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Unbound London 2019: digital trends linked to business success in the digital era
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Unbound London 2019 was an exciting event; It was a great learning experience for tech businesses, and in general for businesses looking to be more tech-savvy and customer-friendly. Hundreds of thought-leaders on tech, innovation, and digital gurus came together under one roof and imparted a few nuggets of wisdom which cannot be ignored going forward.
Here are the best things we picked up from the various enlightening panel discussions that took place all throughout the two-day festival.
The low touch paradigm shift
The less a customer needs to do himself, the better it is, seems to be the new way of determining if you’re ready for the new age of digital products. Still, a lot of businesses seem to think that good customer adoption equals a heavy and repetitive usage of such a product.
The panel around turning your customers into fans was all about ensuring that a digital product such as an app or a web portal is built is friction-less and as low touch as possible.
Thinking about it more in-depth, it makes total sense, right? We all have a limited amount of time and that time is, simply put, not extendable; 24 hours a day. Taking into consideration how much time we already need to spend on doing chores and things we don’t necessarily like, every single piece of time we can free up to do stuff we actually like doing, is more than welcome.
Digital products that are built to last and mainly focus on productivity or business-related matters, have to take this into consideration. As a business behind such a company, you need to help your customers to free up time and/or win back time.
The Productized service era
Not that long ago it was all about online tools and DIY digital products. However, it seems as if the self-service concept is reaching its boundaries and that this specific market is getting saturated. One of the main reasons why this so seems to be linked to the fact that a growing pack of lesser digitally savvy customers wants to start using digital products that can help them to be more efficient in their work and free up time.
This kind of customer expects a knowledge component to be integrated into a product. Meaning that a specific product does not only need to act and execute but it also needs to reason and contemplate.
The above requires that software companies need to conceptualize the products they are looking to offer from a more human-driven service point of view. As a consequence, new business models are emerging that act as a hybrid between product and service.
The bold and the ambitious
During the networking event organized by the Flanders Investment and Trade, the head of the Imec.istart fund Sven Decleyn did a short keynote about the Belgian startup ecosystem.
Sven pointed out that as a young company, independently of the size or the geography you’re from, it’s important to be bold and ambitious. However, this does not necessarily mean that a big exit or an IPO should be on your mind. Being bold and ambitious about the team you’re building and the top-notch customer service you’re delivering could be better goals as you’re pushing to create a company that matters.
And although we’re all in the technology business, in the end, it’s still all about the people. So better be wildly motivated to increase and add value for those humans.
For more updates on the conference, check out our Unbound London Instagram stories highlight.