Creating a Multiexperience and Redefining the Customer Journey
The volume of digital transactions in India has increased since the pandemic. With the value of digital payments in India expected to see threefold growth, reachingUS$1 trillion by FY 2026, according to a report by CLSA, users want better digital transaction experiences. Customers are now demanding a better user experience that is intuitive and easy to use. This has prompted firms to enhance their ability to deliver engaging digital experiences and customer-facing experiences, to increase their customer base or attract and retain talent.
The pandemic has resulted in a different lifestyle, where consumers turn to digital platforms for their daily needs, including online shopping, digital banking, working from home, and communicating with others. As a result, digital platforms have integrated AI and AR technologies to support this increased demand. The digital world today provides a multi-sensory and multi-device experience with multi-modal touchpoints. This trend, also called multiexperience, was ranked by Gartner as one of the top technology trends. Moving into 2022, the trend for multiexperience demands for technology innovation leaders to identify opportunities within the new user paradigm.
What is Multiexperience?
Simply put, multiexperience is about moving the focus from technology to thinking about how people will interact with a company through digital touchpoints. The goal is to provide optimal experiences tailored to the needs of individual customers or users, which will shift the focus from making users adapt to technology to having technology adjust to user demands.
The digital experience strategy of the past was to have users choose between mobile or web. Today, users want to be able to gain access to services and information at any time of the day and in the most convenient way possible. Organizations thus need to think beyond a multichannel and even an omnichannel strategy, and instead focus on multiexperience.
Given that every application now has multiple touchpoints, it is important for application developers or independent software vendors to develop a consistent user experience across devices – be it a chatbot, a voice assistant, a wearable interface, or even an AR or VR supported device. Such an approach ensures that all touchpoints of interaction with the business are consistent and that customers can flit seamlessly between them without having to relearn or duplicate steps. That said, the same experience cannot be replicated at every touchpoint but should instead reflect an experience that feels and behaves native to that touchpoint.
For example, many companies now allow users to order products and services across different devices, via whatever interaction modality is most convenient, be it voice on a smart speaker, messenger, text or smart TV. This strategy has helped many companies improve their revenues, as it leverages the channel most convenient for customers using technology.
To create a successful multiexperience strategy, enterprises need a strong multiexperience development platform (MXDP). An MXDP offers development teams an integrated set of front-end development tools and “backends for frontends” capabilities, allowing developers to alter standard frontend offerings without opening up a complicated blackbox. This in turn enables distributed and scalable development, both in teams and architecture, across digital touchpoints and interaction modalities.
To be considered an MXDP, a platform must cover at least four of five use cases: mobile apps, progressive web apps, chatbot, voice, wearables, and IoT, as well as AR and XR. These types of platforms allow easy integration of conversational and AR/VR applications, and ensure greater productivity for development teams focusing on the creation of reusable components.
Recommended best practices for choosing MXDP platforms
Choosing the right platform for your multiexperience needs can provide companies with a competitive advantage. The MXDP platform should:
Automate repetitive tasks: The chosen MXDP platform must help the developer through automation of repetitive and complex tasks, such as predicting next steps and validating work patterns. Developers can therefore spend less time in lower-value activities and spend more time in higher-value activities that truly matter to build great apps.
Give developers the capability to reuse components extensively: To enable quicker development of apps for common use cases, such as employee onboarding, field service management and mobile app with voice integration, the MXDP platform must offer developers the capability to find reusable modules, connectors and components. The platform should also ideally support an open-source ecosystem and allow developers to build components once, which can then be reused and customized for different solutions as per the specific requirements.
Make integration simple: The MXDP platform of choice should also make it relatively easy for enterprises to integrate their applications with popular AI services, such as chatbots or ML models. Functionalities like AI-assisted development that predict key steps can also help speed up development of applications and allow these applications to reach the market as soon as possible.
Making integration simple can have a huge impact on businesses when needs change unexpectedly. At the start of the pandemic, Humana, a health insurance company with over 16 million members across the U.S., found its call center - armed only with a spreadsheet - bombarded with people trying to find where they could get a COVID-19 test. With the changing nature of testing centers, they weren’t going to be able to keep up. This siloed, legacy digital customer experience was due for an upgrade. At the time, Humana was using OutSystems on a cloud-based project in another part of the company to unify how customers find providers, pharmacies, and other services. The IT team was able to reuse a large portion of the code from that project to create a COVID test locator app that solved the spreadsheet debacle, all over a weekend.
