Our major challenge: the GDPR. We were supposed to deal with three major directions which we had to manage, and we actually did that successfully. We had to adapt our techniques to the legal requirements (managing data deletion, anonymization, data management logic, database update history and communication history, to make things more manageable).
We have long, sometimes endless discussions with customers to make them understand the impact on their business. We also discussed which email addresses had to be reconfirmed and which did not, we analysed the implementation of GDPR messages (classic, we would say, just before the last 3 days before the actual implementation). It was a crazy time, our busiest of the year, which made Black Friday feel like an office holiday.
The third matter is related to the lengthy negotiations we had on contract deadlines, which were extremely time-consuming. We had to deal with a lot of contract formats, and countless claims, clarifications and explanations.
All of these efforts helped us understand that the market could be segmented into three broad areas:
- Most small business still did not know how to properly manage GDPR requirements (some of them still fail to understand the requirements and the risks to which they expose themselves);
- Large firms, especially Romanian ones, prefer to take risks, without acting illegally, but also without documenting the way in which they collect data, and work according to the well-known concept: ”that is good enough”;
- (other) large firms pay attention to all the details.
Those were also the times when most clients discontinued their communication with clients for a few months, and then had to learn again how to do it, while activities hardly got back to normal in September, in most cases. Unfortunately, some customers tried to adapt on the fly and – after noticing that many users had not confirmed their subscriptions – they took the risk and included them in the databases.
GDPR made a lot of waves on the market, but that was not the only major thing we worked on and we are proud that in 2018:
- Is the year that saw huge growth in text message automation;
- We separated communication agreements on each individual text message/email channel for better data traceability;
- We introduced the ability to observe if the prices of the products posted on websites change, in order to alert the customers who shown interest in those products.
This was our successful 15-year track record, and we are so proud of it. This journey taught us so much, and shaped us into what we are today. Next, we had our eyes on the future, while preparing for 2019, a year when we expected storytelling to play a major role. We expected that people would no longer be buying products or services, but emotions, because as strange as it sounds, robotisation tends to make us more human. We wanted to feel that we interacted with people, services and products that understand us and share our feelings.
Hopefully, our next meeting will find us more positive and confident!
