COMPANIES WILL BE CLOSER TO THEIR CUSTOMERS!
Profile
Considered Founder of the Year by Portuguese Women in Tech in 2018, Romana Ibrahim is the Founder and CEO of Keep Warranty.
With more than 15 years of experience in developing markets, her main focus is the costumer. Created in Amsterdam’s Growth Acceleration Program Startuobootcamp FinTech & CyberSecurity and developed in Startup Lisboa, the multi-awarded Keep Warranty was recently nominated by EU-Startups as one of the 10 most promising Lisbon’s Startups.
First of all, thank you for being available to change some ideas about the present and future. Can we start by sharing which are the main challenges of your current responsibilities?
I have managed companies with 100 people and others with only 5, and without any doubt, the biggest challenge is always to guarantee that innovation is the core of the firm and that we are able to quickly reinvent our concepts whenever necessary.
In order to do so, we have not only to be visionaries, but we also need to be sure that our product answers the future needs of the market and, at an operational level, that our team is strong enough to pull it out.
What are the big tendencies in your industry?
Information analytics, as the ability to analyze data and extract meaningful information, is a critical competitive advantage.
Living in this 4th industrial revolution, means we need not only to analyze data, but also to do it in real time and extract virtual insights. The growing need for solutions that respond to real time interactions and new emerging technologies, create a need in organizations for streaming analytics services, in order to create value trough the increase of operational efficiency, waste reduction and better capacity to formulate customized responses in an increasingly demanding business environment.
Client/Customer relationship is critical for any company. What would you consider to be the main distinguishing factor?
We all agree that technology based products have a tremendous impact on the way people live and work.
Through these products and services, companies promote unprecedented changes in society thus increasing their own influence.
But, in exchange for the access to personal information and influence capacity, consumers are demanding firms to be more responsible, work with more transparency and the capability to answer immediately to specific needs.
If technology has ever growing advantages, as consumers, we want cheaper solutions, faster interactions and more expediency.
Nowadays, consumers trace their own path. Messages are no longer unidirectional, from company to client. Clients surf freely through several firms and brands, online and in physical stores, on several devices and using many channels. They trust in authentic interactions with companies and other consumers in order to make conscious decisions – the most influencing and defining contents are the ones generated by consumers themselves, these are the ones that shape purchase behaviors.
People yearn for interaction preceding any transaction. They look for a merge between the real world consumption experience – fast and customized – and the speed and innovation brought by the digital world – that satisfies needs almost immediately – according to the new “FISITAL” tendency. Clients expect firms to place them as their number one priority, regardless which channel they choose to make their purchases.
Offering an integrated, customized online and offline experience, adapted to clients’ expectations and daily routine, represents an opportunity for companies to stand out – specially considering the growing significance that these experiences have in purchase decisions.
Keep Warranty’s services will soon provide in our platform, services that match perfectly our users’ needs and, in addition to being customized, they are related to several consumption experiences that we are a part of.
Having the current challenges and opportunities of Business Intelligence/Analytics in mind, How important is data and critical business information?
Data is everywhere and firms need to capture and process everything – client information, transactions, product and service purchase history, customer journeys, marketing campaigns, result flows, among others – so that they can exploit their information’s full potential and extract operable insights to develop relevant and appropriate solutions for their clients.
In this context, the biggest challenge is to create an environment that allows the connection of data provided by different sources, in order to obtain great data volumes from local environments, cloud and hybrids.
To do this, a data management strategy that allows the integration of structured business data with massive amounts of unstructured data (Big Data) is essential.
This solution needs to follow the same speed as the companies’ business, offering real time insights that can be applied to massive data volumes, allowing oriented innovations – including tools and methodologies like machine learning, AI and predictive analysis.
To you, innovation is…
Creating solutions for real problems and improve substantially consumers’ life quality.
That’s what we do at Keep Warranty, in about 1 year we managed to help more than 75.000 people to solve their problems.
Furthermore, I can’t help but to quote Simon Sinek: “To be innovative, we can’t look to what others have done. The whole idea of blazing a path is that there was no path there before”.
In 2030, companies will be…
… closer to the customers, focused on client satisfaction and service oriented.
Firms will have to include the new technologies in everyday tasks:
AI, Machine Learning, 5G or Blockchain will be the equivalent to being online nowadays.
I am an optimist and I believe technology, data protection and digital education will improve life quality at a global level.
And the same will happen with companies that are forced to adapt to these changes, invest in the customers’ experience and guarantee client proximity and loyalty, or else they might end up like Kodak or Blockbuster.
