Effective Digital Transformation Strategies: An Interview with Andres Angelani of Softvision

“Implementing a design system helps define CX/UX requirements, creating more consistencies and providing a universal look and feel and experience, even when used for different purposes.”

A technical marvel of an interview with Andres Angelani, CEO, Softvision on the ongoing digital transformation of MarTech. Learn more effective CX strategies and how to conceptualize future-ready processes.

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Q1: Personalization has gained momentum as an important marketing strategy over the years. How does personalization affect the customer experience (CX)? What techniques can marketers employ to make their personalization strategies more effective?

With so much digital noise today, customers need simplicity, personalization and contextualized experiences. Customized digital experiences are the differentiating factor necessary to create memorable moments for customers and provide the right product or service content at the right time.

A customized experience is more than simple personalization. Personalization is when a product or brand understands what a customer is looking for, and delivers on expectations. A customized experience is designed to deliver on a specific interest or preference in a way that the shopper dictates. When designing digital experiences, customization may mean that the application takes outside context from the real world and delivers a unique experience based on that information. If I want a customized retail experience, I’ll purchase my latte from Starbucks according to my preferences and specifications (size, strength, flavor, etc.), whereas my Spotify playlist continually streams music to me based on my tastes in music, artists, songs that have been searched and played. At the heart of a successful business strategy is a customer experience that is elegantly simple and positive, where consumers are likely to come away satisfied – and return. This type of experience is designed by understanding the emotion of end users throughout a journey involving the company’s products and services. Often, this is brought to life by digital experiences that change based on where the shopper is physically.

Q2: CX is the big thing on CMOs’ minds today. How should a CMO approach the challenge of building consistent CX across multiple devices? What are the practical obstacles to that?

In an enterprise environment, typically used by employees internally, we typically recommend a ‘design system.’ Most organizations have hundreds of internal applications being used by the same audience. These can be homegrown over time, and are often custom applications built for the company’s needs, but enabling a different experience depending on who is using it, for what purpose, etc.

Implementing a design system helps define CX/UX requirements, creating more consistencies and providing a universal look and feel and experience, even when used for different purposes. Enterprises are rebuilding their experiences, engineering them for a cloud environment. The design system provides a standard set of guidelines that engineers can leverage easily to provide that consistent experience.

Outside of the enterprise environment, for external users, the same approach and methodology applies. Understanding the end user completely, and the context of their physical as well as their digital environment – are they in a store, on their phone down the street, etc. – is critical when developing the design system.

Q3: What is the difference in creating a memorable CX for a B2C organization and a B2B organization? What are key factors that a B2B marketer needs to keep in mind when creating a CX?

There are three primary factors to keep in mind when trying to create a memorable CX for a B2C or a B2B organization:

There Are No Shortcuts

Too often companies simply want to recreate what they’ve done in the B2C environment for the B2B audience, and that simply is doomed to fail. There are several unique aspects of the B2B environment that need to be factored in:

• Lengthy contracts
• Smaller number of customers
• Typical transactions involve big dollars and sometimes, big risks
• Complex products/services
   

All Talk/No Action

We’ve all been guilty of this, where we dig deep in the strategy, creating document after document, deck after deck, that talk about the journey. Unfortunately, all our document creation often doesn’t arrive at concrete steps that will boost business performance. Organizations need to move quickly to:

• Manage and mobilize resources
• Prioritize and determine what you’ll actually do
• Be specific in your action plans so that everyone is clear as to whom and how and when things will happen
   

CX for the Win

While there is no easy answer, companies must be ready to address the entire relationship. Companies should be prepared to provide customers with a dual customer experience. They need to create and deliver two customer experiences, one that caters to the needs and priorities of buyers and another that caters to that of the users.

Q4: It is painfully difficult to find the right attribution model when the customer journey is fragmented across multiple devices. How can a CMO resolve this issue? Is there any particular attribution model which you believe is ideal?

For each touch point the customer has, you have to be sure there is a model for recognition of previous touch points. Did the customer arrive via their desktop, a mobile device, etc.? This is important given the need to acknowledge credit to organizations for any subsequent sale.

But this can be cumbersome and at times confusing, so from an attribution standpoint, there needs to be a movement to eliminate the need to assign credit. This can be accomplished by building experiences that work together effectively. If the customer data is effective across all touchpoints, so it’s visible to employees, then marketing teams should be able to eliminate the old-school mindset of assigning credit to a particular store.

That’s the challenge, or opportunity depending on how you look at it, that exists when examining retail customers vs. those on laptops and mobile devices. The opportunity is to build an omni experience that becomes a central repository for all data, ultimately eliminating the need to give credit to one vs. another.

If you build all your retail and touchpoints of the customer based on their profile and relevant data, marketing teams and the CMO can likely stop worrying about the particular channel, and instead, worry about maximizing the lifetime value of that customer. In this model, web activity and instore sales work together so organizations get the most wallet share possible.

Q5: Immersive technologies such as Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are newer spaces in the MarTech industry. What advice would you give a CMO to create meaningful experiences through AR and VR? What are some of your favorite examples of AR and VR in marketing?

The key to this is always make sure you understand the end user and how they want to use the technology. I think too many companies spend too much time building short-term tech, relying on gimmicks that really don’t have anything to do with respecting the end user’s long-term desires for the tech. Instead, focus on building tools that enable the end user to immerse themselves in the brand and product, something that delivers enjoyment but also meets them where they are in their world, and in their technology life cycle.

