Embrace CX Equivalent to AI & UX to Reinvent the Future of Fintech
Making Transformation Real The pace of digital transformation has intensified dramatically and empowered customers to engage at their convenience with organizations with whom they interact and transact across multiple channels. Amidst this, there is an unstoppable rise of automation, analytics, and AI, and with that comes unprecedented levels of speed – the speed of accelerating business, generating ROI, making intelligent decisions, meeting evolving customer expectations, and bringing new products and services faster to market. AI, AI Everywhere Today, even the most advanced digital technologies are usually reactive rather than proactive. Think of intelligent digital assistants such as Alexa, Siri, or Cortana, you just need to give them a command, and they’ll respond to it instantly—ordering a product you’ve requested, say, or placing a call. However, when powered by transformational technology, these virtual assistants can become more intelligent and proactive. Soon, your virtual assistant might observe that you’re running low on a particular product and suggest that it place an order for you—or tell you how you can find the best value by adjusting your purchase habits. Or imagine that you enter a retail store, browse shelves aided by an intelligent digital assistant, and once a purchase decision has been made, you simply walk out of the door with the product. Across the BOARD With more and more modern consumers expecting a response to their queries in less than an hour, the digital technologies will prove game-changing. Organizations must unlock digital transformation — and leverage the advantage of AI and machine learning. As more and more organizations are pushing for differentiation, AI-driven CX is a pivotal area. Needless to say, AI and ML will exponentially improve CX through intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants. It will help push margins regardless of industry or sector type. Given the current experimental status, early adopters will have a clear mover advantage. For FinTech companies, this indicates a new way to attract eyeballs, emotionally connect with customers, and build an everlasting relationship. How is AI causing a seismic shift for CX? Beat fraudsters before they strike with Predictive Insights and Real-time Analysis Analytics tools collect evidence and analyze data necessary for conviction. Subsequently, AI tools learn and monitor user’s behavioral patterns to identify rarity and warning signs of fraud attempts and incidences. Claims management can be built up using Machine Learning (ML) techniques in different stages of the claim handling mechanism. By leveraging Enhancing CX with Predictive Analysis Predictive analytics in financial services can directly impact overall business strategy, revenue generation, sales nurturing, and resource optimization. It can undeniably act as a game-changer by enhancing business operations, improving internal processes, and outperforming competitors. Predictive analysis gathers and arranges the data, analyzes it using our leading-edge algorithms and technology, and briskly deploy customized, prescriptive solutions unique for each customer. It can help calculate credit scores and help organizations prevent bad loans as it uses a massive amount of data to find patterns and predict insights. These insights and results can reveal what is going to happen next: what the customers are willing to buy, how long your employee might last, and so on. Delightful CX through UI/ UX Creating intuitive experiences with the help of smart UI and UX designs to enable your business to render excellent customer experience. If you engage with users through seamless navigation, layouts, directions, etc. it will help you enable superior customer experience. UI and all kinds of assistants stand at the forefront of all Fintech as a service. No matter how complex the formulae are, how bizarre the analysis is, or how advanced technologies used — the customer still needs to navigate it and utilize everything properly. Regardless of the industry, the business will perform better only if the customer feels valued. And that value can only be brought by delivering unique CX. All over Déjà vu again! Companies – fearful of straggling behind – scrambled to build online footprints back in the 1990s, when the WWW was the digital frontier. In today’s digital era, AI is causing a similar seismic shift. When keeping customers happy has never been tougher. They’ve more of everything: devices, information, channels, and choice. They also have more power. They can switch brands on a whim – and if they don’t like something, they will broadcast the fact over social channels. What’s more, customers’ expectations are ascending ever higher. They have witnessed how digital disruptors deliver frictionless, connected, automated, and personalized Customer Experiences (CX) – and they expect you to do the same. Such is today’s CX challenge. But as with any challenge, it’s perfectly surmountable. Indeed, if organizations embrace AI + UX and act fast and transform their enterprise to a data-driven, connected and adaptive CX infrastructure, not only will they secure the customers they have, but also win the new ones.
