Webinar: Digital Brands growth in a post-Covid world

Well, thank you everybody for being with us today. We're we're here to talk about the strategies for monetizing telco digital brands. And it it would I'd be remiss if I didn't start by sort of saying this has been quite a disruptive year, right, to say the least. And but what is the lesson that we need to take away from this from this year? Right? The year in which we saw near overnight forced migration to all things digital, to all things virtual, to all things distanced. The lesson is that if you're in a consumer facing business, especially, we you're we're we've entered into this phase of of frenzied innovation. Right? And and consumers aren't going to let us rest anytime soon. And it's it's just the beginning. Right? I I mean, if you think about the things like new customer preferences for corporate values, for privacy, for experimentation, works redistributed future, and the operating models that that are being sort of redefined by these shifting market dynamics, all of us all of us will will be challenged. Even the best business strategies will all face challenges. So so how do we survive this? How do we, you know so how did we survive the the past year? How do we survive future disruption? How do you know how to choose technologies in a world like this? Well, anyone who's been undertaking a digital transformation project over the course of the last decade or more, knows that the finish line keeps moving. Disruptions keep coming. So so what we're talking about at Forrester now is this idea of future fit technology strategies. And we start by we we we start by understanding when we talk about future fit, we start with this concept of of adaptable, of the the need to be adaptable. And what is that? Well, the adaptive enterprise has the capacity to reconfigure its underlying business concept by dramatically rethinking its core mission, its primary value proposition, its core competencies, and the markets or industries in in which it competes and its end customer. At Forrester, we've actually built on this a little bit and and coined the term future fit. And a future fit strategy is adaptive, right, to reconfigure those core business concepts, But it's also creative where, you know, it brings emotion and engagement into customer experiences. It's also resilient where you can deliver on your vision, on your brand promise no matter what comes next. Lily? Hey. It's Thomas from Amdocs. I'm just checking if you if you're sharing a presentation with us or not because we don't see one. Oh, absolutely. I should be sharing. Let me Great. So if you could just if you could just share the desktop there or share your presentation. See. Can you see that? Yeah. Great. Thank you. Wonderful. So let me take a step back. Sorry about that. This is what you would have seen so far. This is the lesson. The sign you've been looking for is that adaptability is key to becoming future fit. So this is the definition of an adaptive enterprise, which I think is the foundation or, let's say, even the pinnacle of this future fit concept that is underpinned by that creativity, as I talked about, and by that resiliency. And it's it's, you know, it's not just about survival either. According to our research, firms that have this flexible technology foundation and and and those that have a business operating model that can change quickly, those grow those firms grow nearly three times faster than their industry average. And our analysis actually found that only ten firms so we did this assessment of over five hundred firms. Only ten firms scored perfectly across our, you know, our various future fit and adaptability assessment criteria, and those perfect scores, those ten respondents received that received the perfect future fit score across the assessment, those firms grew four times, more than four times at their industry average. So there's actually not only a survival at stake, but there's a way to thrive, right, with these with this future fit technology strategy. So let's look at take a closer look at some of the change in consumer behavior quickly. And and we know I mean, consumers were changing before the pandemic. And as you've probably heard and as I've heard and seen and as we know now, the pandemic has certainly just accelerated a lot of these changes that existed before. The pandemic changed consumers substantially, but in directions that that were already in motion, in advance of the pandemic. I wanted to look at this data here because I thought it was quite interesting. The base here is consumers who purchased a mobile or telecom service in the last six months. Nearly two thirds say that they use technology more than ever to engage with companies. And similarly, sixty four percent say the pandemic changed how they shop for products, but the data overall here, I think, tells a very interesting story, which is that the majority of these consumers say that they're empowered by technology, and they've changed how they relate to brands, but also that they're more discerning than ever before in their experiences and who they buy from and what they buy. One of the lessons I think we can take and and, you know, outside of the telco industry, for inspiration here is despite huge, huge disruption in consumer spending in early in the pandemic, retail spending in twenty twenty, in the US in particular, is the highest it's ever was