Headquartered in Pune, Maharashtra, Globant is a technology services provider that delivers software solutions by leveraging emerging technologies and related market trends. It provides services for software development, gamification, infrastructure management, big data, mobile development and UX.

Over the last several years, a number of emerging technologies and related market trends have emerged to revolutionize the way end-users interact with technology and reshape businesses and competitive landscapes for organizations.

In this new context, companies’ customers, employees, partners and stakeholders have become “technology voracious” users with high expectations. These users have no durable affinity with a web, mobile or any specific platform or channel. They move fast from place to place and are keen to interact with their digital ecosystem anywhere and anytime, in a painless, fast, relevant and restriction-free way. They demand personalized, seamless and frictionless experiences that will simplify their lives. In short, they expect more in terms of the digital capabilities of the ecosystem of services and products around them.

In this new world, companies find themselves embedded in a digital environment and compelled to envision and start Digital Journeys. This process allows technology to exist as an invisible agent alongside services and products. Digital become an “enhancer” of people’s daily lives integrating seamlessly into every touchpoint between the user, products and services. The goal is to improve the experience in an never-ending cycle. The opportunity is the reward: an exponentially increasing ability to retain, convert, and, overall, enrich the relationship between businesses and their customers, employees, and stakeholders.

These kinds of Digital Journeys exceed the creation of a new a website, a nice and engaging mobile app or a unified omnichannel experience. On top of this, users and consumers are demanding a smarter and deeper connection with brands, based on delivering the proper context, messages and actions, leveraging Big Data and Fast Data from transactional systems and from other external sources of information. So with these Digital Journeys companies will be able to create memorable experiences that will be time sensitive and location aware, generating a smart differentiation and a personalized experience for users.

To deliver this vision, there are two main aspects that organizations will be compelled to focus on:

1. Explore and discover to understand the business. It is necessary to move away from a fragmented set of tools to a unified approach that guides the user through a multiplatform, context aware, seamless experience, the core foundations of the new relationship between companies, users and data. In order to achieve this change, companies need to establish a strategic central governance that looks at the company as a whole. There is a need for a short, mid and long-term digital strategic plan.This requires an in-depth assessment of how the user behaves and interacts with the company and the current state of fragmentation in touchpoints, platforms, tools and methodologies.

2. Build the experience with a unified approach. The ultimate goal is to have an ecosystem where all of the company’s touchpoints act seamlessly with the customer journey. For many companies this is a BIG challenge. For long now, they have been building isolated and fragmented experiences that address a certain area of the business. Whether they are physical stores or CRM, Web Desktop, Shopping Carts, Mobile apps or others, the reality is that all of them co-exist and have the ability to provide some sort of information to and from customers. Truly digital journeys are those that learn from the user in order to adapt the user experience to their behavior and preferences. The cornerstone is the amount of analyzed data required to provide useful information and interactions. They will unlock the true power of networks, mobile, wearables, and the Internet of Things, and will allow companies to start building the systems and applications that will make the digital plan a reality. The new tools need to be consistent, to persist its state across any platform, to be able to scale and adapt, and provide context aware functionalities.

The adoption of a digital journey plan and the switch to a fully developed digital ecosystem is a necessity that companies have in order to keep up with the new user relationship with its digital self.

I envision a world where the virtual and real intermixes to a point where users no longer care through which channel, media, or platform they interact. Brands that will conquer the user will be those that provide unique experiences, different for each user and his context, bringing together all their touchpoints and, in return, generating a deeper bond with their customer, more trustworthy, long lasting and emotional. There is only one question that each company need to ask itself: are you ready to start your Digital Journey?