As a senior leader with experience across a range of multinational and regional technology firms, what aspects of the future excite you most from a business application standpoint?
Millennials lack patience and love spontaneous and fast interactive responses. And as the largest generation in MENA, businesses today need to adopt technologies to assist them in promoting products and solutions more efficiently to exceed millennials’ expectations.
Digitising businesses through online communication: In theory, digitalisation leads to a more integrated, customer-centric approach across the board.
As components of the business proposition change, digital transformation provides new imperatives for communications leaders.
Interactive communication via preferred channels: Businesses should aim to integrate omnichannel technology (social media messaging apps, WhatsApp, voice, SMS, etc.) into their customer engagement — not only to improve communication with customers but also to enable employee-to-employee networking and collaboration.
Automated marketing and engagement: Businesses should invest in a customer engagement hub for managing customer marketing campaigns and tailoring communication for each customer to deliver that 1-on-1 personalised effect.
What are some of the biggest – and most common – misconceptions you see about data?
There’s a famous saying that ‘data is the new oil’. One of the most common misconceptions about data is that it is a ‘defined thing’. In my opinion, big data is extremely massive datasets that may be analysed computationally to uncover patterns, trends and connections, particularly in the context of human behaviour and relationships.
With the right amount of data collected, you can personalise products and solutions as per the customers’ intent and desire – while, of course, taking into consideration all security measures and privacy policies in order to ethically utilise what is being collected.
Thanks to the pandemic, companies big and small across MENA (and the world) were forced to accelerate digital transformation programmes from last year. How did you handle this process at Infobip, both internally and through helping clients?
Agility and resilience are the name of the game. The pandemic hit all sectors and businesses hard, but it definitely accelerated digital transformation (DT), mainly in the customer engagement domain. This situation pushed Infobip to diversify its portfolio of solutions and products. We managed to introduce perfect solutions to help businesses and customers thrive during and after the pandemic.
For example, we introduced a full stack of SaaS solutions built around AI sphere; intelligent and multilingual chatbots; a digital contact centre; and a customer engagement hub, all through a single-omnichannel interface with easy integration of different channels such as WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, Google Business Messages and email.
Go on social media and it’s easy to see consumer frustration with automated customer service facilities in the region, particularly those offered by banks. As aspects of the CX become increasingly automated, what role does the human play? What are these companies getting wrong?
There is a learning and adoption phase attached to any change, regardless if it is automated or not! People’s frustration comes with complicated solutions, as automation should ease out and improve customer experience, not the other way around.
Unfortunately, some customers choose to carry out the complicated track of DT. This is mainly apparent when different departments in an organisation do not align their internal objectives in order to achieve a common goal. A good example would be an IT department making decisions on behalf of other stakeholders such as commercial or financial departments on product use enablement.
In your view, what sector is currently behind when it comes to cloud applications?
Cloud applications come hand in hand with DT and AI adoption. While scalability and security are prerequisites in using clould applications. Interestingly enough, we have witnessed almost all sectors being indulged in automating a lot of requests related to onboarding, ordering, reservations, communication, aftersales, and many more.
I wouldn’t say that any sector today is not adopting DT; however, I could probably say the speed of adoption differs between sectors. With e-commerce, fintech, and digital natives being at the forefront and other sectors like education and health are a bit lagging behind, unfortunately.