the highest it's ever been. Apparel sales at first ground to a halt, But in April twenty twenty one, the US experienced a seven hundred and twenty six percent year over year increase in apparel sales. People are calling this revenge shopping. Right? The local losses, the shuttered doors. We we you know, equal or more was gained through consumer spend overall. Those merchants, those retailers who were ready won big, And these are retailers like Target, like Walmart, and and Best Buy. Some folks were aided by the fact that they sold these essential categories. But the other thing is that these merchants were had put the foundation for digital and omnichannel services years and years and years ago. Right? They gained market share they otherwise wouldn't have precisely because they were already supporting things like curbside pickup, scheduled store visits, mobile payments, contactless payment, etcetera, before the pandemic. So they got to polish the rough edges of their omnichannel and digital strategies rather than starting from scratch. Right? So then you see the differences in experiences like a Target that had signage and reserved spots in parking lots and and integrated experiences into their mobile app compared to other merchants that had eight by ten, you know, sort of printer paper taped to their doors with fine point pen for their phone numbers to do to do curbside pickup. Right? The the the difference was stark. Now here's the here's the other kicker. Right? Those customer experiences, those good and great customer experiences set by the merchants who had invested years ago and had started this this digital omnichannel journey years ago, those expectations are the ones setting the bar or those experiences are the ones setting the bar for your consumers. Your customer is is a maybe a Target customer or a Nike customer or a Best Buy customer. Your their expectations are set by the best experience that they have regardless of industry, not necessarily just with your direct competitors. So you are also serving these customers who who who look to these other experiences and go, why can't I get that? Right? And this isn't stopping anytime soon. Why? Well, we know these that the pandemic accelerated some of those trends that were already in motion. Well, what were those trends? Well, it's this business environment in which there's this technology in human symbiosis. Technologies like personal computers, like the Internet, like mobile, they these technologies have been empowering people, both customers and partners and employees. And companies responded then by investing in digital capabilities and customer experiences to meet the needs of those increasingly empowered customers, and this hasn't stopped. So today, this continuous sort of symbiotic technology human loop drive empowered customer demands, forcing firms to deliver more advanced technologies and experiences, and these upgraded technologies put more information and power in the hands of the people, upgrading their, you know, their expectations and exponentially sort of increasing the power of this, you know, collective networked actions. This is the environment that we're in, and it will continue to be this way. And and telcos have felt the pressure to change more during the pandemic than others. So telcos here were more likely to say that the pandemic increased their efforts to change their business models compared to the global average, and they feel quite ready. So software decision makers there's a lot of data on this slide. But software decision makers at telcos tell us that they let let's point you to a specific here. If you go to that first red box, right, ninety three percent say that they experiment with new technology to discover discover new business opportunities. The next one red box down, you can see that they agree that their company culture instills in its employees the need for constant change to stay ahead of competitors. The same percentage agree that their architecture supports them to make those changes quickly and efficiently, and this last red box is my personal favorite. Eighty five percent agree that they have a fail fast culture. Now, personally, I feel that we're a bit overconfident here. Right? And telcos, in particular, are more confident than the aggregate. But even in aggregate, the majority of firms agree that with these statements. And I'm not quite sure that these sentiments would stand up to scrutiny or, certainly, whether we could see their their impact reflected in the market or in customer sentiment yet. But but it is true that telcos are in fact experimenting with their underlying business concept, and they will continue to do so. Many may even find that they're, adopting various business concepts at once. Their traditional brand, for example, may be a platform provider or a service orchestrator, but they'll launch a new brand or acquire brands where connectivity is the core play or that drive value from being a lifestyle brand. And, frankly, they may find that they have to adapt the underlying business concept over time, right, because of the environment that we're in. And and what is a lifestyle adaptable concept with lots of room for creativity? And if it's done well, it stands the test of time. So there's you know, regardless of the business concept, the the future fitness framework still applies. Lily, thanks so much. I think I barge in here because