With MWC taking place this week in Barcelona, The Fast Mode spoke to Patrick Mareuil, Managing Director, EMEA at Airship in a brief interview, on Airship's expectations for this year's event. As a leading provider of customer engagement solutions, Airship discusses the new business models resulting from COVID-19, the shift of the telecoms industry towards customer-centricity and the importance of mobile customer experience strategy.
How does it feel to be back at MWC?
Incredible yet, slightly unreal. After over a year where the only events we have attended have been virtual, it suddenly feels odd but so exciting to be back in a space where you can finally interact with your peers in-person.
It also feels like now is the right time to be back at the MWC. We witnessed dramatic growth in mobile app usage over the past year. The pandemic deeply impacted consumers’ behaviours and the way brands now engage with them. We are therefore looking forward to discussing and exchanging ideas with other attendees at the event on how they understand these new trends which are now not only defining brands’ mobile marketing strategies, but their overall customer experience as well.
What's your showcase theme this year and what are the key technologies you will be discussing?
This year we are ready to discuss the critical importance of a strong and seamless mobile customer experience strategy to drive growth for organisations, especially as many had to accelerate their digital transformation last year. For many companies, the magnitude of the disruption and the large increases in mobile app and website usage challenged their ability to put a strong strategy in place to help engage and retain the large influx of new customers. This is one of the areas where we can add lots of value.
At Airship we have been helping our clients deliver on their organisational growth through the mobile channel. We’ve done this through enabling them to gather insights from their customers on mobile, plan a communication strategy based on those insights and enable real-time relevant experiences. As individuals’ preferences vary and require different approaches to help them progress through different customer journeys, it’s critical to support a continuous layer of communication across multiple channels (such as push notifications, in-app messages, mobile Wallets, SMS…) and all along the customer lifecycle. From leveraging Airship Journeys to plan goal-advancing communications, to implementing Live Chat when customers need immediate attention, marketers everywhere are realising the value of engaging with customers on their terms. We even helped them by leveraging Artificial Intelligence to be able to predict and prevent churn, as well as reach them at the time they are most likely to engage. These are just some of the key technologies that we would like to discuss with brands at MWC to help support their growth.
What's your outlook for telecoms for the rest of 2021?
The telecoms industry has widely been driven by product and services characteristics like broadband speed, new mobile devices or the best package deals. But we believe this supply-driven industry is ready to pivot towards a demand-driven one, where telecoms should be thinking through how they are best suited to fit specific customer demands. With so much competition and advanced technology amongst telecom providers, only those that really understand and can characterise demand, will be able to deliver on customers’ needs and succeed in a competitive sector. We are already working with some of the largest telecom providers (such as Vodafone, Orange, MTN…) who are using our technology to enhance customer experiences through greater personalised and more relevant interactions with their customers on mobile. This is a customer-centric shift in mentality that we are already witnessing in the telecom industry and is likely to become even more important in the upcoming months.
