Businesses are putting a lot of pressure on enterprise IT managers and developers to speed up their customer experience (CX) transformation and improve their digital competitiveness.Businesses that have not prioritized this requirement risk getting left behind given the fast-evolving customer preferences and emerging players offering customer-convenient experiences.
Enterprise IT teams have traditionally developed their customer communication journeys in isolation, leading to the proliferation of single-use applications that are time-consuming to build and costly to maintain overtime.
Today, enterprises have competing asks from multiple business units and are required to expand their development efforts to deliver improved, end-to-end customer and employee experiences across touchpoints. To achieve this, they must overcome rigid legacy back-end systems. They must also navigate through the complexity of a multi-channel environment to build and manage new applications at scale. Enterprise IT teams need to continually innovate and leverage the latest technologies while streamlining operations and reducing costs.
When building your CX roadmap, consider these four areas:
1. Simplify development with CPaaS
Communications platform as a service (CPaaS) is quickly becoming the go-to solution for enterprises to incorporate communication channels into their applications and deliver digital-first customer interactions. CPaaS offers IT teams, and developers, a cloud-based layer with a set of APIs and low-code building blocks that help them develop and embed these communication capabilities into their existing systems.
APIs and software development kits (SDKs) are an integral part of CPaaS empowering developers to build, test, and deploy applications to bring new customer journeys to life much faster. These building blocks enable enterprises to offer the latest channels like video, rich messaging channels like Apple Business Chat and WhatsApp, Internet of Things (IoT), and integrated payment capabilities, along with traditional channels such as SMS and voice. These capabilities are continually enhanced, enabling IT to build smarter while accelerating their future roadmaps.
2. Embrace a configuration approach
Another aspect of CPaaS is low-code development tools that focus on a ‘Configure, not Code’ approach. Gartner’s latest forecast projects the low-code development technology market to reach
$13.8 billion in 2021, a 22.6 % increase from 2020.
Low-code tools enable developers to accelerate development by shifting to a configuration-based approach using pre-built components (or nodes) that can easily be configured and connected to build applications and customer journeys. This method helps developers fast-track their CX initiatives by leveraging the low-code tools to create, replicate, reuse, and simplify customer interaction automation—significantly reducing programming effort and saving time.
Next-generation enterprise CPaaS platforms offer low-code visual flow builders with an integrated capability to perform a wide variety of functions. These include database lookups, customer preference checks, communications rules, social hour checks, intelligent automation capabilities with natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), and AI. Components like these can be a game-changer for enterprise IT’s CX transformation initiatives. These components can easily and quickly be dragged and dropped to configure flows that deliver seamless, smarter customer interactions.
3. Benefit from the best of both worlds
The combination of low-code and APIs on a single communications platform provides flexibility and choice. Developers can maximize their time by eliminating the need to build applications for each use case. Enterprises IT managers can streamline development efforts to accelerate go-to-market, optimize customer journeys development efforts by removing duplication, and leverage operational tools such as reporting to speed up decision making. In turn, they must ensure that IT delivers business value, support larger business objectives, and drive the digital competitiveness and innovation that their business wants to achieve.
4. Build smarter with a developer sandbox
Having access to a developer sandbox environment enables IT teams to quickly and easily build, test, and prototype customer journeys and experiences. They witness, first-hand, the benefits of delivering innovative customer journeys in minutes.
Our sandbox is designed to allow enterprise developers and IT leaders to experiment with APIs, SDKs, and advanced CPaaS capabilities of imiconnect – our enterprise CPaaS product. It provides access to core messaging channels like SMS, voice, and WhatsApp, along with platform functionality such as our unique flow builder, debugging tools, and reporting. Additional features include quick start information, such as sample code, postman collections, and SDKs, to help developers get started in no time.
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