I really like this slide and this almost maturity model and we discussed this in the past that what's interesting, the reflection on our customers, is that we see the telcos that go into proliferation of services and this moving from communication service providers to service orchestrator, aggregators, trusted data intermediary. Though the lifestyle brand is actually focused a lot of times on only one service but do it very well, focused on the customer and the customer experience and on marketing. Not so much on the service itself, but rather on the customer sentiment and customer experience around it. And I and and this is something that I found very, very interesting reflecting on our specific market. Yeah. Right. There's this move to rather you know, I say this, subscriptions aren't necessarily for every company, but recurring customer relationships are. And there's this move, to your point, from this sort of monetization strategy as a as a revenue driving tactic, and rather looking at a monetization strategy or a business concept, in this case, as a as a more holistic view of how you can drive loyalty and drive more sort of recurring relationships with your customers. And and that actually leads us thank you for adding that because that leads us really beautifully into the next point I wanted to make, which is sort of, you know, this journey. What is the the journey that you may expect as you start thinking about new monetization strategies and new business concepts. Well, of course and this is cyclical, by the way. This might start with an experimentation phase, and it likely does. Right? And and some of you may have already gone through this phase where, you know, the the subscription offering or the monetization strategies is probably poorly aligned with customer pain points and desires. The pricing structure may not be sort of linked to a clear value proposition, and your business, at this point, is probably focusing exclusively on attracting those new customers, right, to the service. So you're attracting a wide spectrum of different kind of customer types or subscriber types. There's no clear common denominator. You're making probably little or no effort to retain those customers. It because you have sort of poor poor insight into their to their desires here, and you and you probably have quite poor visibility into customer acquisition costs and customer churn, you chances are that you're spending more money on on acquiring these these subscribers than the the than the value that these subscribers will generate over the course of their lifetime with you. But once you get better at this, as you move into this, the next phase is the exploration phase. You're working on figuring out what sticks. Right? During this phase, the the offering is starting to kind of expand into different elements. You're putting some tools and technologies in place to facilitate the the the customer kind of cost the the cost of acquisition and and the the the act of acquiring customers. This you know, you might have sort of self-service portals. Maybe there's some robotic process automation, but still, the subscription offering sort of delivers at this point little sustainable value, or the the the offering itself just sort of, doesn't quite find its footing in delivering its offering, delivering the value to to most customers, but you'd still be struggling with quite a bit of churn here. And you you don't have or or you might have weak kind of data analytics capabilities. So you don't have because of this, you don't have really in-depth understanding of which features the customers like and what they dislike and why. You're still losing quite a bit of money on the subscription here or on the offering, but but you're you're exploring. You're figuring out what sticks. Right? And then as you build on that, right, you some of the structures in this intermediate phase, some of the structures of the subscription model begin to emerge or or or the offering in general. I'll I say subscription because often it is pegged on a subscription, especially in the telco space. But during this phase, right, your business is starting to make greater effort to understand the target customer's pain points and what they desire. Right? You start applying sort of human centric design and agile and service based thinking. And at the same time, you're sort of expanding the offering and facilitating upsell, downsell, cross selling opportunities, and so you're you're retaining more subscribers or customers as a result. The churn is starting to decline, and you're putting structures in place here to to communicate more effectively with subscribers. You're starting to kind of figure out the way to control that that the non you know, the the folks who are are you know, subscribers who are who are failing to pay on time and control that kind of upsell opportunity and the churn opportunity and and leaving kind of ex excluding subscribers that aren't aren't the right fit. So you're reaching this breakeven level for the subscription offering. In the evolution phase, your your value proposition is starting to bear fruit. Right? During this phase, you're starting to make progress to convey sort of clearer value proposition. You're increasing your data analytics capabilities. You're starting to, target customers on a more sort of individual basis rather than sort of in this larger segmented groups. This