How Great Leaders Help Their Teams Excel
Great Leaders expect great work from their teams. It is the ongoing commitment and deliberate practice that helps build a great team. The question is how great leaders discover their team’s potential and allow them to express it fully. Developing the team is like growing seeds to becoming a tree. The seed needs three ingredients – water, correct temperature or warmth, and good soil (environment). During its early stages of growth, the seedling relies upon the food supplies stored with it in the seed until it is large enough for its leaves to begin making food through photosynthesis. Similarly, a team needs three ingredients to develop – ‘Trust,’ ‘Coaching,’ and ‘Opportunities to stretch.’ Establishing a foundation of trust and acceptance: Just as the seed needs good soil, likewise, a team also needs a right environment- an atmosphere of trust and acceptance that builds the foundation for having meaningful and open conversations, beyond just day to day regular activities or performance. Development discussions include aptitudes, interests, guiding the different paths, and how leaders can help team members achieve what they want. Investing time and coaching the team: Water and warmth are needed for the growth of a seed. Similarly, nurturing and supporting the team is essential for their growth. Great leaders take time out from their schedule to invest, coach, and grow their team. And when the right opportunity comes, they delegate work to enable the team to demonstrate their potential. Provide opportunities to stretch: As a plant grows, the leaves begin to make their food by absorbing the sunlight and through photosynthesis. Similarly, as the team grows, leaders need to provide challenging opportunities because giving someone a good challenge, and a real stretch allows them to develop and unlock their potential. Teams then set a high bar and provide support to those working to reach it. Plants need water, warmth, nutrients from the soil, and light to continue to grow. Similarly, a team also needs regular feedback, rewards & recognitions to enable them to grow and excel. Successful Ways to Encourage Employee Development Provide regular feedback: Regular feedback is a gift that every team member receives to realize those aspects where something is not being done in the right manner and needs correction. A great leader can point out those blind spots and enable us to find the way out to resolve and do course corrections. This gift truly nourished a person’s growth. Encourage and Applaud: Development is a journey – when too many obstacles and challenges are there, some may tend to give up. Great leaders work together with their team to improve their performance. If you believe in their potential, they will meet the confidence and excel. Holding the team members accountable for their performance is as important as encouraging and motivating them. Appreciation for their excellent work and accomplishments to team members are like nutrients in the soil that enable the plant to grow faster and stronger. Wrapping up Personalized learning is the way of life today. Every person should own their growth and career path. The sky is the limit, especially when changes are happening fast. There is no limit to creativity and innovation in today’s world. Great leaders help their team to explore, develop on their potential, and excel in everything they do. Testing the changes, Testing the changes, Testing the changes 3
Crowdsourced Learning Enables Communities to Grow
The word ‘Crowdsourcing’ was coined in 2005, a portmanteau of the crowd, and outsourcing is a process of collating services and solutions from an online community. One good example is Wikipedia, where we post information, and people across the globe can add their inputs or comments. ‘Learning anywhere, anytime’ is the need of the hour when everyone focuses on continual learning. Opportunities to get information are immense, and therefore taking advantage of ‘Crowdsourcing’ as one of the methods of learning proves advantageous in today’s times. Here, learners come together to achieve a common task and learn from each other, which benefits mutually. Some aspects that need to make Crowdsourced Learning successful are: Transparency and Openness: Learning in a cohort is based on trust and respect for each other. People need to be authentic in what they communicate at the same time, be open to other’s points of view. Being sceptical will not help in visualizing other’s points of view or seeing from another lens. Ideas, Design, and Preparation – It is important to think and prepare well before adding new ideas. Giving feedback is excellent, but it becomes more effective when people understand concepts well. Critiquing also helps in learning and improving one’s skills. It is important to use a common language to communicate unfamiliar topics or skills. This way, people who are engaged and interacting can understand concepts well. Simplicity in communication – An open network of communication requires simplicity in delivering thoughts and ideas. It is important to be specific as well as provide details as we are unaware of the audience and their familiarity with the topic being discussed — effective communication when crowdsourcing requires a balance of both specifics and details. Incremental Learning – Crowdsourcing is a progressive way to learn. Learners need to provide references and links wherever appropriate to understand facts and points of reference. As people who are engaging in the discussions increase, the discussions become more meaningful, people become more familiar and experienced. Feedback provided becomes more relevant. Enriched Community – Learning from sharing ideas, thoughts, experiences, and observations enrich each person with abundant knowledge. It becomes community-based learning, which provides opportunities to learn from each other. Collaboration is the key to crowdsourced learning. It helps communities to grow and perform better.
