Imagine wanting to rush home after a long day at work. But instead of stressing about the travel, you simply grab your phone, open the taxi-hailing app, and address the automated in-application assistant to order a cab. It notifies the taxi service, shares the location, applies for the discount, and quickly arranges for the car of your choice based on your consumption pattern.
This is the reality of our everyday lives.
While this experience caters to 86% of buyers willing to pay more for great customer experiences, it’s not easy for the app developer to consolidate numerous experiences at various touchpoints. As businesses continue to forensically gather and analyze data captured from customer experiences, it is unsurprising to see businesses constantly concerned about sustaining, enhancing, and augmenting this experience at scale while incorporating changing consumer behavior.
Let’s assume data insight requires the developer to augment a modern payment journey within the app without compromising the existing experience. In traditional enterprise architecture, this might go through multiple brainstorming levels before being deemed “too risky” for implementation. However, businesses looking to transition from providing a “transactional value” to a “continuous customer experience” could use this opportunity to address the complication by “adapting effectively, developing distinctly, and delivering frequently.” This entails deprioritizing standard, pre-built, rigid software and updating technology stacks through composable enterprise architecture, allowing greater freedom to adopt the best-of-breed solutions.
By leveraging the micro-frontend architecture, an e-commerce retailer, for instance, can add a new, modern AI-powered search bar without compromising the UI of the digital storefront. This would allow them to “adapt effectively” during the festive season when customers expect gifting suggestions as they search the portal. That is the beauty of a loosely coupled architecture that facilitates composability so businesses can swiftly match customer demands. It also enables the practice of “developing distinctly.” A composable ecosystem allows implementation by one team without compromising the additions from other teams. This allows multiple new features to be composed and introduced concurrently to create an enhanced customer experience. An e-commerce retailer can introduce a new cart system along with an updated digital storefront in a quicker time-to-market mode.
For modern businesses, the challenge is not only to provide experience but also to sustain it. Consider two camera software providers – one that hasn’t provided updates in a year due to an inflexible legacy software stack and another implementing a resilient software architecture based on composability to deliver weekly updates. If you ask the customers, they would probably not be very excited about the experience of the first provider. So “delivering frequently” enables businesses to rapidly introduce updates and modernization for both stakeholders. On the customer end, this could mean introducing new features or technological implementations frequently to keep them engaged. For example, a convenience store can introduce a quick-service mobile app to drive customer loyalty through a gamified experience. On the operations side, this means delivering newer cloud-based environments, platforms like CDP, DXP, CRMs, or intelligence systems with frequent updates to help business teams navigate the market.
While the overall trend predicts the advent of hyper-personalization, hyper-sustainability, and implementation of Web 3.0 technologies, there is more than what meets the eye when it comes to enhancing the experience through technology. Businesses must pay heed to architectures that enable enhanced experiences in a heterogeneous landscape. Like our taxi app, it’s different from how one can call a cab or apply discounts and more about how much value one can provide at the various pre-and-post touchpoints without compromising the integrity of the internal technical teams and external consumer demand.
(This article is authored by Sanjay Salunkhe, President, Hexaware)