is where you're starting to build better customer experiences. You're putting systems in place to measure churn, which keeps falling here at built on off of better kind of, beta and support, and and subscriber lifetime value is increasing here. Right? You're generating more value from the subscribers finally than you spend on attracting them. And you start you know, this start this new launch or this brand or this offering starts to to to really drive value that that c level managers and folks are starting to begin to recognize, you know, begin to recognize the value of it. Now we've moved the experimentation phase off to the left here, and and finally, we're in the expert phase. Right? Your business is using, probably, sort of real time customer journey mapping at at this phase as its central tool for for designing and delivering its value propositions. Your offering and supporting, the the subscription or the offering in in in across all of the channels in which your your business actually operates, your analytics, your data analytics, and your automation capabilities have matured. And this is where you sort of start building sort of automation and and recommendations, based on data to existing subscribers and and, you know, using dashboards to to get the different stakeholders and employees to see the metrics that they need regarding the service. These tools are usually technology that support sales and support marketing, maybe with predictive selling techniques and things like this, And the the the higher ups, the the c level is starting to recognize and gradually sort of migrate some of these best practices or or certainly the the business concept into the into the broader portfolio. Right? And what can you take away from this? Right? These are these these billing solutions every time I talk about billing, people start to lose interest because no one feels so passionately about billing, at least not as passionately as I do. But I actually think that this billing and monetization solution, payment solutions, invoicing solutions, these are not just solutions to bring money into the organization tactically, although they're very important in doing that. And they're not even ones that are just merely there to keep time, right, to to record sort of and trigger when the company gets paid because that's important too. But, actually, I encourage you to think about these these tools and the teams responsible for them as essential, not only because they are how the the the organization brings money into the business, And not only because they manage a crucial and emotionally potent moment in the customer experience, one that we know the power of when something goes wrong, but these technologies can be an enabler of adaptability. They can support creativity. They can underpin resiliency, or they can be a blocker to them. You know? Or how, as you go through that journey, you can see how launching a new product, configuring a new monetization strategy, selling and and and configuring and packaging and bundling and launching in new geographies, all of these things are an essential part of that journey that we just under that we just went through. I wanna take a moment here to take a step back. There's my dogs supporting me here. I wanna take a step back here and look at the the drivers the common drivers for billing and monetization sort of technology selection. It's often because of one of these three use cases. New begets new. Right? There's new products or new geographies, new pricing models that drive this new technology selection because they're seeking speed. The buyers here are seeking speed, support for experimentation. They wanna minimize the disruption to the traditional business because this is a new product or new brand, and and they want data. They want advice. This is often led by product or marketing or sales rather than, if you go to the second use case, this modernization use case, right, where usually this is because we're sort of outgrowing our existing system. We're seeking to reduce the kind of keep the lights on work and workarounds. We're trying to protect against competitors. We're trying to minimize risk and assure compliance. This is often led by IT because the bulk of that keep the lights on work and workarounds drains precious time from the IT department. And then the last use case is this building an adaptive core, right, often talked about like a digital transformation or a quote to cash transformation. Here, the driver is a consolidation of systems. It's automation. It's business process redesign. It's usually much more at an enterprise level and driven by that c suite. And and, Lily, you know, this is great because we also see this very clearly with our customers where you see the modernization. We all know about digital transformations, digital modernizations. But this is really my interpretation of this is modernization is changing what we're doing now to face the known risks or the known expectations of how the business would look like shortly. This is very different than an adaptive core that is actually prepared for the unknown. And this is completely different than just modernizing. Move something to the cloud. You need to build something that is much more adaptive, much more elastic. And maybe this is why SaaS is so much more elastic than just cloud. It's not just about the technology, some business model. There's a whole