‘Own Your Learning’ is Today’s Mantra
With the pace of change in every aspect of life, it has become crucial for every individual to practice ‘Continual Learning’. The beauty is that with the knowledge explosion, we have so many ways to access knowledge and learn. Information is all around us, but we must make the choice of making time, getting the right information, learning and then practicing it to gain expertise. While organizations today promote a culture of continual learning, individuals need to take time out, leverage every opportunity that is available, build new knowledge and skills for personal and professional growth. Here are some ways by which people can practice continual learning: Books and articles – Some of us like to read books or articles – a great source of information. It is available as printed copies as well as digital. Many have lost their interest in these, and the buzz phrase one gets to hear is, ‘I don’t get time’. With long hours of travel and bad traffic, this is perhaps not an excuse, but a fact. Some say a lack of energy, and some have less attention span! While digital methods have given various options like kindle and tablet. Book summaries are one way to get the gist of various books. There are various speed reviews available. YouTube also has book summaries presented in infographics, which are easier to understand. Reading articles from various websites such as HBR, McKinsey, Gartner, Deloitte-Bersin, etc. Podcasts and mobile learning via apps are another way to learn – it is like listening to a radio show. Audiobooks are like lectures that people can listen to on their own schedule. TED Shows and watching videos are another great way to learn from experiences. Attending webinars and seminars is another method by which individuals and teams can develop a focus on their continuous learning to build new knowledge and skills. Taking online courses using the various MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) gives a lot of opportunities to individuals to learn from masters, experts and educational organizations across the globe. Taking challenging assignments and new projects in areas that individuals have not been exposed to earlier. This gives them opportunities to network with people across teams as well as external experts. When people reach out to mentors and coaches when things are unclear, they get guided into solving complex problems and also learning from experiences. When working with an expert, observing the approaches of the experts also gives insights to specific areas. Immersive learning by solving real-time problems with the team by trial and error is another great way to learn in an agile manner. Once concepts and new approaches, technologies, or tools are learned, practicing, and applying new skills helps in gaining expertise in various skills and competencies. It is also important to reflect on progress as a self-assessment. Self-analysis is a great way to track improvement and progress of learning. Another way to work towards improving skills is asking for feedback. Meetups, participating in discussion groups, and other networking methods are other methods to learn from experts around you as well as across the globe. It is important in today’s times to be aware of changes, appreciate those, and keep one’s mind open to new learning. Points to remember: Learn a wide variety of things, not just topics related to current role or work Seek out more knowledge from a variety of sources, by doing new things and having new experiences Always be ready to learn something new and look out for trends and future technologies/industry changes Appreciate change and see it as a new opportunity to discover new paths Be ready to take risks, experiment, fail and learn Be connected and increase your networks – there is always new experience and perspectives which broaden our minds to provide new ideas Be agile and leverage every opportunity to learn Use your social connections to share and learn So, leverage every moment to learn something new through reading, sharing, observing, reflecting – any mode that you get – enhance your knowledge, skills, and get empowered!
