By Federico Grosso *
I opened Adobe Experience House this year making the relationship between experiences and emotions. I bet that for those who are already parents, the day of the birth of their children is a moment that they keep with great appreciation. They remember details and other facts that, on a day like any other, we could never access. And the reason why we remember these remarkable moments in life is because they carry such a huge emotional charge.
And we all seek great experiences. We all want to be moved. In the same way, we are all consumers, aren't we?
With that, I extend the relationship between experience and emotion to technology and the transformation it is already driving. Imagine transmitting such good experiences to each of the customers who decide to consume your brand's product or service for the first time. How to do this in a personalized, unique, and - yet - massive way? And if that experience is personal and very good, what is the likelihood that these customers will return at an upcoming opportunity or recommend your brand to friends? Answering these questions is not difficult, but it is necessary to integrate these questions into the core business.
Customer experience anchored in technology needs to be a priority for brands, after all the consumer demands quality service that is objective, integrated and fast. And the younger the consumer, the higher the expectations for the brands with which he is involved. Proof of this is Adobe's CXM Index 2019 survey, which points out that 90% of people between 18 and 34 years old said they took some action after having a bad online experience, like telling friends, stop buying from the brand, posting reviews on a review site or let off steam on social media.
And when we look back at the experiences, the companies are no longer compared only within the same industry. Now, they are compared to all those who have already raised the bar and better meet (and anticipate) their customers' expectations. There is no safe place - brands are evaluated and discarded all the time.
And it was precisely these challenges, guided by the four pillars of the digital transformation process - Culture and Leadership, Business and Innovation, Technology and Creativity and People and Expertise - that we spent discussing over the two days of the event.
Doug Stephens, founder of Retail Prophet and who was on our Experience House stage, shared his insights and explained that the act of buying is linked to the feeling of pleasure that occurs in the brain through the neurotransmitter dopamine. That is why a bad shopping experience is a breach of expectation to the feeling of pleasure. Remember that if your business generates, for example, 100 thousand orders per day, there are 100 thousand opportunities to surprise your customers, while there are also another 100 thousand opportunities to disappoint.
And what is done to offer good experiences? The digital medium has opened up a new - and vast - door to marketing. Today, the large volume of data generated by consumers can be the answer to the most different questions in your business. Kate Willever, an executive at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management - an investment banking arm focused on healthcare services - showed how the global financial services industry underwent a restructuring in which the goal was to increase assertiveness in detecting clients most likely to close deals with Morgan Stanley.
Kate explained that, given the proportion of 100 families for each of the consultants who do this curation - the key point of this equation is the engagement between these two ends -, the strategy was to put technology in favor of the business, creating analytical models specific to each of the customers based on their preferences, enabling the understanding of consumption patterns and, thus, offering more appropriate solutions.
But what data do I need? It was precisely the theme addressed by Patrícia Souza, B2W digital analytics manager, during his presentation: "how to create a data analytics team without needing rocket scientists". The expert explained that, at each challenge, the web analytics team is involved to help other departments interpret data and generate insights from resources and information.
However, in addition to technology, we see in these last two examples the importance of one of the main - or the main - factor in business transformation: the human factor. Tim Leberecht, CEO of The Business Romantic Society, went to the event to tell about the importance of culture and humanization in the future of work.
For him, artificial intelligence has the potential to develop many of our activities, but not those that demand creativity, that demand passion for doing. The romanticism in the specialist's speech always shows the value of being authentic, cultivating intimacy and understanding that suffering is part of the game, including in the corporate world.
As he says: "whether you are a leader or not, if you cannot see the world as what it could be, you cannot be innovative. Romantic characteristics cannot be automated: empathy, intuition, imagination, emotions, being able to deal with different cultures and people ". This is being human and what generates innovation to drive disruptive experiences.
I believe in the primacy of experience and in the human being's ability to surprise and be surprised. Hence the importance of transforming our business into an experience business; and make our customers experience makers.
* Federico Grosso is General Manager Latam at Adobe Systems
Warning: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
EN 
PT 
