RavePro — Volume 16, Issue 21.1 — November 5, 2018
Latest headlines: Anthony Coppedge on automating customer journeys, Mark Coxon on selling services and liabilities, plus news from BwnQ, Barco, Hitachi, Marshall Electronics, Nanov, Studio Technologies, AVIXA and others
November 5, 2018 | Volume: 16 | Issue: 21.1
We have two compelling editorials today. Mark Coxon continues his series on selling soft services, this time with a discussion on the liabilities they present to integrators. AV over IP is a major shift for our industry — it obviously presents great opportunities, but it also means a new host of liabilities related to cybersecurity, data security and the integration of other systems and hardware that isn’t traditionally a part of an AV dealer’s wheelhouse.
Anthony Coppedge also has a column on automation for the AV industry. He’s not talking about automation with regards to AV technology — but with sales and the customer experience, a true modernization of the sales process.
AV integrators deal with a lot of potential liabilities in their day to day operations. They have to deal with potential auto accidents in their work trucks, workman's compensation claims that may affect their EMRs and increase their costs, the possibility of a structural failure in their installations causing equipment to fall on a customer and so on. The softer side of AV creates some liabilities that may cause certain integrators to pause or hesitate, which means in order to embrace this new frontier, integrators will have to do some due diligence to mitigate their risks.
Automation isn’t new to the audiovisual industry, but a new kind of automation for this technology-focused trade will be centered around automating the customer’s buying journey. As innovation has led the consumer markets to automate the discovery process for buyers, so too has the time come for the long-established AV industry to adapt and embrace the future of vertical market content automation for sales and marketing.
