How COVID-19 Is Shifting Job Responsibilities for Samsung Employees: Display

Customers are seeing products, solutions, and services through a new lens – a lens that is continuing to evolve and likely to have a lasting effect on long-term behavioral trends.

As part of a Q&A series, Samsung employees across business areas share their views on what customers’ new expectations, needs and priorities are; how they plan to meet their evolved demands; and which habits are here to stay.

Name: Mario DiAntonio [LinkedIn]
Title: Director of Strategic Alliances, Display
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Years with Samsung: 5 years, 8 months

1. Has your customer’s expectations, behaviors, and priorities evolved in this new environment? If so, how?

My customers’ expectations have absolutely evolved. From a communication and connection perspective, our interactions have become more frequent, personal and virtual. Video conference calls are the norm now and a meeting request is really an invitation into everyone’s home.

We are also delivering a more comprehensive suite of solutions that we develop with our customers. Investment decisions made today need to address our customers’ current challenges and their value must extend into the future.

Mario and his team at the infocomm conference. (2019)

2. How are you responding to meet the changing needs of your customer?

Customer fundamentals are table stakes, including high levels of responsiveness, intentional communication, and flexibility in how we collaborate. For example, we’re staying connected with customers through LinkedIn, Microsoft Teams and a multitude of other preferred communication platforms.

Also, keeping up with media reports on the changing landscape has helped position us as a trusted advisor.

But the overarching strategic opportunity is helping our customers develop and share THEIR story to their key stakeholders. Samsung’s B2B Display business offers a wide range of products, such as QLED 8K digital signage and microLED displays, and integrated display solutions. Our mission is to enhance the overall customer experience and foster new content creation and engagement possibilities in retail, corporate, education, and hospitality settings, among others. Through collaboration with strategic partners, we have tailored these solutions to meet evolving customer needs anchored in safety, infection protection and control.

3. How are you keeping your customers and colleagues safe while playing a reimagined role in customers’ lives?

For our customers, we have poured time and resources into developing solutions for reopening America, which are designed to increase consumer confidence, help employees get back to work, and dramatically improve operational efficiency in this time of social distancing and heavy sanitization protocols. At Samsung, we’ve primarily focused on creating a safe, healthy and productive work environment.

Now that team building has gone virtual, Mario and his team enjoy looking back on their in-person events.

4. Which new habits and behaviors do you anticipate will continue in the long run?

Displays tailored by industry and customer have played an integral role in the recovery of businesses and I believe they will continue to be a part of the digital-led “next normal.” Early on, we made some bold and decisive investment decisions, which have helped us accelerate our customers’ digital transformation and hopefully reach the next normal sooner.

5. Will their new and potentially everlasting behaviors transform the industry’s future?

The key takeaways from this experience are: clarity of message, understanding the fast-evolving situation and pivoting accordingly to meet expectations, and empathy towards my customers and colleagues. As for Display, growth is driven by digitization and the smart and seamless end-user experiences it can deliver to drive our customers’ future.