At EEMAGINE 2017, Rishi Jaitly, CEO, Times Bridge shared with the full house of event planners the journey of a connected customer.

Customer transformation has become the primary subject of concern for most business leaders. In an era of digital proliferation, companies are vying for customer attention and hence engagement is becoming of paramount importance. As an example, companies aren't just using social media for promotions or to handle public relations crisis anymore, they are now engaging with customers and potential customers in a way that allows people a more intimate connection to the brand. More importantly, it is allowing marketers to play a decisive role in shaping organizational success.

Rishi Jaitly, takes us through multiple points we must make a note of for any business to be successful in this era of a connected world. For instance, paying attention to the “size of your app”, when the “high temper users” realize that the new app is using more data than expected, it effects them. And the opposite inverses as well. “Size of the online experience you offer is essential. Paying attention to bandwidth is actually how you will win and attract users to your online experience.”

The wall street journal piece on the “The End Of Typing: Next Billion Users Around The World by Eric Bellman” was quoted by Jaitly. The article talks about, profiling the Indian Internet users at Delhi railway station, and how many of them are using Whatsapp and Google without typing. Instead of typing searches and emails, a wave of newcomers—“the next billion,” the tech industry calls them—is avoiding text, using voice activation and communicating with images. When you start to think of creating experiences that can travel the internet, you have to start thinking about them.

The ecosystem is changing! In the last 8-10 months, India saw huge changes in the market. Not only because of “Demonetization” but also the launch of Jio was historic by every standard. Almost every app in India including streaming apps, retail, event, messaging etc saw a dramatic spike in usage at the end of 2016 because of Data, One Word JIO! After Reliance Jio launched free 3G-4G packages pan India, increased the accessibility and consumption of data to a scale we wouldn't have imagined so soon without its presence. It changed not only how Internet was perceived in India but also how monthly figures changed.

Artificial Intelligence is coming, it is the new electricity. Just as electricity changed almost every business around the world, the same way AI is capable of taking a variety of inputs to produce recommendations for you with what events you like, what content, etc. It is all in the near future.

So for Jaitly, “What becomes most important is Data. “If there is one thing I would encourage you to think about as you think about your future, I would ask you to prioritize data collection. Because what you are sitting on in all of your experiences are things that other people crave; which is an engaged user by definition. Someone who has come to one of your experiences by watching it virtually. What you are sitting on is data, and what undergoes all of this is data about the engaged user. What has happened on the Internet is that there are clicks everywhere. Collecting data and being rigorous about that is extremely important. I recommend you to hire a Chief Data Officer, data scientist will be hugely important”, says Jaitly.

When Jaitly was in twitter they launched an app called Periscope which allows you to live stream a public forum and anything you are experiencing in the world. And we used to call that teleportation. And In his opinion, that’s a powerful way to think about the future of events. This has now been a reality for the last couple of years. And think about engaged experiences not only keeping the footfalls in mind but also the experience in the digital sphere; this is going to only get more pronounced. A way to think about this looking at future is to think about importance of data.

Importantly, in India, now there is this vibrant start-up ecosystem, with venture capitalists from Japan, China and US, investing into people thinking about these ideas. “The events and entertainment industry needs to harness data and create models around these new ideas. The same investor who earlier said I would invest on platforms and not on content experiences, today is saying they wish to invest triple the amount in this segment. India is becoming a global hub for start-ups. Media technology is worth giving a shot. There is no reason why events industry cannot have an ecosystem around this standpoint”, opines Jaitly.

In conclusion he added, “Data is vital, the more you invest in collecting and understanding and deriving actionable insights from the data you are sitting on, the more powerful your innovation will be from a content experience standpoint, the more investors will be walking to you, you will create more delightful experiences and your business will pick up more momentum.”