Veronica Buitron
Co-founder and CTO, TangoCode

Digital Transformation is key to survive in this age of data-driven sales and marketing. Most companies need to relook their digital processes and adapt to the disruptive phenomenon. We spoke to Veronica Buitron, Co-founder and CTO of TangoCode, to understand how to bridge the gap between UX  and CX and the current state of digital transformation in B2B marketing firms. TangoCode builds custom software for companies in the digital marketing space.

Tell us about your role at TangoCode and the team/technology you handle.

I’m the CTO and Co-founder of TangoCode. We are a custom development company with emphasis providing scalable solutions for digital marketing companies based on ideas of innovation, automation, ownership, diversity, and partnership. At TangoCode I work with with the technical team leaders and sales and marketing leaders to define our future strategies from a technical and business perspective.

What is the current state of Digital Transformation for B2B companies?

When we talk about Digital Transformation, I refer to companies that have re-thought and restructure the way they do business to interact with their customers using digital to enhance their customer experience and current operations. In that sense, I believe the awareness is there. Most B2B companies believe their industry will be disrupted by a digital innovator. However, I think the majority of the companies believe they are not going to be that disruptor.

Companies struggle to adapt their current processes to transform digitally. Most of us, have some type of digital strategy in place but few have been able to digitize their strategy instead of having a digital strategy, and that is a big difference. I think there is a huge opportunity for disruptiveness in different industries and the B2B consumer is expecting as much digital as the end-customer because, in the end, we expect what we are exposed to in our daily lives. So customers expect an integrated digital and offline experience, regardless the service or product you are delivering.

How are you competing against the established platforms for Digital Services?

We don’t compete with them in the sense that we are in a different niche, we work with companies where digital is such an intrinsic part of their value that makes it hard to work with off-the-shelf solutions. We develop a process through which we work with the company to tie their business goals to technology so that technology will serve their goals and not the other way around. We partner with our clients to develop technology that might have some of the same functions that you find in established platforms but are thought through and are going after a different outcome. Our solutions power the acceleration of our client’s digital transformation by enhancing their existing products, bringing new products or new experiences to their customers.

In 2018, to what extent do Product Innovation teams manage to bridge the gap between UX and CX?

CX vs. UX = Client vs User.

The client wants a complete experience that meets their expectations regarding value. A user cares about the frictions in using a product although it might not necessarily be tied to the value.

Here at TangoCode, we strive to provide the greater amount of value for a unit of effort from our clients. Our job from innovation perspective is to understand when a killer UX is an intrinsic part of the value in a relationship with the effort or not.

There is an intrinsic UX baseline that digital users are expecting and you cannot fall under. That baseline is given by everyday tech exposure in every action we take involving technology. As long as we are above that baseline, it is up to what value means for the client much effort we want to invest in UX.

Bottom line CX is not tied to UX. A client experience can be great because just clicking one button through our automation platform saved a user 700 hours, regardless of the interaction.

What does your product and solutions roadmap look like for mobile marketing and advertising?

We are a custom development company that we redefine custom development, in the sense that what we bring to the solution pre-built building blocks that accelerate the construction of the digital solution. In that sense, we have initially focused on building blocks for ad-media platforms to place information using best practices and then collect results in standardized reporting with visualization applications.

Now, we are starting to focus on the next level, which is to have building blocks ready to enable voice to digital solutions and use machine learning to make sense on all the data we help scale so the solutions could be insight-ready from a technical perspective.

What role would your bots play in making a refined Digital Transformation?

As I mentioned in the previous questions, we think that voice is one of the main drivers that will transform many industries. Look at Alexa or Google Home; they are changing the way we live. They are now making calls to book appointments for you with natural language so going to a website and clicking things is going to be a thing of the past.

One of our building blocks focuses on the visualization of digital marketing campaigns results for agencies. Now we will have results voice activated for fast insights, so people on the go can ask questions about how the campaigns are performing before scheduling calls. We believe that people are looking for a more natural interaction everywhere and that is where the voice comes into play. For that, we are working on a voice-activated application powered by AWS Lex (Technology that powers Alexa) to get answers to questions directly to their phones.

What technologies in AI/machine learning have you deployed, or plan to deploy in the coming?

We are heavily invested in AWS technologies so besides AWS Lex we are doing some R&D with Amazon SageMaker to build, train and deploy some models that will allow us to make predictive analytics. For instance, in the Dashboard building blocks, we could proactively start showing clients data insights that will allow them to make decisions more productively.

Thanks for chatting with us, Veronica.
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