Clients are wrestling with what their businesses will be in 5 yrs: Chestnut

Earlier, big thinking was happening at the strategy level and technology was the enabler. Now the reverse is happening, Donald Chestnut tells Sangeeta Tanwar

How do you see technology disrupting the consumer experience?

We have been talking about technology changing businesses worldwide over the last 20 years. However, what has changed in the recent past is that there has been acceleration in the adoption of technology. As the brands are racing to close the gap between their businesses and where the consumers are, we are moving from a point where technology was just a way to deliver a new experience to customers to technology becoming the core of the business to stay competitive. For example, technology in mobile devices in the hands of people like ourselves has disrupted the world. It is those two trends, technology itself and the ability to deeply understand people as to how we think about vacation planning or retirement, that is powering businesses today.

With technology taking the centre stage, how do you approach the creative and strategy part of businesses?

Even if I rewound five years back, I think technology was the enabler. And you had bigger thinking happening at the strategy and creative level. We had media and advertising companies coming up with bigger ideas as to how to engage and transform a business and using technology to help empower that. Now the reverse is happening. Technology is disrupting the world at an ever-increasing pace providing the means for disruption and transformation. And how you do that is a creative exercise surely, but it is almost secondary. Earlier, technology was the back office and now the technology is the conversation itself.

There is a comment from the Starbucks CEO that describes the firm as a technology company that sells coffee. I often use it in my presentations to illustrate how technology is proving to be a big disruptor. Of course, Starbucks is a coffee and a retail company, but it is using technology big time to run loyalty programmes and to support mobile payment. Leveraging technology, Starbucks is way ahead in the game in the world of beverages and fast food.

How has the disruption unleashed by business changed and impacted the business landscape for companies like SapientRazorfish?

The first thing is that digital is no more on the surface. Digital is moving right into the core of the business, it is moving right up to the CEO (chief executive officer) level.

Most of our clients are now wrestling with what their business is going to be in the next five years. When you have the world’s biggest hotel providers wrestling against Airbnb, which does not even hold any rooms. It’s just technology in the hands of the people creating hotel solutions. So, the technology driving to the core is now changing all aspects of the business. It is also changing our business.

So what was once for us a familiar case of working with just media and marketing firms has now turned into re-architecting the business from product to service to bank branch to distribution through web and mobile.

So, what are the new focus areas for the company?

We have to think about what are the new services that we need to offer to clients as their business needs are changing fast. It’s no longer enough just to think about a creative idea, rather it is more about thinking aloud what is going to be the impact of an idea. We are actively looking at developing new skill sets in areas such as product design. For example, talking about product design, for long we have been used to thinking about mobile app design for say a bank. Now we are thinking differently. One may be thinking about a mobile app from the outset but whatever you develop today has to be a brand new theme and product that could help save a bank from extinction amidst rising competition from various payments apps.

Such solutions call for a different mindset around innovation and creativity. Digital product design is a priority for us. We are also big on service design as a practice that is thinking about how do we transform the entire customer journey inside the business and outside the business. The focus is on delivering cognitive experience through artificial intelligence — think of Siri. A lot of our clients are looking at how do we harness the power of big data to create some level of automated smart experiences. There are many among us that think the future of the website is really cloudy at a time when we are talking about using an app to book our flights. Essentially, it’s a fight between search versus browse as we are realising that there are different ways of interaction. 

Another high area for us is investment in physical environments. So, think about a bank branch of today and the future. What would a bank branch look like in the next 10 years in a digital world. It is not that SapientRazorfish is going to go deeply into physical designs. Our core strength is technology and leveraging it to drive disruption and understanding the consumer experiences. We are betting big on designing for what I call connected environment — a hotel lobby, a bank branch of the future when shopping is changing from a physical to digital experience. The thrust is going to be on using the same creative and technology skills at the base level for a whole range of business channels.