*Per Márcio Arbex
The demand for faster and more assertive decisions has driven digital businesses that are going far beyond traditional customer centric models. Companies that put the customer at the center of their strategy, integrating and unifying data from different sources and anticipating trends in real time, have the ability to offer a wide range of products and services to all types of consumers.
These are companies that want to map their end-to-end business processes, allowing them to track purchasing behavior omnichannel and thus anticipate trends. With a complete view of their customers, companies can serve them rationally and consistently, whether in a mobile app or in a physical store. The goal, after all, is always to improve the customer experience, regardless of the channels used.
While the new economy has changed the way companies interact with each other and their customers, there is a growing demand for native API-based cloud architectures on the other. The implementation of modern event integration and processing platforms also requires companies to embrace a change in culture focused on innovation, which is fundamental to guaranteeing advanced self-service processes.
A few years ago, the banking industry placed little emphasis on the importance of customer differentiation. The customer centric culture in the industry has improved and is providing deeper analysis to create an extremely personalized experience for consumers. In addition to making each interaction more customized, financial institutions also intelligently promoted upsell and cross-sell. For this, they traced the demographic profile of the customers, whose information provided insights that allowed them to invest resources more assertively in marketing and products.
As the degree of analytics maturity increases, the understanding of customer centric analytics becomes more accurate, allowing companies to use this data to build better machine learning models and feedback loops. At the same time, financial market players that incorporate AI and visual analytics are better able to understand lending metrics, leading them to even more robust insights for real-time decision making. This new customer-centric approach connects an enterprise's entire data and application ecosystem to deliver a fluid experience to its users, while also bringing adaptability and resilience to changing market conditions.
By using APIs to integrate their systems, the Air France-KLM group, which involves KLM, Air France and the low-cost company Transavia, can, for example, make a single change and update all the channels that are connected, connecting all the stages of a customer's journey through APIs, providing relevant information in a central, real-time application. This means that call centers, kiosks, apps, travel agencies and partner sites are all perfectly aligned. Now, Air France-KLM is able to offer new digital services such as flight change recommendations, seat updates and partner inventory faster, where a single update reaches the entire ecosystem of connected channels.
Customers, partners and the entire group have been benefiting from this API-first strategy. The API-based cloud native architecture process increased the group's Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 20%, a metric that measures customer satisfaction.
Knowing consumers in depth is even more important in times of crisis. Even today, there are large companies that do not have visibility of the path taken by customer data in their channels, unaware of the benefits of unifying big data in an integrated platform. This causes them to waste time, money and new revenue streams by launching products and services. To overcome these challenges, it is necessary to unify the entire digital infrastructure for fast access to all products and applications. When big data works in partnership with unification, connection and data science technologies, a sea of possibilities for business is discovered.
* Márcio Arbex is director of solutions engineering at TIBCO
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
EN 
PT 
