Omni-Channel Apps – Redefining Customer Experience

The most important keyword for any B2B or B2C business is omni-channel these days. A lot has already been written on it and it is not a trend that will phase out. Great Omni-channel experience defines the company—it also reflects how serious a company is with respect to its branding, marketing and brand value. There are multiple factors driving the omni-channel strategy for Enterprises. Some of the important ones are listed below:

1. Multiple Devices - It is very common for a user to start an activity/transaction on one of their devices and then complete it later on another device. As a seller, you cannot afford to confuse the user by giving different experience on different devices.
2. Personalization - Every company in B2B or B2C has to provide personalization to its customers. Higher the ticket size greater the personalization expected by the customer.  Users love the same experience, same color scheme, same product stack on brick & mortar stores or online websites and apps.
3. Quick Decision Making - Customers are in a real hurry. They want to buy now, they want to transact now and they do not want any confusion because it is perceived as cheating. To achieve this, the Enterprise needs to be accurate, precise and should have the same user interface. In fact, not only user interface backend should be same but also should propel the same experience and data to the user. Sessions of the users should be stored in such a way that from wherever a user logs in they always start from where they left.

Enterprises who point to provide a great omni-channel experience depend on third party providers for one or more functionalities. There are huge challenges and few solutions available that can reduce the burden on Enterprises. Some of the challenges are as follows:

1. Dealing with multiple SDK providers for various devices
2. Legacy systems that need to be exposed as APIs for consumption of internal and external apps
3. Agility - Time to market is very important as there is huge competition being thrown by disruptive startups
4. Data is Silos. Single backend for all the apps on omni-channel
5. NFR - Scalability, high-availability, performance of these APIs
6. Analytics across all channels to take personalized actions to drive user engagement, user retention and monetization

While developing new age products at ShepHertz, we have kept all these problems in mind and have worked on a philosophy of providing omni-channel app development approach while making no compromise on security and performance. ShepHertz’s big data solution provides actionable analytics. The intention is to save effort, cost and time to market for App Developers keeping the complexity of their App in mind.