Top 5 Salesforce Trends that Will Shape 2020
Salesforce has become a business-critical application in an age of digital transformation, where once 24/7 management for Salesforce was uncommon, it’s now becoming a new expectation–impacting the broader ecosystem, as well as the teams, partners, and companies that surround it. Why does Salesforce continue to astound reviewers across the board? What is it exactly about? Ease of use, Customized CRM, Automation, or Analytics? All the answers are resounding yes, but there’s something more than that. No doubt, Salesforce is an important part of business success and strategies with over 150,000 customers and their success stories and positive reviews. But the other side of this success can be explained as- Salesforce = Industry + Innovation. Here are the top 5 Salesforce trends, which are revolutionizing businesses today to support the above equation. Enabling AI with Salesforce Einstein – Vision, Prediction & Voice Do you know, how quickly AI-powered apps can be built for employees, partners, and customers on an incredible artificial intelligence platform? From machine learning and natural language processing to computer vision and automatic speech recognition – with Salesforce Einstein brings you the power to think, see, and act to success. Three methodologies, which are nailing the entire innovation are: 1. Einstein is a key catalyst for Salesforce: o Einstein Prediction Builder and next best action What if someone could predict the future? Yes, Salesforce Einstein leverages past data through machine learning to predict future activities with minimal programming. It helps predict business outcomes, create custom AI models on any Salesforce field or object with just clicks and not to code. With a guided approach, it works with yes/no types of questions and predicts numerical data. It provides a scorecard of the expected accuracy of the prediction and provides key insights from the results. o Einstein Vision See from the far! This methodology is beneficial to keep track of the entire conversation about your brand on social media and more. Image recognition in your apps by training deep learning models is another plus. This is to recognize your brand, products, and more. We can apply in our application workflows like visual product search, identifying the product, and automated planogram analysis. Einstein Image Classification leverages pre-trained and customizable models to recognize and classify images specific to your business, at scale. While Einstein Object Detection leverages customizable models to recognize and count distinct objects within images, providing granular details like size, count, and location of each object. o Einstein Voice Talk to an AI assistant is just like experiencing a real conversation. Talk to Einstein Voice Assistant to get daily briefings, make updates, and drive dashboards. It also helps create and launch your own custom, branded Voice Assistants with Einstein Voice Bots. With Service Cloud Voice, Voice assistant, and Voice skills, it will serve the customer in a whole new way. Needless to say, Einstein Voice is a game-changer with the power of the voice and the intelligence of Einstein. 2. Accelerating transformation with Salesforce – A digital reinvention Today’s business world is undergoing the process of transition. With newer technologies evolving, industries across the globe are determining new processes as older ones may no longer be enough. Customer expectations are constantly evolving. They are more connected, informed, and unprecedentedly technologically savvy that they expect the organizations to be likewise up to date. Digital transformation starts with customers. Digital transformation is as much a cultural shift as a technological shift. Leveraging the industry-leading Salesforce solutions and its innovative applications is one of the best ways to achieve quality, efficiency, and scalability faster. Salesforce helps you make it easier for businesses to sell more and grow with the help of CRM solutions. It helps you focus on individual relationships with customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers. It even helps in finding new customers, winning their business, and providing support and additional services, and much more. 3. Designing Seamless Customer Experiences – Customer 360 Journey This is a customer-driven era where customers expect connected experiences across channels and departments, and no matter what, you want to fulfill that. Being a #1 CRM, Salesforce enables your organization to meet these expectations by building online customer communities for clients to share their ideas and resolve a problem. These communities allow agents as well to connect more easily with customers through a variety of channels and resolve even the most critical problems of customers in just a few clicks. Design experiences across channels to help your business drive customer delight and deliver the seamless experiences they expect. 4. Unifying the Customer Experience – MuleSoft Capabilities with Salesforce As we discussed, customers expect connected experiences. They want to avoid experiencing the layers where your systems and departments meet. MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform and Salesforce Integration Cloud help connect every experience by making it easy to connect any application, data, and device with APIs — Application Programming Interfaces. APIs take requests and tell a system about the user’s needs and requirements, conveys system response to that user as well. This process helps optimize a reusable process and enables organizations to accelerate IT delivery, increase organizational agility, and deliver innovation scalability. MuleSoft works as a Salesforce Connector. It can connect any system, application, data, and device to unleash the power of the Customer 360. The integrated capabilities of MuleSoft and Salesforce enable companies to unlock data across systems, develop scalable integration framework, and ultimately create differentiated, connected experiences at a rapid pace. 5. Data Virtualization: Multi-Org Strategies with Salesforce and Heroku Multi-Org Strategy enables a customer to own multiple Salesforce Org. Data and applications are split in different Orgs based on various factors like business units or product lines. Salesforce Multi-Org. The strategy helps you with data separation, reduces the risk of exceeding Org limits, improves time to market, gives freedom to innovate, simplifies Org-wide setting management, reduces the risk of teams to be impacted by shared updates, reduces complexity within a single Org and more. Here comes Heroku Connect to make a difference. It helps Salesforce to share data with your Salesforce