With customers and employees craving for frictionless and consistent experiences, delivering engaging digital journeys is no longer just an option. An effective MXDP platform can help in addressing diverse digital experience needs that are not only expected in the current era but key to staying competitive.
The pandemic has resulted in a different lifestyle, where consumers turn to digital platforms for their daily needs, including online shopping, digital banking, working from home, and communicating with others. As a result, digital platforms have integrated AI and AR technologies to support this increased demand. The digital world today provides a multi-sensory and multi-device experience with multi-modal touchpoints. This trend, also called multiexperience, was ranked by Gartner as one of the top technology trends. Moving into 2022, the trend for multiexperience demands for technology innovation leaders to identify opportunities within the new user paradigm.
What is Multiexperience?
Simply put, multiexperience is about moving the focus from technology to thinking about how people will interact with a company through digital touchpoints. The goal is to provide optimal experiences tailored to the needs of individual customers or users, which will shift the focus from making users adapt to technology to having technology adjust to user demands.
The digital experience strategy of the past was to have users choose between mobile or web. Today, users want to be able to gain access to services and information at any time of the day and in the most convenient way possible. Organizations thus need to think beyond a multichannel and even an omnichannel strategy, and instead focus on multiexperience.
Given that every application now has multiple touchpoints, it is important for application developers or independent software vendors to develop a consistent user experience across devices – be it a chatbot, a voice assistant, a wearable interface, or even an AR or VR supported device. Such an approach ensures that all touchpoints of interaction with the business are consistent and that customers can flit seamlessly between them without having to relearn or duplicate steps. That said, the same experience cannot be replicated at every touchpoint but should instead reflect an experience that feels and behaves native to that touchpoint.
For example, many companies now allow users to order products and services across different devices, via whatever interaction modality is most convenient, be it voice on a smart speaker, messenger, text or smart TV. This strategy has helped many companies improve their revenues, as it leverages the channel most convenient for customers using technology.
To create a successful multiexperience strategy, enterprises need a strong multiexperience development platform (MXDP). An MXDP offers development teams an integrated set of front-end development tools and “backends for frontends” capabilities, allowing developers to alter standard frontend offerings without opening up a complicated blackbox. This in turn enables distributed and scalable development, both in teams and architecture, across digital touchpoints and interaction modalities.
To be considered an MXDP, a platform must cover at least four of five use cases: mobile apps, progressive web apps, chatbot, voice, wearables, and IoT, as well as AR and XR. These types of platforms allow easy integration of conversational and AR/VR applications, and ensure greater productivity for development teams focusing on the creation of reusable components.
Recommended best practices for choosing MXDP platforms
Choosing the right platform for your multiexperience needs can provide companies with a competitive advantage. The MXDP platform should:
Automate repetitive tasks: The chosen MXDP platform must help the developer through automation of repetitive and complex tasks, such as predicting next steps and validating work patterns. Developers can therefore spend less time in lower-value activities and spend more time in higher-value activities that truly matter to build great apps.
Give developers the capability to reuse components extensively: To enable quicker development of apps for common use cases, such as employee onboarding, field service management and mobile app with voice integration, the MXDP platform must offer developers the capability to find reusable modules, connectors and components. The platform should also ideally support an open-source ecosystem and allow developers to build components once, which can then be reused and customized for different solutions as per the specific requirements.
Make integration simple: The MXDP platform of choice should also make it relatively easy for enterprises to integrate their applications with popular AI services, such as chatbots or ML models. Functionalities like AI-assisted development that predict key steps can also help speed up development of applications and allow these applications to reach the market as soon as possible.
Making integration simple can have a huge impact on businesses when needs change unexpectedly. At the start of the pandemic, Humana, a health insurance company with over 16 million members across the U.S., found its call center - armed only with a spreadsheet - bombarded with people trying to find where they could get a COVID-19 test. With the changing nature of testing centers, they weren’t going to be able to keep up. This siloed, legacy digital customer experience was due for an upgrade. At the time, Humana was using OutSystems on a cloud-based project in another part of the company to unify how customers find providers, pharmacies, and other services. The IT team was able to reuse a large portion of the code from that project to create a COVID test locator app that solved the spreadsheet debacle, all over a weekend.
With customers and employees craving for frictionless and consistent experiences, delivering engaging digital journeys is no longer just an option. An effective MXDP platform can help in addressing diverse digital experience needs that are not only expected in the current era but key to staying competitive.
