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Gartner`s Tech Trends 2021: What is Special about Total Experience?

Serhii Voloshyn

Each business company is unique and has its strategy of development and workflow improvements. Modern technologies make this process of improving much more manageable and efficient. An organization builds a suitable plan of growth for the next several years and chooses the required methods of its execution. 

Recently Gartner has published the top tech trends that will become even more popular in the next 2021 year and have excellent implementation opportunities for the next five or even more years. These trends aim to digitally transform various business industries and entrust their improvement to technological tools. 

Gartner`s tech trends 2021

We want to bring to your attention short descriptions of the announced Gartner`s trends. Each of them has great potential and benefits in case of integration into the company workflow. 


Internet of Behavior
Internet of Behavior or IoB gathers all required data about workers, customers, or users combines and analyzes it. The information can be various, such as internet activities, behaviors, and habits from public and private organizations. IoB helps to analyze the workers` behavior at the workplace and influence the behavior.  The data can be tracked from different sources like social media, citizen data, public organizations, location tracking, etc. Of course, some sources are limited or don’t allow gathering data by law. 
Total experience
Total-experience contains the entire company experience – employee, customer, and user. It shows the company’s activities from different sides and reveals the disadvantages to fix them quickly. We know that customer experience is essential as the company has to involve the potential customer at once. However, you also need to provide excellent conditions for your employees and users. These options create the reputation of the enterprise and increase the quality of services. All these experiences are linked by particular features and depend on each other. 
Hyperautomation
This trend calls for maximal automation of the business work processes. The idea of this trend claims that every process and other aspects of each organization can be and should be automated by tech integrations. Gartner insists that to make the business efficient,  all owners have to keep up with the latest technologies, automating systems, and boldly implement them, or they can be left behind.
Anywhere operations
The business should be accessible anywhere, anytime, and for any employees. That is the key to success in the next 2021 year. Today most companies operate remotely and have no possibility for offline meetings. Modern applications help to provide constant communication and a great experience between owners, employees, and customers.  Anywhere operations trend`s purpose is to eliminate the need for personal interactions and turn to online services.
Distributed cloud
This trend implies turning to public cloud data storage for business companies of all sizes and industries. It has a range of benefits for employees as well as for customers. Daily, organizations deal with vast amounts of information that can be managed only digitally. Not all of these companies have enough budget to pay for private cloud storage or implement custom ERP. Public clouds are usually free and provide many beneficial options. Among them are the absence of low-latency problems, reducing the company expenses, accurately saving data, providing different levels of access, and keeping up with particular regions’ privacy laws.
Cybersecurity mesh
Cybersecurity is a noticeable feature of each internal digital system. Cybersecurity mesh is a modern approach in cybersecurity that is flexible and scalable for any business company and industry. This cybersecurity strategy is considered to be an improved version. With the expanding business areas and particular companies, the security demands simultaneous growing. Specific companies have their security checklists with the required options. This approach can be scaled to any organization and perform the needed functions due to the cybersecurity mesh flexibility.
Intelligent composable business
This pandemic situation has shown modern businesses’ readiness to adapt to current conditions and global changes. This adaption process is called intelligent composable business. What components does this approach include? Intelligent composable enterprise implies work processes digitalization for stable and uninterrupted company work under any circumstances. This approach contains accessible data storage for all departments and workers, the ability to work remotely, quick reactions to problems, automation of some work processes, and reduction of human resources.
AI tech
AI technology is worth investing in 2021. It is usually a part of the internal digital systems as AI can not exist as a separate project. The main issues about AI implementation are difficulties with maintenance, interpretability to the particular business, and governmental support. 
Privacy-enhancing computation
This approach includes three technologies used to protect data that is being used or shared. The first one is responsible for a secure environment for using the data. The second one provides custom analytics and data processing. The third one offers algorithms to the analytics. This approach helps to stay secure and confidential while sharing or keeping the data.
Hyperautomation trend
Check our recent blog post about hyperautomation trend in details.

