For me, it boils down to the hidden sales cycle: or if you like micro-moments. The consumer behaviour has changed forever. The battle for hearts, minds, and dollars is won (or lost) in micro-moments, meaning you need to provide the right information, at the right time, throughout the entire customer journey.
When there is no physical person taking care of, or guiding the customer, it becomes all about the data. Behavioural and contextual data, in combination with content, product, transactional and customer data. You need to get the right capabilities to be able to combine your data into new customer experiences, and build and launch them at speed. Yesterday you needed an e-commerce store, today you need a mobile application and who knows what tomorrow holds? Are you adapting fast enough?
Jump on the MACH tech bandwagon sooner rather than later
If you don't jump into a future tech state with a MACH approach (Microservices, API-first, Cloud, Headless), you risk ending up with a big black box (aka a Monolith). With such a black box all kind of ideation gets stopped because with every new idea or innovation, everything must be rebuilt from the ground up. Even worse is if you build a black box all new initiatives must be built by you and it is impossible to scale and get help with innovation from a creative SaaS community. This model will ultimately break under its own weight because it cannot be maintained nor scaled over time.
At Occtoo we are 100% dedicated to fast forward our customers ability to move into an API-first approach without the need of ripping and replacing in their current stack. This enables customers to get better value out of the investments they have already made in data enhancing backend system (e.g CRM, PIM etc). This gives both customers and partners the freedom to use their own frontend and fuelling it with headless data. Read also: Occtoo joins the MACH Alliance
Your frontends should be as thin as possible focusing on the experience, look and feel and consume the data via real-time APIs (Static vs Dynamic) making data and frontend truly decoupled. The more decoupled you can be in your platform, the more adaptable to future changes and anti-fragile you will be (Read Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Black swan and Antifragile for more in depth insights on this topic).
Ideate and innovate at rapid speed with Occtoo Experience APIs
With Occtoo you can easily unify your enterprise data and turn it into experience data, make unique combinations of product, customer and content data assets, make these datasets (Occtoo Segments) available in milliseconds in any frontend on a global scale using Experience APIs (Occtoo Destinations). Easily re-use and re-purpose the data across screens/channels.
More reading: Building truly unified customer experiences has never been this easy!
Every time you have a new project in mind you just create a new Experience API with a click, to serve your next initiative with the exact data needed for that specific frontend and experience. As the number of channels/screens are exploding and growing exponentially this is the only way to manage this over time and at the scale expected by your customers.
You might also like: "To build digital experiences with speed and at scale, Experience APIs are the future"
For us, this is a fantastic thing for our developer community, creating business value for our customers by spending more time on the customer experience rather than trying to integrate and access data.
With Occtoo you can reimagine your stack with an API-first approach without the need of ripping and replacing your current stack. Rather enhancing the value you get from your previous investments in system of records putting the data to use where it adds value, in the customer experience layer.
A great example of this is our customer Cartier. By way of this approach, they have created a stellar App universe, making the Cartier digital customer experience match the quality of 170 years of accumulative expertise and exquisite service.
Become future fit with MACH tech
So when looking at your current tech stack, try and apply a MACH perspective when making your platform choices. You should seek to minimize your exposure to risk, and maximize the gains (meaning better and more relevant customer experiences) for your organisation. We all know that the implementation of large monolithic platforms is always tightly linked with corresponding large risks. You can never have 100% control over the risks involved when implementing new platforms, but by choosing an agile, API-first, purpose-built, best-of-breed platform, you will minimize your exposure to unknown risks when fast forwarding into a tech state fit for the future.
See how Christian Bader used Occtoo to fast forward Fenix Outdoors innovation with an API-first approach
About Occtoo
Occtoo is an Experience Data Platform that fast forwards how digital officers, marketers and developers create relevant customer experiences everywhere. Unify all your experience data (transactional data, product data, customer data, content etc) with ease and access it from one single place. Make unique combinations of customer, context and content data and create an Experience API with a click to make the data available in real-time in any frontend, channel or device.
Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or reach out to me at jimmy.ekback@occtoo.com if you want to discuss this topic further!
