Once I was in center college, I labored stage crew. I had no want to be on stage, however I beloved being backstage, behind the curtains, within the dim glow of the lighting board. Positive, the actors received all of the glory. However actors have understudies. The present doesn’t go on with out the sound, surroundings and props. We actually stored the lights on. And ever since then, I’ve had an incredible appreciation for the worth of labor that goes unseen.
That’s why I’m so pleased with the work IBM Consulting™ is doing with the Recording Academy® this 12 months. Most individuals know the Recording Academy for the sound and spectacle of the GRAMMYs. However far fewer individuals know what the Recording Academy does the opposite 364 days of the 12 months.
The Academy is the world’s largest society of music professionals, with greater than 22,000 members that represent the music trade: performers and producers, songwriters and sound engineers. On behalf of these members, the Academy fights for creator rights, works to avoid wasting music packages in faculties, educates individuals concerning the cultural and social significance of music, and supplies well being, monetary, and rehabilitation assets to music individuals in want.
During the last six years, because the Official Expertise Accomplice of the GRAMMYs®, IBM has labored the entrance of the home, remodeling the fan-facing expertise with AI-powered options like GRAMMY Perception with IBM Watson. It’s very seen work, accessible by tens of millions of music followers, and an incredible demonstration of AI’s means to remodel information into perception.
However this 12 months, the Academy requested IBM to go backstage, driving their digital transformation deep into the group. They requested us to remodel the member expertise. Put merely, members are the lifeblood of the Academy. And over the course of any given 12 months, they should have interaction with the Academy for any variety of causes: to resume their membership, to forged a vote for the GRAMMYs and, in the event that they’re fortunate, to just accept a GRAMMY nomination and e book tickets for Music’s Greatest Evening.
To assist facilitate these interactions, the Recording Academy did what so many firms do once they wish to higher handle the digital expertise of their prospects: they migrated to Salesforce’s highly effective buyer relationship platform.
“That is the digital age, and digital experiences outline your model, whether or not you’re a retailer, a financial institution or the Recording Academy,” says Panos Panay, the President of the Recording Academy. “And IBM has been important in serving to us take our digital expertise to the following stage.”
To do it, we activated a staff of IBM consultants that makes a speciality of maximizing the worth our purchasers get from the Salesforce platform. The staff collaborated with the Recording Academy utilizing IBM Consulting’s distinctive Storage methodology, defining personas, architecting person journeys and co-creating customized digital experiences for varied constituents, beginning with GRAMMY nominees. And since time was tight, the staff deployed IBM’s unique set of pre-built accelerators that saved almost 1,000 hours of growth time. (Learn extra about this work right here.)
“IBM helped us combine the nominee communication course of with our GRAMMY ticketing procedures and the membership software journey, making it a way more streamlined and safe expertise for this 12 months’s nominees,” mentioned Kelley Purcell, Vice President of Membership on the Recording Academy.
IBM is a B2B firm. Which implies that a lot of the work we do goes unseen by customers, even when they profit each time we enhance the client expertise for a retailer or thwart a cyberattack on a financial institution. Our work to enhance the fan expertise of the GRAMMYs over time might get all the eye. However when the artists take the stage on GRAMMY night time, keep in mind the backstage heroes that make a present like that attainable, and all of the vital work IBM has been doing behind the scenes.
