Year 15 – Present and future
Every day we arrive at the office we only look to the future, but we have learned that to do this we must never forget the past and never disconnect from the present, and 2018 found us ready to act on all fronts.
Major challenge: GDPR. We are dealing with three major directions that we aim to manage and manage to do. We had to adapt the technology to the legal requirements (data deletion management, anonymization, data management logic, database update history and communication history, so that it is easy to manage).
We have long, sometimes endless discussions with clients to make them understand the impact on their business. We also discuss which email addresses need to be reconfirmed and which do not, we analyze the implementation of GDPR messages (classically, in the last 3 days we had available). It was a crazy time, the busiest of the year, which made Black Friday seem like an office holiday.
The third aspect is related to the long negotiations we had to carry out on the contractual terms, which consumed an extremely long time. We were faced with a lot of contract formats, a lot of claims, clarifications and re-clarifications.
All of this has led to the market being segmented into 3 large areas:
- The vast majority of small businesses still do not know how to correctly manage GDPR requirements (some of them still do not know what they are and what risks they are exposed to);
- Large companies, especially Romanian ones, which prefer to take risks, without acting illegally, but do not document their data collection methods, and work according to the well-known concept: let it go.
- Large companies that pay attention to all the details.
It was a period of readjustment for most clients who paused their communications for a few months, but activity returned to normal in most cases in September. Unfortunately, there are clients who "adapted" on the fly and after noticing that many users did not confirm their subscription, they preferred to take a risk and include them in the databases.
GDPR made a lot of waves in the market, but it wasn't the only major thing we worked on because we are proud of the fact that in 2018:
- This is the year in which SMS automation developed enormously.
- We have separated the communication agreements on each SMS/email channel for better data traceability.
- We are introducing the possibility of analyzing price changes of products on the site to generate alerts to customers who have shown interest in these products.
These were the 15 years that we are proud of today. From which we had to learn a lot of things and which shaped us as we are today. We look to the future and prepare for a 2019 in which we are convinced that storytelling will play a major role. We will no longer buy products or services, but emotions, because, as strange as it may sound, robotics is starting to make us more human. We want to feel that we are interacting with people, services and products that understand us and empathize with us.
Let's sound optimistic!
