Customer

Engagement in
2022



 Customer Engagement 2022

As an industry, social housing can sometimes be guilty of looking

inwardly too frequently and not taking the time to look outwardly.

We wanted to do the opposite and provide insight into how other sectors and market
leaders address Customer Engagement in 2022.

This report should act as a starting point to enable organisation to be er assess how
they can improve their Customer Engagement and should shine a light on the best
possible “customer experience”. These learnings, we hope, can then be implemented in
social housing and property management more broadly.

Contents:

1. What does Customer Engagement look like in 2022

2. The Mobile-First Approach

3. Technological Empowerment

4. Mobile vs Web

5. Our Conclusions

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 Customer Engagement 2022

What does Customer Engagement look like in 2022

From our extensive research, some presage themes have emerged. Customer experience in
2022 should be: omni-channel; utilising AI; personalised; instantly gratifying; customer
centric; measurable; proactive; and mobile- rst.1

The Omni-channel customer experience2

Providing excellent customer experience (CX) means tailoring the customer journey to tell
a clear, concise story representative of your “brand” and allow the buyer to move
seamlessly from one touch point to the next. Whereas a standard marketing mix may allow
for several channels of customer engagement at various points along the customer
journey, an omni-channel customer experience should support interaction via multiple
channels at the same time.

AI in Customer Service
By now, we all know that AI can be involved in the customer journey but in 2022 they are
more sophisticated than ever and can deliver excellent customer support and guidance.
Chatbots, for example, can never replace an understanding and empathetic human
interaction but the implementation of integrated AI can help guide and resolve issues
faster than ever. 

Personalised experiences
One way to truly enhance CX is to make it as personalised as possible. The one-size-
marketing- ts-all is an extremely outdated concept in 2022. Today, there are many
intuitive tools that can be employed to create a personalised experience, be that showing
certain customers certain information to remembering preferences they have shown in
the past. 

“91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who recognise,
remember, and provide relevant o ers and recommendations.”
- Accenture3

“Today, customers expect organisations to be intelligent, and

understand them better over time. Personalised experiences that meet
this expectation strengthen the customer relationship.”
- Bruce Hogan, CEO, Software Pundit4

1 https://www.cadesignform.com/blog/customer-experience-trends-2022
2https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2022/02/08/ ve-customer-
experience-trends-to-embrace-in-2022/?sh=9375e4528625
3https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2022/02/08/ ve-customer-
experience-trends-to-embrace-in-2022/?sh=9375e4528625
4https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2022/02/08/ ve-customer-
experience-trends-to-embrace-in-2022/?sh=9375e4528625
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 Customer Engagement 2022

Instant grati cation

In almost all other sectors, customers don’t like having to waste time searching for
information about their favourite brands, products, or services. So why should it be any
di erent in housing? Streamlining processes, retaining customer information so that
steps can be skipped, and anything else that essentially makes things more convenient
for the customer is an important and necessary step in being an excellent service
provider and improving CX.

A CX-centric approach
In 2022 we see many brands shifting their marketing strategies to further encompass the
customer experience — tailoring all of the strategies in their marketing mix to be er
re ect providing an excellent customer experience. All of the above trends can play a role
in a cx-centric strategy, with the ultimate goal of making the customers feel important
and that they are catered to every step of the way.

Measuring the customer experience

Understanding how good your customer experience is, is just as important for continued
future success as providing it. The trend toward advanced analysis of the customer
experience is rapidly growing in many sectors, serving to help many brands be er ne-
tune their CX by discovering what areas are working and which need improvement.
Tracking metrics and learning from the results is something any customer centric
organisation should be doing, before competitors pass them by!

Proactive service strategies

With plenty of analytical data in hand, organisations can be well equipped to provide
preemptive and proactive services. These are services that can be specially designed to
target a customer’s needs and wants before the customer even knows what they need
and want! This creates a personalised customer experience that really resonates with the
individual and improves customer loyalty.

Mobile rst
Over the last several years marketers learned the importance of being mobile-friendly;
creating mobile versions of a brand’s website so that the site could be easily viewed on
mobile devices. Today’s studies reveal that many parts of the customer’s journey are
actually completed on mobile devices, leading marketers to shift gears once again and
adopt a mobile- rst approach.

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 Customer Engagement 2022

The mobile- rst approach

It is no secret that the COVID-19 crisis accelerated the digitisation of customer interaction
in many sectors, but whilst this did indeed act as a catalyst, it more sped up the inevitable
than represented a sea-change.5

Let’s take Domino’s as a case study:

In 2008, Domino's was in dire straits. In a bid to recover, they launched an online platform
and, later, an app, promising to improve the experience of ordering a Domino's. The tech
would revolutionise the business. Unlike the manual system it was replacing, it got orders
correct every time; it’d tell you when your pizza was being cooked; and, it’d reliably let you
know when it would be delivered, with a cool tracking feature. Gimmick this was not: in
2019, over 80% of Domino’s pizzas were ordered ‘online’, and over 50% of those via the app.

5https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate- nance/our-insights/
how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-
business-forever
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 Customer Engagement 2022

Whilst it may seem that Domino’s and housing have li le in common, the story of digital
innovation at Domino’s is educative. It presents technology as a singular solution to a wide
array of issues. It demonstrates market appetite for tech. It reveals that tech is welcome
in even the most unlikely of environments.

The implementation of technology and a mobile application resulted in more speed, more
e ciency, fewer mistakes, more accountability, be er understanding, and continual
improvements.