Four Key Factors to Consider Data Testing
It is a data-driven world. The amount of data produced each day is 2.5 quintillion bytes. And by 2020, 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second, per person. Data, therefore, is the new oil, and businesses have already started leveraging this data for their benefits. With a growing movement to digital technologies like IoT and AI/ML, data is all set to become even more valuable. However, what is of paramount importance is the way this data is leveraged. The reality of data is that it is never clean. Data is either incomplete, or inconsistent, or invalid, or inaccurate. For the sake of understanding, let’s take a simple example – in a mortgage firm, while collating data about debtors, there could be fields that might be missing from the source like no zip code (incomplete data) or there could be an error in entering the zip code and its only 4 digits, making it inaccurate. These errors can lead to inaccurate insights that can result in revenue loss, missed opportunity, or even reputational damage. Testing, therefore, forms an imperative part of any data strategy. It is critical that data is tested at the source to clean, correct, and validate it. A good-quality data brings in several benefits to a business, which include: a. Boosting productivity: Data scientists are data experts who have been hired to analyze and interpret data. Instead, 80% of the time of a data scientist is spent on cleaning and preparing the data, which also is the least enjoyable part of their work. In short, businesses are wasting their premium data scientists as ‘data janitors’. Testing data can prevent this and data scientists can focus on their core work – getting relevant and actionable insights. b. Making better decisions with the right insights: A better data quality results in the right insights, which in turn leads to high confidence decisions by removing the ‘guess-work’ out of critical decisions. This decreases the business risks to a great extent. c. Enabling customized targeting to customers: With the right data, the business has the right insights to customize its offerings to the customers. Imagine this – a Netflix user who watches a lot of horror shows and movies would continue using Netflix if he gets the right recommendations. d. Improving revenues: Businesses lose millions of dollars every year due to poor data quality. In the above example of Netflix, if the user doesn’t get the right recommendations, he would move to your competition, thus resulting in the loss of business. Conclusion: Needless to say, Data is important. However, one of the biggest issues is masking unstructured data and archiving data. Moreover, organizations also lack the necessary skills and expertise to test their data, which results in inaccurate insights. Data can only be as useful if an organization can maximize its full potential. The good news is that Tavant can offer a leading-edge automated solution for testing data to improve its quality and make it appropriate for consumption. For more information, reach out to us at [email protected]. Source – • https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/05/21/how-much-data-do-we-create-every-day-the-mind-blowing-stats-everyone-should-read/#3fd7751d60ba • https://www.nodegraph.se/big-data-facts/ • https://hackernoon.com/a-few-facts-to-take-into-account-about-big-data-market-growth-eaf7c993f0fd
Optimizing OTT Ad Performance by Identifying Right Metrics
In the digital world, everything that happens leaves behind an electronic trail behind, and thereby every consumer’s actions and movements can be monitored. This is what differentiates OTT (Over-The-Top) advertising on digital platforms from our traditional way of advertising like cable TV or print. Leveraging OTT enables one to gain access to a lot of information and data about consumers in terms of how they engage and interact with advertising campaigns. OTT platforms provide better control and transparency over the ads served, thereby providing the best options in terms of placing as that will have a higher completion rate. These insights into every feedback, whether negative or positive, for the betterment of future marketing and advertisement campaign. Ensuring the right campaigns are run to the right set of audiences at the right time needs pacing OTT campaigns evenly across channels through optimization. There are several key metrics that need to be tracked in order to optimize OTT ad performance: Click-Through Rates (CTR) Rather than traditionally applying advertisements, the modern audience is expecting a considerable step up in terms of advertising techniques. Hence click-through rate is an important measure to improve and optimize OTT ad performance. Therefore, over time, the comparison of results and analysis from different ads or platforms enables us to have data that can be used in further study of engaging messages. Ad Optimization Even in the advertising world, “First Impression is the Last Impression” holds good in various front. Therefore, it is better to optimize OTT ads in a way that it will perform best. There are many characteristics that play a vital role in OTT campaigns. Color and accents usage, images, fonts, sound, language, visual graphics, ad size, etc., are some of the aspects that should be kept in mind while optimizing OTT ads. Device Optimization This is another technique that can help in the optimization of OTT ad performance. Ads should be rolled out, keeping in view the device they are on. Let’s say that your ad of Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ is to run on the iTunes Store. This would turn out that the ad might not be viewed in the right format. Therefore, it’s always better to know what ads are running on which device because it can dramatically improve the ad’s performance. This is another way to optimize OTT ad performance. Live Event Advertisements Broadcasting live ads can provide several benefits to the advertisers. 