2018 is slowly but surely coming to an end. But preparations for 2019 are continuing to run at full speed. Even better? There’s still news to announce before the end of the year! True to the motto: Think about tomorrow, today. We’re giving all brands, retailers, and manufacturers the chance to do just that. At the Handelskraft Conference on the 28th of March 2019 at the Klassikstadt in Frankfurt am Main.
German hospitals aren’t exactly known for being digital pioneers: Lots of paper with handwritten notes, x-ray prints, and hardly usable digital health insurance cards. A long way from what Hollywood shows medical facilities to be like. In these shows and movies, doctors are far from reality. Using tablets at a patient’s bedside to show the patient their fracture on a digital x-ray with an animation to help explain what happened internally. The German consortium SMITH wants to use a standardised data system to take the first steps towards efficient patient management so that the digital transformation can finally begin in these hospitals.
Source: pexels
On May 8th, Google CEO Sundar Pichai took his place on stage in Mountain View, CA. During his keynote at the Google I/O Conference, he presented a new development to an astonished audience that could change the world: Google Duplex. Google Duplex lets the Internet giant give AI a voice. The voice is indistinguishable from a real human. In other words: When Google’s AI makes a phone call, the person on the other end doesn’t think they’re talking to a computer. Google Duplex even intersperses a few ums and erms through its sentences. Google Duplex has created a scalable assistant with an ingenious understanding of dialogues that can lead thousands of conversations at once.
Google’s focus on this project is a solution for private users. But it’d be unfortunate if this groundbreaking technology can only take care of table reservations for your next candlelight dinner. Only with personal customer service can this intelligence reach its full potential.
Experience, wisdom, leadership – all these qualities are spoken to people who are older than you, right? From small business to schooling to the completion of vocational training or studies, it is primarily older people who educate, advise, train, and lead. This socio-cultural character ensures that one expects a senior person to be someone older than oneself.
Thanks to digitisation, new job profiles and the demographic change 4.0, it’s precisely this expectation that is increasingly being met. The tendency is to have a project and team leader around 30 with a staff of 40-plus years.
Waiting in line to pay at checkout with cash or a card for a product that you don’t know if it’s the latest, best, and greatest? These are not good conditions for a modern customer experience. Unfortunately, customer-unfriendly experiences in stationary retail are still a reality. No wonder that consumers prefer to use the simple and fast version of e-commerce in many areas. There is no queue, no cash. Product suggestions are personalised and although the service is usually not personal, at least a chatbot has mastered manners. It’s about time that the offline retail to pull itself together and focus on its former core competence: Service!
Some work best under the pressure of time. Especially when it comes to e-commerce projects, we all know how important it is to keep up with the times when it comes to demands and trends, as well as literally being on time. Both levels can only be justified if internal and external conditions are right. In other words: Both processes and employee responsibilities in the company, as well as the system and technology framework must be well thought out or compatible. What this theory looks like in practice is shown in record time by the project we implemented together with our client Netto eStores.
Do I need an umbrella this morning? Add buttermilk to my shopping list. Play the latest episode of House of Cards in the living room. In millions of households, these questions and requests are already a regular thing in everyday life and are answered or completed (more or less) reliably by virtual assistants immediately. But how is it in offices? Are we ready to stop using our hands and let our voices work for us?
It’s the motto of business this year: The most traditional German companies have joined forces. We are talking about Allianz, Deutsche Bank, Hamburg’s major publisher Gruner + Jahr, and others. They are not merging, but they are currently piling up log-in platforms. The goal is clear: It’s all about snatching away or at least digging up the valuable user data from big overseas competitors — Facebook, Google, and Twitter. In theory, a good idea, the practice is unfortunately too small, as you will see. It’s time to think bigger so that we Europeans will not miss digital advances in line with data security.
A data scandal here, sinking user numbers there. It looks like Facebook is continuing down the path of bad press for the long-haul. But Facebook has something good to announce, which should at least make environmentalists happy, among all their critics.
The platform age is fractured, not just for B2C but also for B2B commerce. That was the focus of this year’s ECC Forum on April 12th at the BALLONI Hallen in Cologne, that we got to attend. We got to eavesdrop of presentations from large retailers and manufacturers like Conrad Electronic and Gabor Shoes. Furthermore, we got to exchange ideas and knowledge about new e-commerce developments with many different other retailers, manufacturers, and other digital experts. That helps us summarise what the five trends in the platform age are for you.
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