Enhancing User Experiences Through Technology

On Thursday, New York International attended the book launch for ‘The Never-Ending Digital Journey’ by Andres Angelani, Guibert Englebienne & Martin Migoya at the New York Stock Exchange. The event organized by Globant, the company where three authors work, was opened by Sir. Martin Sorrell who gave an insightful opening address.The WPP founder & CEO spoke about how technology has affected the advertising & media industry and specifically his company. Remarkably, 50% of their revenue today comes from sources that didn’t exist 15 years ago. In fact 40% of total revenues now come from digital alone, the rest coming from emerging markets. Considering these two drivers of growth, emerging markets such as Africa and South America hold great opportunities according to Sorrell as they are better suited to adopting new technologies. They have leapfrogged the ‘PC’ era straight to mobile and are not bogged down by legacy systems so they will adapt faster. In such a fast moving competitive space the WPP approach has been to cannibalize their own businesses. “If you don't eat your own children someone else will.” Traditional businesses don't move fast enough, “we must continually innovate, change quicker and experiment or die”.The panel which included the three authors and Andrew McLaughlin, CEO of Digg was chaired by chief strategist for Dow Jones Tracy Corrigan. They spoke about the challenges for brands to break through ‘the noise,’ the concept of digital journeys and the opportunities which exist for brands that can differentiate themselves through technology. Today, there is so much content for our brains to decipher what’s worthwhile & what’s not, that our attention span is drastically reduced. As a result, we are spending less time interacting with each brand. This radical change and the response of making personal experiences through digital prompted them to write the book. Embracing digital allows you to do this at scale.An interesting example is Domino’s Pizza who have become an entirely tech based product who also deliver pizza. Through social listening they realized that they’re pizza was terrible - their first challenge to solve. They then set about reinventing the supply chain to involve their customers throughout the production & delivery process through technology. Today you can track your order through the app to see what stage it’s at. They even have their own version of Siri called Dom: “Dom, where’s my pizza?” For such a big brand they adopted an unorthodox approach to social media by allowing all employees to have a voice instead of the hierarchical approach where lawyers and PR departments must approve all communications. Even their drivers are expected to respond to progress requests from customers by tweeting at red lights.What Dominos have become very good at is personalizing & scaling the experience for every customer through technology which is very hard to do. Research shows that millennials want to create their own experiences rather than have content pushed at them. Such longer interactions drive loyalty which is the premise of the book itself. In industry at the moment you have IT infrastructure & engineering on one side. On the other you have digital agencies, this book is intended to bridge those silos through agile software production. As CEO of Globant & co-author Martin Migoya summed up “this book is a new way of thinking about software in an effort to stay ahead of the curve.”  For more information on the book and the Authors, visit the books website here