly growing. From AI!s expanded role in hyperautomation to AI-powered chatbots and analytics applications, Artificial Intelligence will drive digital transformation and business growth in 2022.
✅ Zoho Solution – Zoho’s business intelligence suite – Zoho Analytics and Zoho DataPrep – puts deep, data-driven business insights within reach of small and large enterprises, without the need to invest in learning AI and ML languages or hire experts. Similarly, AI is embedded in Zoho CRM in the form – Zia – that enables your customer-facing teams to drive more meaningful customer engagement and address customer issues more effectively.
Trend #7 of 2022 – Total Experience
Total Experience (TX) is about delivering an all-round exceptional experience to anyone who interacts with your brand, including customers, users, and employees. TX improves end products/ services, provides a healthy work atmosphere, increases brand loyalty, and reduces business silos.
✅ Zoho Solution – Zoho believes great employee experience (EX) is a recipe for delivering exceptional customer experience (CX). Your customer satisfaction is set to improve if you listen to your employees and communicate one-to-one. Zoho Workplace, Zoho Remotely, and Zoho WorkDrive are excellent communication and collaboration tools that drive employee experience. All these Zoho tools are integrated with customer-oriented apps, including Zoho CRM, CRM Plus, Finance Plus, and other applications, which will ultimately enhance your customer engagement. Zoho combines the power of employee and customer experience with its powerful, unified suite to help you achieve total experience.
“Zoho has evolved from being at the front office, moved towards the back office, and then evolved into adding ERP functionalities progressively. Now, we have built a unified software that runs all aspects of a business, which is why we call it the operating system for business,”
said Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu.
Trend #8 of 2022 – Unified Business Communication
68% of businesses say they prefer a unified solution for communications, it!s no wonder why UCaaS is a must-have today. Having a unified communications solution ensures business continuity, higher productivity, faster communication by providing a single platform for your teams to communicate.
✅ Zoho Solution – Zoho doesn’t just enable Unified Communications but brings context to communications. When you contextually embed unified communications tools, they become less of about being a vehicle and more about enhancing the contextual experience. Whether you talk about Zoho Workplace, Zoho One, or other Zoho apps, your team gets a digital workspace for unified communication and team collaboration.
Trend #9 of 2022 – Business Agility
The idea of business agility is to react to changes in the market in a timely
manner. Agile businesses are 40% quicker to market with their products, which means they are 50% more likely to out-perform their competition. With agile solutions, your business can meet its customers’ ever-changing needs more quickly.
✅ Zoho Solution – Business agility means being able to work quickly and ensure you’re focusing on the right activities at the right time. It’s all about capacity, flexibility, and velocity. With Zoho’s agile solutions like Sprints, Creator, and Workplace, your business can accelerate value delivery to achieve business agility.
Trend #10 of 2022 – Resilient Business Operations
Business resilience is the ability of an organization to quickly adapt to disruptions while maintaining continuous business operations. Migrating your systems to the cloud will allow you to continue operations. With Zoho One’s operating system for your business, your organization can build a more resilient framework and prevent future disruptions.
“More resilient business operations can be achieved by migrating all elements of your business to the cloud and using Zoho One, an operating system for businesses. One cloud-based solution to manage all your sales, marketing, support, HR, and accounting processes, will ensure continuity of operations. One cloud solution will allow your business to continue to function without any costly downtime.”
Trend #11 of 2022 – Data Privacy and Security
Privacy vs. security has already started to merge and share common interests and responsibilities. As regulators increase pressure on organizations to secure data, it is important for your business to use cloud solutions that offer strong encryption tools and help you protect the data in the event of hardware failure or disaster.
✅ Zoho Solution – Privacy has a lot to do with choosing a business model. When you choose Zoho apps, you select NO ad-based business model, NO double-dipping, NO Adjunct surveillance. Zoho owns all the core aspects of the technology stack and does not rely on ad-providers. It is bootstrapped so there is no investor pressure. Zoho uses strong encryption tools and cyphers to protect customer data.
“We’re proud to say that at Zoho, we #opted-out” of the advertising model long before any government had to tell us it was ethically dubious,” says Zoho Corp.
Trend #12 of 2022 – Social Commerce
With remote work environments and flexible work hours, users are now spending more time on social media. Therefore, to achieve success, brands need to maintain an omnipresent demeanor on social media platforms. Enterprise can use social commerce to reach customers where they are and build seamless buying experiences.
✅ Zoho Solution – Zoho Social has everything you need to build a great brand on social media. With Zoho Commerce, you can create a storefront on Facebook and Instagram and sell your products, making social commerce easier for your business.
Trend #13 of 2022 – Contactless Payment
For payments, a seamless customer experience cuts down on the obstacles that appear during the checkout process. A payment is frictionless if it features customer-convenient choices, such as contactless payment options, mobile payments, digital wallets, and so on.