For others, it’s always a good idea to take products and technology, and insert them into a life moment or event, so the end user can really feel what it would be like to have that product or experience in their life at a key period. This is the real opportunity with AR and VR.

For example, as it relates to live events, put me in the stadium for a product announcement. I want to see Usain Bolt runs past me for a New Balance product announcement. That delivers real excitement and brand value, and then let me buy the product right from that experience.

Transport me to something live, and allow me to experience it in my world in a personal and relevant way.

Q6: IoT, AI, conversational commerce and machine learning are some of the buzzwords in MarTech currently. What is your take on these new technologies? How are they going to shape the future of MarTech?

I think it’s fair to say that the future of marketing is open. While there are lots of buzzwords and new technologies dominating the conversation, we need to remember that there are thousands of marketing technologies to choose from. This translates to a central marketing hub needing to integrate with everything… from your CRM to your CMS, to software, to other pieces of marketing technology that helps drive business performance and in some instances, business transformation. This open hub philosophy also enables you to collect and analyze all your data in one platform. Over time, this will make it easy to fold in and integrate new solutions that will help the business scale and grow.

Q7: MarTech is incomplete without data analytics. Many marketers struggle with understanding the numbers, patterns and ratios from Big Data and turning them into actionable insights. What tips would you give marketers to ease their way into the data analytics process?

There’re a few things that marketers should do to ease their way into the data analytics process:

Be patient

Know that any big data program you dive into will likely take up to 2-3 years to fully mature. Too often people want to rush through and shorten this, but it really is beneficial to take a long view of the data and the impact on the business.

Build a Team

Look inside your organization to build the team, and tap a handful of resources. This often makes more sense than going outside the organization to immediately hire a data scientist. The team you build should be comprised of business analysts, developers and others who already know a lot about the data and business processes. These folks will be able to leverage existing relationships with IT and others, which could help streamline requests and the timeframe.

Leverage Existing Tools

Again, look inside the organization as there are probably free or easy to acquire tools. Excel and Tableau are likely easy to access, and already being leveraged for reporting and dashboards. From there, it shouldn’t be hard to explore advanced techniques for data exploration and data mashup.

Q8: What are some projects or ventures at Softvision that you are excited about? Would you like to give our readers a little sneak peek into Softvision’s future?

There are four new things we’re focusing on today:

Softvision Labs: At Softvision Labs, we identify opportunities to define innovation goals that enable our clients to realize their digital future. Oftentimes, our labs teams look at how customers can be given engaging experiences, enabling them to discover and explore through the mix of digital and physical experiences. We make sure that a strategy is in place to ensure innovations actually impact business, and not sit in silos with limited impact. To do this, we prototype and learn, running multiple experiments at a lower cost.

Education Around New Technologies: The digital world is moving at lightning speed, and if you don’t stay on top of all the developments and new technologies you’ll quickly be left behind. We’re making it a point to identify subject matter experts within our organization, and have them take the lead in staying up to speed on issues that will be most helpful to our clients but also our staff.

Deeper Relationships: Softvision has always benefited from a strong client roster. These days, we’re looking to develop deeper and more meaningful relationships with our existing clients. With a roster that includes Estee Lauder, Goldman Sachs, Macy’s, Mozilla and many others, we’re getting more comfortable asking difficult questions and helping to guide and lead our clients vs. always being in reactive mode. These deeper relationships benefit our clients as much as they do us, and they appreciate our working shoulder to shoulder with them to solve complex business transformation issues.

Global Expansion: We have built a strong company with twenty-three offices, and talent in this space is hard to come by and frankly to keep. We’re specifically expanding our presence in two markets – Buenos Aires and Australia – because we know the space, we have several local client opportunities in those respective markets, and there is a great deal of talent that is untapped. Additionally, we’re expanding our Romanian offices to include a design studio. The design studio will likely service the UK and other markets, and because we have a great team already in Romania we’re confident we can add to it.

MTA: Thank you for such a great in-depth journey into digital transformation, Andres. We hope to talk with you again, soon!

About Andres Angelani:

Andres Angelani is the Chief Executive Officer of Softvision. He is a proven leader in effectively deploying technology and business process strategies leveraging his proficiency in Digital Strategy, Agility and Team Development, Game Development and Enterprise Software Architectures. Prior to Softvision, Andres was one of Globant's pioneers and recently served as the Chief Solutions Officer. Angelani is a frequent speaker and thought leader on how to scale digital innovation in organizations. He also co-authored a book titled The Never-Ending Digital Journey: Creating New Consumer Experiences Through Technology. He started his career in Argentina as a software developer and holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Business Management and a Master’s degree in Software Engineering. Andres is fluent in English, Spanish and Italian and is also a trained classical pianist

About Softvision:

Softvision, part of Cognizant Digital Engineering, creates impactful end to end digital products and solutions that connect brands with consumers that result in relevant, memorable and rewarding interactions. With over 2,800 product, design and engineering professionals, across a network of 25 studios in 11 countries and 5 continents, Softvision delivers sustainable innovation, agility and an emotional connection that inspires engagement and business transformation. For more information, visit www.softvision.com.