50 Innovators of the Year 2021
CIO Bulletin
A digital consultancy works with companies as they mature in their digital journeys. This is often a multi-departmental effort including the marketing, digital and IT teams and involves a deep assessment of business goals, strategy, CX and the technology that it’s built upon.
Enterprises need to ensure their digital efforts and investments positively impact their business, but don’t always have the expertise or resources to execute these large and complex projects. This is where Appnovation plays a role.
Appnovation advances their clients’ businesses by innovating everything digital. They are endless innovators, constantly looking for new ways to connect the dots and connect people.
Appnovation’s approach is to become part of your team - true partners with a sustained commitment to your business goals. They believe in taking an experience-led approach to helping brands understand the role digital can play in realizing strategic opportunities, solving real-world business problems and delivering tangible and measurable results
We got in touch with Scott Wassmer, General Manager of the Americas, to hear more about how Appnovation innovates.
Q. Tell us about the full range of services on offer with Appnovation.
Appnovation is a global, full-service digital partner that helps our clients create innovative digital experiences, based on human truth. We work with our clients on everything from strategy, to experience design, to choosing and implementing the right technology, to seamlessly bringing that experience to life. Our solutions ultimately help our clients navigate the constant change in their business environment by placing our clients’ customers first.
Q. What makes Appnovation unique?
We have a different work model than many of our competitors. We are more agile than they are and we take an iterative approach to much of our work. Using a test-and-learn approach, we’re constantly implementing new insights so the experiences we build delight consumers.
Another priority of ours is putting the right people on the right project and empowering them to make decisions. This level of ownership means projects don’t get weighed down with the layers of bureaucratic management you’d typically see from our competitors, all while having the framework to scale as our clients need it. This is a differentiator.
Q. How are you helping create innovative digital experiences?
We connect user experience with technology, and technology with strategy, so our clients and their customers benefit. Not one of these things is more important than the others, but it’s in how they come together that matters. We also understand that consumer behaviors and expectations have shifted. More than ever, the most successful brands are the ones that deliver empathetic and human digital experiences.
Of course, this is easier said than done. Here are a few key factors to consider:
When these elements seamlessly come together, coupled with the right technology underpinnings, innovative digital experiences are made.
Q. How do you solve real-world business problems for your clients?
By defining a north star strategy that aligns the different areas of the business to a common path forward.
Appnovation recently conducted research on The Digital Consumer and found that over half (53%) of consumers say online experiences will be more important than in-person experiences in the next year. Additionally, 61% of consumers expect to have more of their brand experiences online in 2021 and beyond. This means that creating a great digital customer experience is essential. But it doesn’t happen in silos. Rather, a great customer experience requires many groups – from technology, to data & analytics, design, strategy, and marketing – come together to define what a value-based experience looks like.
Q. What’s one thing your clients should be thinking about now in order to be successful in the future?
The most important thing I’d tell anyone to do in 2021 is make sure they’re creating a customer experience based on fundamental long-term strategies.
The things people expect when they’re shopping — personalized service, human interaction, helps finding what they need — these don’t change when the experience moves online. Many companies are looking at AI, robotics, and new technology that, of course, could be extremely helpful to push their businesses forward. But not if they don’t have the basics done well.
Q. How are you helping brands keep up with the growing consumer expectations?
Customer experience has become the key differentiator for brands. Those that get it right see increased customer satisfaction, increased customer retention, and increased revenues.Fundamental to keeping up with consumer expectations is understanding them. Having solid customer insights allows a brand to enable more innovation and experimentation in its digital strategy and beyond.
Bringing together data and insights from around the organization creates a shared view of the customer, enabling us to design and build empathetic, personalized, and delightful experiences that center around the customer’s needs.
Q. Can you share a client case study?
Appnovation was recently engaged by three provinces in Canada – British Columbia and two others – to support the Single Site Staffing initiative in each province’s long-term and assisted living facilities amid the COVID-19 pandemic. These projects focused on the development of business processes, digital systems, and real-time collaboration to support the collection, analysis, and reporting of personnel data that allowed health employers to make decisions about healthcare resourcing in order to lessen the risk of COVID-19 transmission between healthcare facilities. Appnovation’s data analytics and insights identified hot spots within each province where there were a lot of staff working at multiple sites. As a result, important resourcing decisions were able to be made.
Q. What does innovation mean to you?
Innovation is a very loaded word in business today, as most people use the word as a marketing tool rather than embracing it as a core value.
To me, innovation isn’t evolution. Rather, it’s the ability to understand the needs of consumers that aren’t obvious to those around them, allowing you to create products and services that meet those needs before they’re known by the masses.
Innovation is about creating anything new that makes the world a better or happier place.
Q. What does the future hold for your company?
I’m extremely excited about the future of Appnovation. We’ve been on an amazing trajectory for the last few years by focusing on expanding our offerings, bringing in the best talent, and creating a workplace that excites our teams and clients.
As we continue to move forward, our focus is to create more value for teams, our customers and their consumers. We’ll be doing this through continuous expansion of talent, service offerings and locations while focusing our skill sets on the types of products that provide our clients with the best opportunities for their own growth.
Our success is built on the success of the products we create for our clients, as well as on how well those products are embraced by their consumers. Our goal is to continue to offer the best products in the world and by doing so, create one of the best companies in the world.
Meet the leader
For over two decades, Scott has successfully managed and mentored Fortune 500 companies amid their digital journeys. A tech native, he has a passion for developing the right strategies and implementations for companies looking to drive growth and value through digital business transformation and digital marketing innovation.
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