How to Build Experiences Where Technology Is Felt, Not Seen

Your customers won’t remember how technologically advanced your brand is. They’ll remember how your experience made them feel. 

When designing the right tech mix, knowing your customers and utilizing empathy-building approaches is key to creating the right tech solutions for your business. 

Once you’ve considered the massive influence of empathy in your customers’ changing behaviors and built your data strategy on unlocking real insights, next you have to make sure you’re using the right technology to make it happen. Not only to just bring your current strategy to life, but to easily and quickly enable the inevitable changes you’ll have to make in the future. 

The key once more is (you guessed it) empathy. 

When used strategically, thoughtfully, and, yes, empathetically, technology can empower seamless and unforgettable experiences that will make your target audiences feel all the ways you want them to: engaged, impressed, empowered, and loyal.
 

The right mix of tech ingredients powers your experience

When it comes to how various technologies and platforms intersect to inform an empathetic, authentic customer experience, the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. 

It’s thinking in “parts” and not the whole that can lead brands down the wrong road in the first place.

There are common elements that every unique experience has, and each is a thoughtful culmination across content, commerce, data, marketing automation, and more. Your approach to universally operationalizing all of these components creates a process that can benefit your organization. 

To be ready to scale, be agile, and adapt your business from a global perspective, you need to have an equally global perspective on how you modernize. These tech ingredients are inherent in every experience, and your ability to operationalize them with velocity and scale will separate the market leaders from the followers. 
 

Build for agility and adaptability from day one

Agility isn’t something that just happens. You need to plan for it. That means expanding your thinking and making sure you’re not making technology choices too focused on any one need or channel. 

Take content, for example. When you think about creating content, it can be too easy to think of it only within the channel you’re building it around. Having a genuinely channel-agnostic content strategy is much bigger and more complicated than what many companies are set up to do.

So to solve for complexity and scope, you tie yourself down to a solution that works quickly but isn’t necessarily ready to scale. You’ve bundled yourself from the beginning too closely to a specific channel, business division, or geography. Now your ability to switch gears and respond meaningfully is hampered. The next time you need to adapt quickly to anything unforeseen (like, say, a global pandemic) you’re automatically constrained. 

When we think about making technology work invisibly, it’s crucial that all the tech machinery you’ve employed isn’t bundled together too tightly. If you keep that in mind as an integral focus of your strategy from the get-go, you’ll have fewer significant challenges in the future and be ready to switch directions. 
 

How to start unbundling tangled up tech

Untangling technology where you might have focused too granularly in the past begins with your cultural mindset. At its core, this is about your brand’s ability to handle change. 

How you address this change is a matter of how you redefine your customer experience. When any aspect of your business model — from strategy, to pricing, to product — is too closely tied to one individual channel or platform you’ll inevitably run into problems. 

You need to be focused on an overall digital experience that aligns the profitable things for your business with what customers want and where they’re already going — not where you want them to be. 

You can’t fight where your audience is going, no matter how sophisticated your tech strategy is. The technology you use can only amplify, for better or worse, where your business opportunities are. 
 

Avoid solving small at the sacrifice of big picture strategy

Even organizations with long-term digital strategies and existing investments have to keep an eye on high-level thinking. Maybe even more so. 

This is where the influence of technical decision-making on overall strategic planning is significant. Sure, it’s easier to give budget and accountability to a specific business line or area to source technology. In the short term, it reduces dependency and complexity. But in the long-term, you’re far more likely to find yourself constrained by that same narrow initial scope that allowed you to move quickly in the first place. 

Put simply, you can’t think big while only solving for small. 

The real trick is how to balance both considerations. The magic is blending the immediate need, guard railed by operational governance, so that at the same time you’re setting yourself up for maximum adaptability in the future. 

That’s where having a partner like Appnovation comes into play. We have strategic insights from a long list of partners and a long history of real-world solutions for how we’ve solved similar challenges. We know how to connect the dots and shape a strategic direction in a way that takes a business forward and creates value. 

Get in touch with our experts today.