95% of estimated sports viewing happens live. From live concerts to sports events, it is an effective way to optimize OTT ad performance. Live broadcasting of ads can provide vital and crucial data by responsiveness and engagement of the viewers. Let us say that an ad is broadcasted live, and the website traffic increases, then there is a clear relationship between both. Therefore, tracking and analyzing website traffic while broadcasting live can tell us to gain detailed information in real-time. However, with prerecorded content, these ads can be watched at any time of day or night or anytime in the future. In the future, OTT attribution will be the critical element in the optimization wave. This will help teams to analyze campaign performance at device level reporting and impression forecasting to identify the right audience segment and serve the right ad across preferred OTT device and platforms. Overall this will help boost ad completion rate and conversion, thereby ensuring the right set of outcomes are delivered for each advertising dollar spend.
The Future of OTT Cross-Media Measurement in the Digital World
The basic concept of OTT (Over the Top) was to deliver television viewers content wherever and whenever they wanted, along with the goal to give users the quality and the live TV experience. With personalized content being served, the need raised on understanding how content was being consumed by end-users. Information such as who viewed the content, for how long, from where and which device the content was viewed became important for advertisers and agencies for providing the right audience at the right time. For brands, it’s important to know where your consumers consume media – whether it’s TV, mobile, tablet, or consoles. These questions are difficult to answer. Therefore, brands are wondering where to buy media to start engaging consumers with their ads. How can they optimize their campaigns across different platforms? That’s where cross-media measurement comes into the picture. What is Cross Media Measurement? Cross-media measurement has been in focus for quite some time by media researchers. The scope includes measurement of various content, including images, videos, or music along with the devices they are viewed across various matrices. All the information that is gathered is thoroughly classified, analyzed, and researched to generate a clear picture of how content is being consumed. This approach helps various stakeholders within the media industry to create, distribute, and monetize content much more effectively and forms the basic concept of cross-media measurement. With the change in media consumption, advertisers are looking at multiple ways to reach the right audience. Therefore, they are running integrated campaigns along with different media platforms and devices. However, to do that it is more important to assess everything with accuracy and correctness. The main advantage of cross-media measurement is that it provides a better and on the spot results and views from the consumer end. Therefore, advertisers can have a more detailed look at their media consumption habits. OTT Cross-Media Measurement – Looking Forward The main advantage of OTT is that unlike cable services, both advertisers and service providers can analyze a large amount of data about their consumers. The beauty of OTT cross-media measurement is that data can be accessed as per the demand. Since every single operation is programmed, it is relatively easier to analyze data from the viewer’s recommendation. So, what is the future of OTT cross-media measurement? We cannot say for sure whether linear TV will be replaced in the span of the next couple of years. But there’s a bright chance that this shift could occur sooner than before. As more and more advertisers demand added transparency and ROI into the ad money spend, we will see broadcasters investing in cross-media measurement platforms to measure the effectiveness of campaigns. At the same time to make the whole system to be extensive in terms of a win-win for advertisers, agencies, and broadcasters, a more collaborative effort is required to bring in a more consistent and stable cross-media measurement system. The concept of TV broadcasting is changing, and so will the way one view and interacts with content and therefore, how ads will be viewed and consumed. It is more like a Rubik’s cube, and we need to get everything correct for a better viewing experience in the future. Conclusion In addition to analyzing data, there’s still more work to be done on the researcher’s side. As more content goes online, advertisers, agencies, and broadcasters will need to know the importance and significance of cross-media measurement. These stakeholders will need to come together to build a cross-media measurement model that can span the various marketing ecosystems to measure campaign performance effectively. Integrating data across sources is just one part of the whole ecosystem, how the cross-media measurement model will evolve will ultimately define how multi-channel campaigns can extend their reach and effectiveness.
