On the mobile experience: It plays a very significant part of the user journey. More than 80% of our customers are engaging with us on a mobile device. So whenever we’re looking at streamlining the user journey, or how something is going to work, it’s all built from a mobile-first point of view, because that’s where and how our customers want to engage with us. We’ve seen instances where all of Australia wakes up and decides to go to the movies, and the first thing they do is they pick up their mobile phones and type in the website. That creates a tsunami of demand on our web environment, but they just expect it to work. Not only have we increased performance and reliability of our digital channels, but we’ve significantly reduced our Azure hosting costs as well because of the efficiencies we’ve achieved behind our new website and mobile app.
On digital retail: If I reflect on the last few years of the digital strategy, one of the key things we did was to say that trying to host our own digital gift stores is really not the way to go. So as part of the greater strategy where we we’ve redeveloped our website, ticketing, and primary consumer-facing websites and apps, we decided to move our gift stores to the online platform Shopify, which runs ecommerce stores globally. What that gave us was the reliability and scalability to give users familiarity with their user journey to buy merchandise. In our case, it’s our gift cards. It also has a lot of built-in promotional functionality that we’re able to leverage. It ended up being a great decision that enabled us to sell on social channels and a wide range of other ways that we didn’t have the ability to do before.
On change management: Company culture is hugely important. I don’t know whether it’s our industry or the culture I’ve helped build within the technology department, but we have very low turnover. I think all leaders will say your success comes from surrounding yourself with great people, and I feel like I’ve done that. I’ve got a head of development and architecture who had the forethought to think about where we needed that strategy to be, what we needed to achieve, and giving people the autonomy and support to do what they’re good at. This is what breeds great outcomes and a great culture for success. It’s all built around trust. Of course, it also comes with challenging those people to go beyond whatever it is you set out to do. If you stretch those goals, then ultimately you achieve more than what you want to achieve. I think that’s what people also enjoy. They want to know not only that they have clear objectives of what to achieve, but how their achievements are going to impact the bigger picture.
