Navigating a digital reckoning in the art industry | Elizabeth Van Bergen, Product Experience Lead (Phillips)

Today, LogRocket’s VP of Marketing, Jeff Wharton, talks to Elizabeth Van Bergen, who leads product experience at Phillips, a global high-end auction house.

In this episode we talked about:

• Creating a product experience for both tech novices and early adopters

  • “One of our big things is always creating parity between experiences. We always want to create the journey for the client, we want to show people what they can do, not force them. We've really been able to also bring that online and offer them the digital space from a product standpoint.
  • Some people just always prefer that personal high touch. But the idea for us is to be able to create an experience where for 80% of the clients it’s not necessary. So the 20% of the market that we're looking towards, the ultra-high net worth individuals, we will always be able to service them.
  • But by being able to solve for the 80%, it gives our team the bandwidth and ability to focus on the ultra-high net worth individuals, whereas our tools help those early adopters."
  • How the traditional auction industry went digital overnight
    • “[The pandemic] was a reckoning for the whole world, but I think for an industry that is so rooted in tradition, like the auction world, it was the catalyst that drove everyone to really be interested in the change. It wasn't that people didn't know that it needed to happen, that we didn't need to change our digital offerings; it just wasn't the core of what we were doing.
    • Changing something within the auction world can sometimes be like trying to move a mountain. You're trying to explain something that is maybe very foreign to what our specialists are used to doing; this is how we've done it for 20, 30 years. So the pandemic was great because it changed everybody's minds and it rerouted how people were thinking about things like 'What can I do for this client or what can I offer them digitally?'”
  • And why the digital experience is as important as the functionality itself
    • “Relationships within our industry are key. So you want people to keep coming back because, whether someone is a consigner or a buyer, both are clients. Either way, the company is making money and it's important to service both of those clients.
    • So you always want people to be coming back. If you have a happy buyer, they come back, let's say maybe five, 10 years later and they sell, you have a happy consigner. So you also develop a brand loyalty and that trust is really key.
    • So even though some of what we do is still, and will always be, in person, that digital aspect of it, if someone's trying to WhatsApp someone after a meeting and now all of a sudden that share option isn't providing the correct metadata that's supposed to be there, that can be really frustrating, and can also not always look as nice, and sometimes it just needs to look nice too."

Links

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethvanbergen/

Chapters

00:00 Intro
00:54 Elizabeth Van Bergen's Background and Career Journey
02:15 The Art of Productizing Taste
03:22 Digital Transformation in the Auction Industry
05:17 Creating Seamless Digital Experiences
12:10 Navigating the Pandemic and Embracing Change
16:29 Leveraging Social Media and Data
21:36 Balancing Functionality and Experience
28:27 Collaborative Efforts and Future Directions
32:09 Outro

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LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today.

Special Guest: Elizabeth Van Bergen.