How can MuleSoft Address Integration and Digitalization Challenges?
We are living in a “connected everything” world, where users look for integrated experiences and workflows across networks, devices, mediums, and touchpoints. Thus, applications and software have to provide an integrated view of the users’ world to stay relevant. It means that the ability to integrate data, services, and events across systems, whether on-premises or cloud, has become a critical need. Enter, the “middleware platform” in the form of enterprise service bus (ESB) and API gateway. Some of these platforms are also provided as iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) on the cloud. Multiple such integration platforms are vying for the top spot, and MuleSoft has been one of the rising stars. MuleSoft has recently been named a Magic Quadrant Leader by Gartner [1], and is recognized as one of the thought leaders in the API-led connectivity domain. Let us look at some of the critical areas that current middleware and iPaaS solutions need to cover, and see how MuleSoft addresses them: Cloud Today’s solutions need to be cloud-ready and architected-for-the-cloud, and MuleSoft can claim to be both. MuleSoft is designed from ground-up to be able to connect services across cloud-to-cloud and on-premises-to-cloud situations. MuleSoft’s “Anytime Runtime Fabric”, users can reap the benefits of Kubernetes and Docker to deploy to AWS, Azure or on-premises. And now, with “CloudHub” it provides a global, fully managed, multi-tenanted and highly available platform for APIs and integrations, ensuring 99.99% uptime. Reusability MuleSoft has taken a robust stance on reusability by creating a marketplace for pre-built integration assets, including APIs, connectors, templates, and examples. It means that teams need not spend time on designing and building APIs for most of the common services on the web. It also means that a business can build and publish its own reusable assets that can then be used across various divisions, functions, and teams, thus reducing replication, improving governance and standardization and improving efficiency. API Networks The “connected everything” enterprise today needs a complex network of APIs to ensure all its integration needs are met. Not only does this require a middleware fabric on which to build the network, it also means that effective tools for managing, monitoring, and securing such networks become critical. MuleSoft has all these areas covered. The “Anypoint Design Center” provides the ability to design and build the network faster using a semi-visual interface, while the “Anypoint Management Center” provides deep visibility into the health of the network and allows engineers to diagnose issues. “Anypoint Security” provides security at every layer of the network, with in-built compliance for common security standards like ISO 27001, PCI DSS, SOC 2 and GDPR. It also allows for multi-level security and authorization policies providing both broad and granular control. Thus, the MuleSoft “Anypoint” platform has everything needed for a complex API network for a modern inter-connected, digital, globally accessible application. Time to Market As always, any transformational change needs to meet the “Time to Market” test, and the move to an API-driven, integrated system is no different. Many such projects fall by the wayside due to lack of resources to finish within time, so productivity and speed are essential for business success. MuleSoft’s combination of a unified platform, visual tools and workbenches, simplified integration runtime, support for the full development and testing lifecycle, and availability of reusable ensures that integration projects can highly efficient and agile. MuleSoft claims [2] 3X faster delivery and 70% higher productivity for app dev teams, resulting in faster time to market. If you are looking for a market-leading integration solution that meets your business needs, MuleSoft should definitely be on your radar. Their success in the market and their 94% customer satisfaction claim seem to indicate that they are delivering on the tagline – “Connect anything. Change everything”. What Next? Tavant, MuleSoft’s partner and reseller, works closely with MuleSoft to offer solutions that allow enterprises to quickly and efficiently design, build, and manage their APIs, applications, and products. Tavant has a robust MuleSoft COE with core practice areas of financial services, aftermarkets, and media & ad tech. To gain more insights, reach out to us at [email protected]. _____________ [1] https://www.mulesoft.com/why-mulesoft [2] https://www.mulesoft.com/why-mulesoft
