Telum spoke to Adeline Plane, APAC Marketing and Communications Director of IDEMIA on what led her to join IDEMIA, how the business messages evolved from being product-centric to customer-centric, and the company's employee-centric business continuity plans in digital communication throughout the pandemic. 

What led you to join IDEMIA? What was your journey like becoming IDEMIA’s APAC Communication Director?
I joined IDEMIA France back in 2013 as an International Marketing and Communications Manager under the government solutions department. Two and a half years later, I relocated to Singapore to oversee the regional operational marketing for the public security and identity unit. With the customer knowledge I garnered from my experience, I then had the privilege to build IDEMIA’s APAC marketing and communications department, which supported all five business units in the region including financial institutions, mobile operators, biometric devices and automotive, digital, and public security and identity.

How has communications helped introduce IDEMIA’s technology to APAC?
As the global leader in augmented identity, our focus at IDEMIA is to enable citizens and consumers alike to perform their daily critical activities in the physical and digital space safely and securely through biometric technology. Although APAC is a hotbed for digital innovation, the great wave of new innovations in the region makes it even more vital for tech companies to engage with our customers and communicate how our solutions can help solve today’s problems.

Through public relations, we focus on leveraging our expertise and innovative work to introduce our audience to the latest technology developments and show them how they can be best applied. We also ensure that we have the right communication tools, such as a customer reference digital brochure, to support our sales team in delivering the right messaging to our customers and prospects. We aim to start and contribute to the broader conversations around innovation in the public and private space. This approach has helped us successfully raise awareness about IDEMIA, build thought leadership and solidify our position as a global tech leader.
 
What PR challenges have you faced when leading communications across APAC? What have you done to resolve them?
APAC is a diverse region; each country has its practices, work frameworks and media landscapes which require navigation and adjustment. However, supported by local insights from internal and external partners, we have adapted by conducting media landscape analyses for individual countries, translating content to local languages, and always keeping an open mind.
 
Our messaging has transformed from being product-centric to customer-centric for better relevancy. We produce regional vision papers and increase our media engagement with feature interviews, customer interviews and success stories. We also adapt our topics to local interests and gain a deeper understanding of the maturity of local markets to garner maximum engagement.

The pandemic has forced companies to explore new ways to communicate with their employees and customers digitally. What measures has your team taken to overcome these challenging times?
Clear and consistent communication is critical to minimise disruption in times of crisis. Internally, we prepared employee-centric business continuity plans. We developed an internal employee newsletter to keep our team engaged, held ‘water cooler’ virtual catchups to encourage two-way communication, and created market reports to provide an overview of the global technology landscape. We have also hosted internal webinars and trainings to help our employees upskill personally and professionally, as well as adjust to the workplace changes.

For our customers and stakeholders, we introduced more personalised communication campaigns to foster engaging and productive discussions. We created educational material like videos and vision papers on biometric trends, and hosted webinars on digital identification for them. To bring our stakeholders closer digitally, we launched a Virtual Experience Center, which is a web platform that allows our customers to discover and virtually navigate IDEMIA’s cutting edge innovation and the latest technology solutions. My team and I have been on our feet to quickly adapt to the new arrangements and introduce new ways to help our business with a dedicated communication plan. We are now working on new success metrics/KPIs to measure our actions and explore new and better ways to do things.

How has IDEMIA’s technology helped the economy adapt to digitalisation?
Our technology solutions have been key drivers of digitalisation while also reshaping day-to-day life practices in verticals such as travel, finance and security. Some of our biometric access control devices, such as the MorphoWave™ Compact, a contactless fingerprint recognition tool, ensure buildings and workplaces can maintain effective security without delays in traffic flow or compromising on hygiene through frictionless access control, which enables zero direct contact.

In the FinTech space, we constantly strive to improve the consumer experience by providing payment options that are both frictionless and more secure – for instance, biometric cards and dynamic cryptogram cards. We also offer 5G SIM cards and 5G enabling solutions that can protect mobile subscriber privacy as 5G becomes the new standard. In a nutshell, securing our identity has become mission critical in the world we live in today.