Partner Profile Q&A: Credera

Digital touchpoints and experiences infused seamlessly throughout physical spaces are fast becoming commonplace in industries like retail and healthcare. Many enterprises have begun the journey toward a cohesive, connected environment by adding modular technology-based components, such as self check-in or check-out stations, informational kiosks that can provide price or product details, and so on. They further bridge the physical-digital divide with associate handheld devices and consumer apps. However, given the complexity of these types of projects at scale, most enterprise organizations don’t attempt to execute a broader digital strategy on their own.   

Credera, an Aila partner, is a leading management and IT consulting firm that helps guide companies through digital transformation. In this brief Q&A, Taylor Marley, a manager in Credera’s Management Consulting practice, elaborates on some of the challenges and opportunities in this space, as well as how the synergy between Aila and Credera can accelerate innovation at scale.   

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your company?

Throughout my career, I have partnered with many organizations across industries to identify innovative solutions that solve for top-of-mind business challenges, primarily through digital transformation and marketing technologies. Credera is a full-service management consulting, user experience and technology solutions firm who helps many of the world’s leading brands engineer, install, scale, and optimize their leading customer experience technologies.

Who are your typical customers? What problems do you solve for them?

Our clients range from Fortune 500 companies to emerging industry leaders. We work with leading airlines, retailers, health care organizations, and restaurants to help them enhance their customer experience through digital applications. Credera partners with organizations to collaboratively solve their business and technology challenges, enabling them to better serve their customers and employees. We also work with organizations to create business cases for digital transformation and to define roadmaps with a clear path to return on investment.

What are some of the main challenges in this space?

There are two primary challenges that are top of mind for CMOs and CTOs in 2019: (1) orchestrating data-driven, personalized and contextual omnichannel customer experiences and (2) unifying customer experience data to proactively infer customer intent and retroactively assess marketing ROI. For the first, research is signaling that the average customer’s path to purchase is less linear and predictable than ever, which means that every touch point, whether digital or physical, must be meaningful to that unique customer given where he or she is on the path to purchase. This can be extraordinarily difficult to accomplish in a channel-centric or siloed organization whose incentive structure has deviated from business strategy over time. For the latter, the sheer volume of unstructured data being collected can make real-time data standardization, unification, and interpretation very challenging. Marketing ROI models must now account for this volume, in addition to the spectrum of channels customers now engage with.

How has Credera’s vision evolved over time?

Credera’s 20 years of growth have largely been rooted in the digital strategy and services space. However, given that we are now part of the Omnicom portfolio, we are even more uniquely positioned to bridge the traditional divide between Marketing and IT and partner to develop and implement best-of-breed, enterprise grade marketing technology solutions. We are excited about our unique positioning within the professional services industry and will continue to bring our technical and data science chops to the table with Marketing and Customer Experience stakeholders.   

What do you have planned for the future? Where do you see untapped opportunities in the market?

We see the lines between physical and digital commerce experiences continuing to blur and emerging technologies, such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), accelerating the pace of disruption. The digitally-enabled consumer and associate will be empowered to see and think beyond the confines of their screen, which will ultimately unlock the next frontiers of customer experience and growth. Our aims are to support our clients as they rationalize these disruptions in the context of their business strategies and devise aggressive, yet sustainable roadmaps to respond quickly to the competition. We believe Aila’s Interactive Kiosk is a formative component of this experiential development and will enable the activation of imaginative physical experiences.    

Why partner with Aila?

The Credera and Aila partnership is a great fit because we complement one another in terms of our core offerings and capabilities; the partnership, therefore, creates exponential value for clients. This partnership enables organizations to rapidly procure and pilot Aila’s solutions while simultaneously working on an agile, data-first plan for custom software development, feature prioritization, and implementations at scale. Credera can also provide program leadership to support delivery, adoption, measurement, and value realization. With this partnership, we look forward to providing forward-thinking organizations with innovative and flexible solutions that increase speed to market and enrich the customer experience.