Evolving the digital DNA of a company

How do you update the DNA of a company and completely revolutionize a digital strategy? You invest in the right technology and the right talent.

There are a number of challenges that come with changing the digital landscape of a company. When I joined Amplifon four years ago, it had a digital presence, but it wasn’t working for them as much as it could be. But such is the nature of digital transformation - it’s constantly evolving. If you don’t evolve with it, you risk losing interaction with both your customers and employees. Even more so now, when an unexpected and unforeseeable situation such as Covid-19 pushed us to leverage on our digital touchpoints as never before and thought us how to be more closed to our customers during the emergency as well as in the future. Amplifon brought me in to re-establish and drive that connection. But before I could think about what media we should invest in and what type of digital touchpoints we should utilize, I needed to understand who our consumers were.

Understanding our consumer

 It's not a secret that our main consumers are senior individuals, but there is little research available about the way this customer base interacts online. A common misconception is that only young people use social media, and that the older generation is unfamiliar with the latest technology - but that is simply not the case. Our main customer base is digitally active, but in a different way to the younger generation. While big companies and marketing agencies invest their money in research on how to interact with youths, seniors are given little thought, meaning there’s little research out there for us to work with. And this is a missed opportunity considering that according to Ipsos, the media consumption of the +55 audience has increased significantly during the Covid-19 period and the rise of e-commerce and online communication has been a strong trend during the crisis.

Moreover, the study “Smart ageing. Technology has no age” powered by Amplifon and conducted by Ipsos, shows that seniors are devoted smartphone users (71% of Australian and German respondents prefer smartphone rather than the other devices such as tablets or laptops), very connected (75% of Italians and Americans go online several times during the day), and social media addicted. For these reasons, our first challenge was to understand how our older consumers interacted on digital platforms.

We struggled to find external partners to provide us with the research for our niche product - we had to do it ourselves. We dived deep and began to analyze our audience, using our partnership with Google and Facebook to get an exact picture of our senior customers behavior online. 

This was the most challenging period for us - understanding what the best way was to interact with this customer group. But we did it. This led to the creation of what we called the Digital Center of Excellence - an internal media agency that we could roll out company-wide and make accessible across all our global outlets. The work that we did in the past years allowed us to embrace the digitalization increase of our core target during the global health emergency. As a matter of fact, after the pandemic period, our digital leads grew of +20% cross countries and it’s been more than proportional to the increase of the audiences which grew of + 17,6%.

The impact of the Digital Team

Our new internal Digital Center of Excellence allowed us to innovate our digital marketing in two significant ways. Firstly, we own our technology stack - meaning we have complete access and control over the ad server, giving us our own digital management platform to work on. The technology stack gives us unlimited access to our specific consumer data. 

Secondly, it has been positively impacting the organization. If you look at big companies, they all have internal media agencies. It changes the way the company operates itself - having access to that platform and information allows other digital innovations to flourish. We now have that access and can identify what media we should invest in as well as what our digital touchpoint would be.

 An agile approach

A clear digital strategy and a cross-function team allowed us to do something that we have never done before: to create an ecosystem that links our hardware and software. Being able to directly communicate with the product, our hearing aids, we could use the digital ecosystem to create new services that our consumers would interact with. As a result, the Amplifon App was born. 

We distanced ourselves from the traditional silo approach when developing our new services, deciding instead to reshuffle everything. Our agile approach allowed us to understand what both the technological and operational impact would be - from the design itself to the usability of the app, creating a service that integrates functionally into everyday life.  

Evolving our digital DNA

In the time I’ve been here, we’ve strongly accelerated our transformation journey from product to service-driven approach, never compromising on our customer devotion. We now provide digital services. That is a massive shift as these services require bespoke software, UX design, engineering and constant innovation and maintenance - skills that were not in our DNA four years ago.

We’re a lean team, but we needed to add this knowledge and skill to our ranks. So, when we’re hiring, we know it’s vital to find the right people, who fit our philosophy and our ambition. When looking for talent, we need candidates to understand where the company has come from and where it is going. We want the right people, who can come in and bring an element that we are missing; someone embracing our corporate values and the ambition to always think strategically and change our services with a pioneering approach.

Any new employee that comes into our digital team needs to understand we are in a constant state of evolution. We now have a digital presence to build on - one that will keep our customers engaged as digital interaction continues to change. I want us to be a leader in this space, as digital is now in our DNA. 

Do you want to be part of our digital revolution at Amplifon? Find out more about what we do and the opportunities on offer for dynamic digital professionals.