Stronger together: how Paul works to achieve a unified customer experience  

Multiple domain experts, a joint mission 

Paul de Metter is an unparalleled font of knowledge about working in an ecosystem of companies. That’s part of his role as CTO of 4NG Conclusion, the digital agency group that operates as a smaller ecosystem within the greater Conclusion sprawl. The core of an ecosystem, according to Paul, is that you serve customers from different entities, each with its own expertise, while collectively providing a unified customer experience. “Every company is motivated to offer customers the ultimate experience. That perspective makes it completely logical to want to help customers with everything. It is possible to go full-service, but some solutions really do require domain experts,” he asserts. “It is impossible to be a specialist in every single field all on your own. That is why we opted to specialize. From there, we have the option of collaborating with various external partners, but providing a unified customer experience takes more than that.” 

What Paul means by “more’ is a shared culture and vision. “It is important to work in the same way toward a shared mission: providing the best possible service to customers,” he explains. “In other words, you need to operate as a unified team with one single task. This also means that you need to be able to collaborate as direct co-workers. Within an ecosystem, all of this is possible.” 

The mindset of an entrepreneur 

Paul believes that an entrepreneurial mindset is the key to successful collaboration within an ecosystem. “An entrepreneur is proactive. They always want to learn and gain inspiration to provide their customers with even better service. They seek people out and keep expanding their network. That proactive attitude, combined with a network, is worth its weight in gold within Conclusion. That’s exactly what ensures that you will know where to find the other experts when you need them. If you invest in that relationship, you will be able to accelerate as needed.” 

Experimenting for the purpose of learning 

The entrepreneurial mindset is also important when it comes to providing service. “If you want to serve the customer well, you have to be at the forefront of change,” Paul believes. “That means not just being very familiar with the current market trends, but also experiencing them first-hand. In my opinion, that’s a matter of learning, adapting and improving. I see it as one big experiment. Take AI, for example. That will soon become part of everything we do – so I want to know what it is, how it works and what I can do with it. From there, I just start experimenting. On my own initiative, as an entrepreneur, because I want to explore this technology. The more we experiment ourselves, the more important the lessons we learn from those experiments, which can then be put into practice on behalf of our customers.” 

A single team tailored to the current challenge 

Paul believes that the Conclusion ecosystem really shines when exploring a technological trend such as AI. “As Conclusion, we created a joint AI proposition. That’s too big to manage on your own, so we bring together all the CTOs from all the companies to brainstorm. That’s when you make real progress. And by regularly collaborating at this level, you really get to know each other. From that valuable foundation, we can roll up our collective sleeves and make it happen together. Different companies work together in the back end, but the customer sees us as a single team tailored to the current challenge, providing a unified customer experience.”