What is the Total-Experience Trend?

Total-experience is a confluence of the customer, user, and employee experience. This trend has the purpose of helping to implement essential solutions into the company. Due to the pandemic and remote work, many business companies needed internal systems that help organize the workflow properly. It also touches the customer-side operations as the remote work doesn’t have to influence customer experience quality. Customer, user, and employee experience and quality are the key to the company’s successful development and making it more productive and beneficial.

Total-Experience Trend features

Providing better experience

Total experience unites the external and internal aspects of the company that contribute to the company`s improvements. The essential component of customer and employee experience is communication. It should be constant and convenient for both sides. Communication tools help to share information despite the location. Companies have to be ready that someday they will be forced to work from home even if they have their offices. This year has shown the necessity of stable internal systems to deliver an excellent customer or user experience. 

According to the statistics, companies have started to use video meetings 50% more than the previous year.

Lifesize

Customers usually expect easy and loyal communication with workers. As the market is full of competitors, communication has to be efficient and helpful. Only one bad experience can influence the customers and make them forget about your company. Communication tools should unite different channels like email, calls, video meetings, chatbots, etc. 

UCaaS

Therefore, we came up with the next TX benefit  – UCaaS. Unified communication as a service gathers all communications in one system. Among them are text messages, video or audio calls, phone calls. UCaaS unites all channels and elevates the total experience from all sides. It provides easy and quick connections, sharing information, and managing the entire workflow. It also helps to reveal the weak sides and fix them to improve the employee and customer experience. To reach a high point in TX, companies use a wide range of apps to organize the work processes with particular functions. 

Customer experience trends

Due to the pandemic situation that touched most of the world, the customers` lives and experiences changed a lot. The areas that haven’t been so popular before the quarantine got a new life. People mainly focus on their health and safety. They try to eliminate the need for visiting overcrowded places and stay at home. There are several ways of living your full life without leaving a house that will be actual in 2021.


Virtual schooling
The pandemic situation forced most educational establishments to go online worldwide. Hence, many students and tutors revealed urgent needs for qualified online platforms where the educational process can be tracked and managed effectively. 
Virtual connections
This year, all spheres of our daily life turned to virtual versions. Work, school, university, shopping, traveling – all these things are available online, and it is actually. Virtual connections became an inevitable part of people’s lives. They use video and audio streaming apps for business and work meetings; they use online services for home education, use fitness apps that replace real gyms, and use online shops to buy products and clothes instead of offline shopping. Most people got used to this way of existing, and life would be impossible without these modern apps and their built-in technologies. 
AR VR
These technologies make virtual connections real and provide full interaction with other people. AR and VR provide telepresence, using the camera and microphone in pairs with smart glasses, etc.
Delivery
Delivery services perform the primary function that helps people to keep a normal state of daily life. Today you can order anything you want – food, products, clothes, different items for the home, cleaning service, and many other things. This pandemic forces us to stay at home for most of the week or even a month. Delivery services make our lives full-fledged and execute any need.

Employee experience

To maintain a positive atmosphere in the collective, all employees have to be satisfied with their work conditions and responsibilities. Many company processes depend on the employees, particularly customer experience too. As you may know, if customers get an excellent experience, they are likely to continue business relationships for a long time. 

Business owners tend to retain their best employees and look for ways to improve the conditions and automate some processes to reduce overload. Each employee has particular needs and requirements, and it is vital to listen and analyze all of them. General company rules and policies are apparent; however, some employees sometimes need exceptions to make their work better and more productive. Due to modern digital solutions, it became much easier to improve and modernize the workflow and engage employees.

According to the recent Medium statistics, 90% of employees are more productive when they use gamification methods in their work.

Medium

Choosing the technology to implement is a responsible task for business owners. Integrated systems should work accurately with the existing apps, meet all company demands, and be simple to use for workers. It is also vital to provide surveys among the employees to find out more about their work requirements and needs. It is not a quick and easy task. Business owners should think of working with enterprise psychologists and data scientists to build appropriate questions for workers. The more employees work for the company, the more engagement they need as it influences the entire company’s productivity a lot. 

