Physical Events Are Set To Re-emerge With Digital Integration: Sabbas Joseph, Founder & Director, Wizcraft International
The global pandemic has been detrimental to the operations of many industries, all of whom have transformed themselves to survive. The event industry is no different. With an unexpected and immediate shift to digital, both brands and their customers entered new territory, defined by new rules. It is now clear that the virtual avatar of the event industry is here to stay and it will transform everything we know about customer experience.
In a pre-pandemic world, surveys pointed that brands valued customer experience as top priority, even above product and pricing explains Sabbas Joseph, the Founder and Director Wizcraft International in his keynote address at the BW Businessworld Event Tech Summit. He notes how the pandemic has disrupted normalcy leading to a new normal where we embrace digital tools irrespective of age in order to connect to our family, friends and work thereby propelling us towards the adoption of a technology that would have otherwise taken a decade.
“Some might say, we're all going to come back to the normal, physical events are going to be back. And there's another school of thought that the virtual events will die. Both are wrong. And both are correct. Physical events will be back. But they won't be back in the same form that we knew them prior to 2000,” Joseph remarks. Explaining the future of events as Phygital- an amalgamation of Digital and Physical, he believes customer experience will become location agnostic, putting us right in the middle of era where we can access brand experiences anywhere and everywhere.
Top 5 trends
Joseph offers 5 trends as his predictions for the future of phygital customer experience.
“Reinventing yourself, reinventing your business, reinventing everything around you, your vendors, your partners, your community, your ecosystem, is an art. Either you can let it evolve, inform and reform itself. Or you can set guidelines for yourself and everybody and set the guardrails for that reinvention,” Joseph concludes.
It is clear that in the future of new customer experiences, technology will be an enabler, time will be the new currency, data will be a big definer and content will remain a strong driver. The only differentiator will be the speed of acknowledgement; for the sooner brands accept it, the more ready they will be for a post-pandemic world.