✅ Zoho Solution – Zoho offers multiple payment solutions, including Invoice, Books, Checkout, and Subscriptions. Zoho supports a variety of payment gateways that are equipped to handle payments across the globe. With Zoho payment solutions, you can accept contactless payments and get paid faster on time.
Trend #14 of 2022 – Collaborative Business Intelligence
Collaborative Business Intelligence is the merging of business intelligence software with collaboration tools. Actions need to be coordinated across departments before making business decisions. Collaborative BI tools make teams work together towards a conclusion in real-time.
✅ Zoho Solution – Zoho’s collaboration tools including Cliq, Projects, Meetings, Mail, and Workdrive come with remote work features and a dynamic AI-powered platform (Zia) that help you work smarter and get things done faster. Zoho’s collaborative tools are constantly growing and adapting to Artificial intelligence.
Trend #15 of 2022 – Human Capital Management
Companies are focusing more on employee experience, thanks to the slew of changes caused by the pandemic. Just like other departments, human resources (HR) is also moving toward digital transformation to improve areas such as the employee experience, virtual work, hiring, payroll, and employee engagement.
✅ Zoho Solution – Hiring employees is an investment for your company. Do it right with Zoho Recruit. Right from vendor portal, custom careers pages, applicant tracking system, time-sheet management, and invoice generation to employee referrals, Zoho Recruit is your best bet for human capital management in 2022.
Trend #16 of 2022 – Self-Service BI
Self-service business intelligence (BI) is a type of data analytics tool that allows you to automatically perform data mining and statistical analysis to explore and examine data sets, without requiring a BI expert. Self-service BI solutions deliver actionable insights faster, helping you make decisions that are better, wiser, and most significantly, data-driven.
✅ Zoho Solution – For data to be a true catalyst of business growth, there can’t be any gaps in the collection, management, or analysis process. Zoho DataPrep application, a Self-Service BI Platform, focuses on four segments to make data a growth catalyst – augmented data preparation and management, data stories, augmented analytics, and an app marketplace. Zoho’s BI tool will empower your business to drive decisions with data without having to learn new tools.
Trend #17 of 2022 – Customer Centricity
Customer-centricity means putting the customer first and at the center of everything that you do. The best way to become a customer-centric organization is getting everyone on board – leadership, marketing, sales, service, support, finance – encompassing both customer-facing as well as back-office roles.
“Too few BI platforms in the market excel in both data preparation and analytics, which leaves businesses with weak — or worse, flawed — insights. Zoho’s BI Platform is industry-leading because it ensures organizations are acting on legitimate data, which can be effectively leveraged to determine new revenue, streams, refocus funds, drive productivity, and overall gain a competitive edge among peers in their market,” said Zoho Chief Evangelist Raju Vegesna.
Trend #18 of 2022 – Customer Service and AI
There can be little doubt that AI is the next frontier of customer service and will become a crucial competitive differentiator in 2022 and beyond. AI- enabled customer support systems help you provide proactive service, more personalized interactions, round the clock availability, identify behavior trends and habits, and customer-oriented conversations.
✅ Zoho Solution – Zoho’s AI-powered assistant – Zia – brings customer service and artificial intelligence together. Zia analyzes customer sentiments and suggests responses to customers on behalf of support representatives. Zia is embedded in Zoho Desk, CRM, and SalesIQ to enable businesses to provide the right solution to customer problems at the right time.
Trend #19 of 2022 – Omnichannel Customer Support
Omnichannel support allows customers to reach your brand on a variety of communication channels, from traditional phone support to email, social media, live chat, and more. Implement customer support technology that creates a friction-free customer experience along with cost savings and efficiency.
✅ Zoho Solution – Zoho Desk helps you manage all your customer support activities in one place. From emails, call center, self-service portal, to instant messaging, Desk lets you give customers timely, personalized help across multiple channels.
Trend #20 of 2022 – Integration
2022 is predicted to be a time where companies can outsource anything. Global integration is the way because companies will need to work together to solve critical business challenges. Applications and tools that integrate with each other will be the way to succeed in every business sector.
✅ Zoho Solution – According to Zoho Chief Evangelist Raju Vegesna, “Zoho’s laser focus is now on its versatile platform (Zoho Creator), research and development (R&D), and infrastructure (10 data centers) that support all 45+ Zoho applications from the ground up is providing seamless integration and superior customer experience.”
Trend #21 of 2022 – 5G Wireless Technology
As the 5th generation mobile network is rolled out slowly across the world, it is going to change the way businesses and customers connect and communicate. Businesses need to move to cloud technologies that offer more reliability, massive network capacity, increased availability, and a more uniform user experience to users.
Signalchip launched semiconductor chips for 4G/LTE and 5G NR modems, which would enable high-speed wireless communication. The company was mentored and funded by Sridhar Vembu, founder and CEO of Zoho.
Trend #22 of 2022 – Accelerating towards sustainability
Consumers, governments and stakeholders are all demanding greater environmental accountability from companies. Organizations that leverage cloud applications and green initiatives and follow sustainable practices will be able to attract new customers and keep existing ones.