In 2022:
- The Apple App Store has 1.96 million apps available for download.
- There are 2.87 million apps available for download on the Google Play Store.
- 21% of Millennials open an app 50+ times per day.
- 49% of people open an app 11+ times each day.
- The average smartphone owner uses 10 apps per day and 30 apps each month.
 
Therefore, for any organisation to be successful, they must interact with customers how
they are used to being interacted with. This shouldn’t be di erent just because you rent
your home or just because you happen to live in social housing.

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 Customer Engagement 2022

Technological Empowerment

It is no secret that technology has revolutionised the way people interact with traditional
sectors. Retail, banking and even healthcare have embraced technological advancement.
This has been evidenced in even housing with a shift to providing basic web portals for
residents. However, it 2022…

It is more clear than ever before that people prefer using Prefer using app than a mobile
site:

*E ective 2020 Mobile App Growth Statistics To Know

The common rebu al in social housing is that elderly residents don’t know how to engage
with apps, and prefer web portals, however, again, in 2022 this is becoming a mute point.

Furthermore, simply because there may be an educative journey to take customers on,
that doesn’t mean that the ultimate CX should be limited to basic functionality, No one
should be excluded, but customers certainly shouldn’t be precluded from engaging with
you in the way they want.
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 Customer Engagement 2022

Mobile vs Web

The data is emphatic, the majority of time spent on mobile devices is on apps.

However, that is not to say that a mobile friendly website is not also a great improvement
for your customer experience initiative. Mobile friendly websites a ord a lot of bene ts6:

- Instantly Available
- Compatible Across Devices
- Can Be Updated Instantly
- Can be Found Easily
- Highly shareable 
- Have a broad reach 
- Can’t be Deleted
- Mobile websites can be less expensive to develop

However, nearly every single one of these bene ts is as true for a mobile application.

However, native mobile applications enjoy a myriad of speci c advantages - and we are
talking native iOS and Andriod apps here - not mobile websites packaged as apps that
actually act as a web view…

Mobile apps o er be er personalisation

Based on the preferences, mobile apps are about delivering dedicated and personalized
communication to the customer, giving him new possibilities, useful features and
convenient solutions. 

Ease of sending noti cations

For the last couple of decades, email has been the most widely-used business
communication tool. As a result, email has lost the e ectiveness it once had; its open
rates and click rates have constantly dropped.Enter mobile app noti cations.These
noti cations are of two types: push and in-app. Both are exciting alternatives for
communicating with app users in a far less intrusive manner. The ability to send instant,
non-intrusive noti cations to users is so desirable that it is one of the key reasons why
many businesses want to have a mobile app in the rst place. In-app noti cations are the
noti cations that users can only receive when they have opened an app. Push
noti cations are those noti cations that users can receive regardless of any activity they
are doing on their mobile device. 

Make use of mobile device features

Mobile apps have the advantage of utilising features of a mobile device like a camera,
contact list, GPS, phone calls, accelerometer, compass, etc. This means that customers
can utilise the device they have instead of being limited.

They work o ine

Like a website, apps too might require internet connectivity to perform most tasks, but
here’s the di erence: an app can still o er basic content and functionality to users in
o ine mode.

6 https://www.hswsolutions.com/services/mobile-web-development/mobile-website-vs-apps/
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 Customer Engagement 2022

Freedom in designing
With all the technological advancements in web designing, mobile websites still have to
rely on browsers to perform even the most elementary functions. Mobile websites depend
on browser features like ‘back bu on,’ ‘refresh bu on,’ and ‘address bar’ to work. Mobile
apps, however, don’t have any of these restrictions. A mobile app gets designed with
several elaborate functions based on advanced gestures like
‘tap,’ ‘swipe,’ ‘drag,’ ‘pinch,’ ‘hold,’ and more.

Users spend more time on Apps

Fundamentally, it is the customer journey and the customer experience which is

important when deciding on your digital strategy. By looking at the two customer
journeys it is easy too identify the preferred route:

Option 1: Web Dash

1. Your customer opens their web browser.

2. Customer googles you / the service they are interested in.
3. They scroll through results (including in some cases your competitors)
4. They nd your website and open it.
5. They nd the service they need.
6. They have to create an account / input all of their personal, and in some cases,
payment information.
7. They nally get to action their request

This doesn’t include the stipulation that at any point they could get distracted and exit
the website, meaning they would have to start all over again.

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 Customer Engagement 2022

Option 2: Mobile Application

1. The customer has your mobile app on their phone home page.
2. Their account and payment info is already saved permanently.
3. They nd what they’re looking for much more e ciently and action it with just one
click.
4. If they exit the app before nishing, you can simply remind them with a push
noti cation.

The di erence is large and demonstrable and is why many industries are commi ing to
not only digital transformation but a mobile rst approach to their customer interaction
and their customer experience.

This should be at true for housing as it is for housing.

Of course, organisations in di erent sectors are optimising for di erent things. Retail is
optimising for sales and housing for quality of service but the tension points and drop o
points remain consistent and so do the learnings.

While your website can be mobile-friendly, it will never give you and your customers the
advantages and power of a real mobile app.

Conclusion

It is clear that in 2022, your customer engagement should be: omni-channel; utilising AI;
personalised; instantly gratifying; customer centric; measurable; proactive; and mobile-
rst.7

When it comes to your mobile solution, it’s not whether you should be thinking about it,
but how, via either a mobile friendly website or native app. However, the data is clear and
persuasive, to master your customer engagement in 2022 you must have an app forward
solution.

Get in touch

To nd out how Ark can help you become not only tech-forward but tech-ready get in
touch with Angus on angus@projectark.co.uk

7 https://www.cadesignform.com/blog/customer-experience-trends-2022
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 Customer Engagement 2022

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