concept that you just described very nicely about adaptive versus, okay, I'm gonna do the same but more modernized way. Yeah. I love that. I love that. The the modernization is is work towards the known known initiatives, and the adaptability is sort of working towards the unknowns. I love that concept. And and the best advice that I can kind of give give here about technology selection in this era, you know, of of modern you know, monetization, innovation, and business model change and and business concept adaptability is that, you know, isolate this core kind of business problem driving your search. Is it, about the knowns? Is it about the unknowns? And and and that can sort of drive the scope of the feature set that you care about, but but you can actually separate the good matches, the good vendor or partner matches from the great matches by by thinking about sort of layering these three future fit components across each capability that you're assessing. Right? How are they helping you become adaptive to reconfigure those concepts? How are they helping you be creative to bring emotion and engagement into those customer experiences? And finally, how are they how are they helping you be resilient? Right? How are they helping you deliver on your vision and your brand promise no matter what comes next? What might this look like? So, for example, some elements that you might consider as sort of underpinning your adaptability would be a a vendor or a partner that is architected for agility. Right? This is certainly a sort of SaaS architecture. It could be API driven with great documentation that delights the engineer, could be configurable by nonengineers as need to be. Right? How does it empower the business user to change things? I mean, it could be a global go getter. Right? There's, you know, support from multicurrency, geographic segmentation for customers, for promotions, for invoicing, for reporting, for taxation. You know, we know that globalization is a way to scale and a way to diversify revenue streams. Beyond that, right, omnichannel. How you know, what might you be looking for supporting the the many channels in which you might be delivering? So bundling with, you know, certainly digital or mobile, but platform selling, bundling with partners reselling, and payment strategy. You want a vendor who and a partner who, supports subscriptions and usage and consumption, and and one time based payment models and payment strategies. Right? They want you want one that can manage the pricing and monetization and life cycle and reporting implications of each. You don't want that to be a limiting factor for you. Creative. Again, with the architecture here, it can't be overstated. If you can make changes quickly, if you can configure to your heart's desire, you can unlock a freedom, to deliver and monetize the emotionally and emotional and engaging experiences you create for customers. And optimization. You want a a vendor and a solution built with optimization in mind so that you can work on new things, not necessarily chasing the performance from the old things. Right? Things like churn mitigation for technical payment failures, dunning processes, alerting communications, etcetera. Innovation. Here, you can go either two ways. Right? Do you want a partner who innovates quickly, who moves fast, who tests and learns with you on you know? Or one that does opportune you know, robust opportunity sizing and research before you jump in. What is your pace, and what do you want? And generous geniuses. Here's a bit qualitative, but you really do want a partner that is and and I use the term partner here specifically. Right? Not a vendor, someone who is a partner with you who's with their expertise. You shouldn't have to chase that. And finally, resiliency. You want security savants. Right? You want your customer you don't you don't want your customer data to be safe. You need your customer data to be safe with their with their software, and if at all possible, you want their software to alleviate compliance on you, right, your compliance burdens. Accountability advocates, here is where, you know, on the one hand, what are their SLAs? Do they operate with transparency? On the other hand, it's are they accountable for your success with their technology? How committed to their customer success, aka your success, are they? And lastly and, certainly not least, performance, uptime. How do they calculate it? Outages are not common in billing software, but this is absolutely table stakes. Right? These are examples to get you started. Right? But as you build your requirements, and I think you get the idea here. Right? Be use these future fit principles of adaptability, of creativity, of resiliency to help you choose your strategy moving forward and the technology, the part the right partner for your brand or your brands, because that's the lesson from twenty twenty. Right? Digital transformation isn't enough. It often assumes an end, a period at this end of the sentence. I have transformed. But that human technology symbiosis, that loop that we talked about, means that transformation is ongoing. Be adaptive. Be creative. Be resilient. Right? And your technology should help you do these things, not hinder you from doing these things. With that, I'll say thank you very, very much, and I'll hand it over to the AIM docs team to take you through the rest of the presentation.