Let's take a look at the current state
Winning customers is harder than ever, customer expectation is at an all time high and customer loyalty is at an all time low. The channels where customers spend time is constantly emerging.
Companies experience high pressure to deliver an outstanding and unified customer experience, but it becomes increasingly harder to deliver due to a very fragmented data landscape. Across the years organisations have invested in technology to store and maintain specific single domain data (CRM, PIM, CMS etc). This has led to the experience data that's used to deliver a great customer experience being locked into silos within systems of records. Most often these systems are built on old legacy technology.
Any attempt to solve this challenge ends up adding to a spaghetti integration mess which is time consuming and often very costly. For every new integration you become even more slow moving. Digital officers and marketers are cornered and cannot innovate nor adapt to changed customer behaviours in the speed needed.
What does the new state look like?
Since the old way of doing things is obviously doing more harm than good, we think it is time to flip some old truths connected to how we build CX stacks. Because why expect new results doing the same thing?
We believe that it's time to stop spending time moving data between databases and integrating data models and instead add a unified data layer on top of your system of records. Start building the next era of consumer apps without letting the last database dictate what is possible to do or render in a frontend experience.
In the new state you need to take a composable approach to your stack to be better prepared to quickly adapt to changes, and this is especially true when it comes to the customer facing layers. You need flexibility and speed. Two things that have been hard to combine, up until now...
You need something new and this is it!
This is what you need
You need a unified data layer that sits on top of your system of records. The main job of your system of records is to store and maintain all your domain specific data. The job of the System of Engagement is to unify and activate your data and bring it to life in front of your customers using real-time APIs. This modern stack needs to be built on services and capabilities with a MACH approach (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-Native, Headless) focusing on scalability and APIs. This will enable innovation to thrive where it before was impossible.
Next era - How CX apps should be built
In a headless world digital services and capabilities in the cloud will be the threads from where you weave your digital customer experience apps (attracting or converting) and create screen experiences for your customers everywhere.
You might also like: Jacob Rastad, CTO, Nordic Nest 'We chose Headless because speed and agility are our #1 priority'
Using modern JavaScript frameworks when building frontends provides you with a high degree of flexibility and great support for fetching data using APIs (RESTful APIs or GraphQL) to deliver frontends at scale. To produce them at the speed needed, the consumption of experience data must be tailored to exactly match the needs of every frontend. We must move from the ONE IT API to many experience APIs tailored for each individual frontend. This will create the needed efficiency when building at scale. If you stay in the old (IT) mindset this will not be feasible.
The Business users/marketers must be empowered and given control to maintain and deliver this while creating maximum flexibility and agility for the frontend developers.
With Occtoo you can easily unify all your experience data, making it accessible from one single source. Make unique combinations of customer, content and context data and create tailored real-time APIs with a click. Publish and collect your data all in real-time in any frontend, device or channel for each of your digital initiatives. This is the missing piece in your unified experience stack, enabling speed in the, ”idea-to-deployment” process and capability to offer a relevant customer experience in milliseconds everywhere.
See Occtoo documentation for developers and architects here.
This approach will provide you with many benefits:
(Warning: long list incoming😉)
- You no longer need to integrate data between databases that is not built to be integrated. This is costly and time-consuming both in the short- and long-term
- Spend less time integrating data and more time being creative with data
- Make changes to your data without it affecting your customer facing frontends until you press the button
- You do not have to store data in your frontend which impacts performance negatively
- Your marketing/business teams become data autonomous and can launch new experiences in the speed of their own choice
- Bring your own frontend and use the one your team prefers
- Take the handcuffs of your creative teams and let them design something unique for your customers with less technical limitations
- You can support unified and channel-agnostic experiences
- Data is available in real-time in any frontend, meaning zero friction in the customer experience
- Build something once and scale it globally across any endpoint or geography
“ I would sum up the value of Occtoo as - speed. Speed in how fast we can launch new customer experiences, speed in how we serve a relevant experience in real -time on all touch-points and speed in how we modernize our technology stack to fast forward our customer experience innovation.”
The best thing is, you can do all of this without ripping and replacing in your legacy technology that handles core business processes. And on top of that, we'll have you up and running within a few days!
Like what you read or have questions? Please reach out to me directly at jimmy.ekback@occtoo.com or connect with me on LinkedIn.