Redefining the Customer Journey in the Digital Age
Are you optimizing your customer’s journey? Customers don’t need to be wowed. They’re super busy. They just desire a streamlined experience, at any given moment with quick and seamless resolution. Needless to say, they are looking for an easy, personalized, connected, and consistent experience. The value of focusing on your customers’ journey can’t be understated. Done right, it helps make your marketing feel more like matchmaking and builds a lasting relationship between your customers and your product. As the old adage goes that if you don’t understand the customer journey and evaluate how, why, when, and where customers are interacting with your brand; you cannot influence them. This holds true with today’s digital customers; ultimately, you will fail miserably to meet their evolving needs. Thanks to digital and social media, the customer’s intolerance to brands that get their engagement strategies wrong is growing significantly. Isolated Conversation- A thing of the Past; the connected customer wants hyper-personalized Digital age customers expect hyper-personalized user experiences when they interact with a particular brand, including high-value communication across multiple channels and devices. Customers are now much more savvy, more agile, more independent, more complex in terms of what they look for to help make their purchasing decisions and their behaviors are increasingly inconsistent and harder to predict – in contrast, the marketer’s traditional approach to defining their target audience, planning and executing campaigns is struggling to keep up. A consumer’s real, personal journey of self-improvement is constant throughout that individual’s life. The need to understand the customer journey through your product and service experience has been widely heralded as a fundamental component of marketing for years. Those companies who fail to unravel the mystery behind the customer journey cannot strengthen their bond with their customers. However, the term “customer journey” is broken. This sounds cliché, but the complexity of customer journeys coupled with multiple broken, disconnected channel partner networks is impeding organizations from delivering personalized customer experiences. In today’s data-rich world, the term ‘customer journey’ is undeniably too high level, too generic, and too prescriptive. It’s incomplete, rarely actionable and therefore it is said to be ‘broken.’ The focus of tomorrow’s marketer, therefore, needs to be less linear, segment focused, and personal. Delivering a seamless experience at every phase of the customer lifecycle can bolster a brand’s relationship with its audience and it requires an ample amount of data and a thorough understanding of the customer journey. However, customer journeys don’t work that way, because customers don’t behave this mechanically. They are human and should be respected as individuals. Taking this account, Offline or CRM data on its own is no longer enough to drive this approach. Despite the high sophistication, the truth is, the ‘real’ customer journey is something far more complex, variable, and volatile than it is challenging to cope up with this effectively. Challenges that businesses face with the customer journey: Extremely difficult to harness the information on customers and audiences from social networks. The growth of online conversations and metrics, which require a robust platform to manage the enormous amount of content. Conversations between business and customers are scattered across various channels. All the data that is available on a customer is somewhere in silos and is not utilized fully. Companies are struggling to find ROI across multiple channels. To solve these challenges, Salesforce has come up with a powerful platform, ‘Salesforce Marketing Cloud’ to integrate all disparate data. Why your business should Choose Salesforce Marketing Cloud? Salesforce marketing cloud is one of the market leaders in the marketing cloud domain along with other clouds like IBM marketing cloud, Adobe marketing cloud, and Oracle marketing cloud. It is the platform for delivering relevant, personalized journeys across channels and devices. It helps marketers to deliver the right messages at the right time to the right people using the right channel. It provides your organization – journey builder, contact management tools, content management tools, analytics builder, and various channels such as email and mobile. To gain more insights, email us at [email protected] or visit Tavant.com/Salesforce.