How to improve the employee experience?

Engagement technology

A core step into improving the employee experience is integrating engagement technologies. It is essential to gather feedback from workers regularly. To know what sphere should be changed or what your employees’ needs are, you need to collect information about their work and listen to their requirements. The feedback should be extensive and include different points like company policies, daily tasks and projects, the productivity of the work, and the collective atmosphere. 

Increase productivity

If you stay informed about employee satisfaction, you can easily find ways to boost the company’s productivity. Due to technical implementation, the work processes become more efficient, automatic, and more straightforward. Therefore, workers have more free time to perform more critical and complicated tasks. Employee listening strategy is the most effective way of reaching your main goals and keeping the company high. 

Employee experience
Companies that invest in employee experience are 4 times more profitable than those that don’t.

Delegate to employees

The positive collective atmosphere means that each employee feels valued, heard, and kind of independent. It is a great thing when workers can express their thoughts or ideas and get support. Wise headers delegate tasks to their employees, give them freedom, autonomy, and provide tech tools to perform their functions efficiently. It is vital to empower workers with the projects they have experience or are interested in to get an excellent final result.

Business applications

Today modern businesses use hundreds of applications that help them to manage their work processes. The ranges are comprehensive, and among such apps, we can see work time or entry trackers, task and projects trackers, inventory and expenses management systems, and many others. These applications are integrated to make the workflow digitalized, easier, and more efficient for all departments. They also help control the employees and their effectiveness thanks to analytics and custom reports that can also be provided with app implementation. 

Improve collaboration

The company consists of several departments that have different roles in the workflow. To keep the company’s productivity on a high level, the collective has to stay united despite the various tasks and locations. Amoth the recommended tools are communication apps, single databases, team-building online meetings, etc. 

User experience

Due to the development of technologies and the appearance of innovations, the user experience, and requirements change. It became more digital, full of built-in functions, accessible. Users expect more from their experience on the web or mobile apps, delivery, and other services they interact with regularly. UX has to be an exciting journey for each user to make them stay or return. Some technologies are defined as required for UX in 2021.


AI tools
A chatbot is the most widespread AI technology that is implemented to increase customer satisfaction. AI chatbot provides real-time communication with users, and it continues to extend its functions and opportunities. Chatbots help to process vast amounts of user data and reduce the tasks for human resources. This AI tool is supposed to develop and improve, providing a better user experience. Products with embedded AI should have a specific design to be clear and straightforward in use. 
Self-service
There is a prediction in arising needs in self-driving vehicles. Such technological tools are another level of development. This prediction is rather potential; however, some users already expect this type of experience soon.
Voice UI
The modern market is full of virtual voice assistants built-in to our devices. Voice UI is a different and improved version of virtual voice assistants. This technology implies full-fledged communication between users and machines via the voice recognition function. Still, it has to be usable for all users as they have various voices, intonations, languages, etc. 

FAQ

Gartner defined 9 main technologies that are worth investing in 2021:
  1. Total-experience
  2. Hyperautomation
  3. Cybersecurity
  4. Distributed cloud
  5. AI
  6. IoB
  7. Intelligent composable business
  8. Privacy-enhancing
  9. Anywhere operations.

A digital transformation has to cover all company’s work processes and fit the business requirements. There are 4 vital areas that should be digitalized – business strategy, business workflow, domain, and company policy.
Before implementing, it is important to build a digital transformation plan that reveals the business` requirements and defines suitable digital systems and technologies. This choice depends on the company employee and customers. Tech implementation should respond to their needs and expectations.

To end up

The choice of technologies for business optimization is vast and can become beneficial for your enterprise. Before the implementation, as an owner, you should build a plan of expanding your activities for the next several years and set the main goals you would like to reach. Consequently, your aims will define the technological tools and systems your organization requires.

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