Blake has always taken a natural gravitation to technology. In fact, our founder, Howard Blake, has been in the technology business since 1990. During this time, Blake has seen all kinds of technology come to fruition. Although our technology has changed throughout the years, one thing remains the same… it’s always driven by innovation.
So, what’s changed? And more importantly, how has Blake adapted to meet the demands of an evolving technological era? For starters, we’ve been focused on consumer behaviour. In the past, it might have meant surveys but right now, we’ve built behavioural algorithms that can predict consumer behaviour so that we are able to discover where best to spend our efforts. Understanding consumer behaviour also allows us to make our technology more useful and relevant to the audience with which we wish to connect.
Social Media has been another large driving force behind technological development at The Blake Group. These applications have generated a new set of behaviours, which when recognised and harvested, can be used to our advantage. When taking into account the way in which a social media platform like Facebook allows us to gain deep insight into consumers’ patterns of thought and action, it’s obvious that we need to tailor our messages to suit these new behaviours. Although social media is seen as a behavioural modifier, it’s possible to use it as a tool to understand and predict consumer actions as well.
Through interactions with an audience on social media, we’re able to pick up trends. Businesses like Blake become aware of such trends and ascribe to them, or as we often do, forecast new trends. This is an integral part of any business that exists in the modern world, today. Primarily because if we fail to advance as trends do, we risk redundancy with our target market. As important as adapting with the trends, it’s just as vital to understand consumer behaviour. This is logical, should you not get your target market, you’ll struggle with them getting you.
Innovation should be the lifeblood of any corporation. Think of it this way, if all banks hadn’t created their own mobile banking app, customers would have only switched to a bank that did. This innovative challenge is a hot topic in the contact centre world as many still believe that the best way to liaise with customers is over a telephone call. We’re of the opinion that your success rate will differ between demographics and means of contact. Some companies have seen higher conversion rates with a digital interaction over voice-based calls alone. Some might argue that it’s too soon to migrate to digital contact alone. We think it’s a sign for the next step in digital evolution. Perhaps it isn’t a distant prospect, and maybe we’re not as far off as we think?
We will continue to share our thoughts, insights and experiences as the Blake journey unfolds. There will be some challenges and many questions posed along the way but that’s what we’ve come to expect on our quest for digital disruption.
