With the competition just a click away, customer experience is paramount. Consumers have unprecedented access to new digital services like never before. They enjoy simpler, faster, smoother and more personalized experiences. In the future, providers of these services must capitalize on embedded opportunities as a key to differentiating themselves and becoming more competitive in their markets.
Embedded opportunities are everywhere, in most industries, if not all. In finance, integrated payments can make life easier for all parties with just a tap, eliminating the need to swipe, insert, or even touch a card. Customers automatically pay through an app at the end of their shopping trip. Think of your order-and-pickup experience through your favorite coffee app: a quick, accurate, and ultimately delicious start to the day—because you didn't have to wait long, of course.
Customers also expect the companies they do business with to understand their unique preferences and engage with them as individuals. Personalization within apps builds loyalty, increases customer satisfaction, and creates opportunities for growth. When you log in to your banking site, think about personalized offers specific to you and your needs. It could be a new loan, new credit card benefits, an offer to consult with a company representative, a credit report, etc.
And in the insurance sector? Consider the world of auto insurance. It is very competitive with consumers who shop for insurance coverage at least once a year, checking coverage, deductibles, pricing, and other information that may tempt them to switch providers. Many businesses only require the consumer to provide their name and zip code. With just these two pieces of information, an app can look up the person's full address, cars registered in the person's name, and the person's driving history, and provide a quote instantly. The quicker and more convincing the quote, the faster the consumer can switch providers.
hit the right notes
Turning these opportunities into reality requires perfect alignment between business and IT teams on priorities and how to deliver to the end customer in an agile, fast, efficient and successful manner. The days of the forced march to the Cloud are over. Instead, organizations are taking advantage of a hybrid approach that combines existing and new technologies to create and support these new capabilities. This is how organizations manage to deliver compelling, differentiated user experiences that ultimately grow the business.
The hybrid computing environment must work like a symphony, coordinating the contributions of various platforms to produce a beautiful composition, or in this case, enable the delivery of differentiated and engaging experiences. Mainframe, yes Mainframe, offers a competitive advantage as a key part of this symphony. There are three tools you can use to help you orchestrate this hybrid environment like a master: integration, artificial intelligence (AI), and automation.
The integration
To keep a hybrid IT environment in sync, IT systems must deliver sophisticated and well-orchestrated processes at scale, without failure. However, more sophistication can lead to more complexity and more data to manage.
IT experts often refer to the mainframe as the heart of your business. After all, it ensures transactions are completed quickly and data is always secure. On the other hand, IT administrators can take advantage of cloud services for front-end capabilities. It takes a computer master to lead this cross-platform orchestra.
Since data access is necessary to create the user's personal experience, Cloud and Mainframe must work together. For example, to enable a quick and easy auto insurance quote, the app must have immediate access to critical information, such as a database of names and zip codes for APIs provided by the Department of Motor Vehicles for registration information. automobile and driving records, and actuarial tables for similar cars and drivers. Only by integrating all this information in a single flow can the estimate be presented to the user. The user does not need to know how to access the parts. They just know that the app correctly identified their information and they received the quote quickly.
To allow the application to fulfill its mission, always guaranteeing an accurate and fast result, an API-first strategy is essential. APIs make it possible to tap into relevant databases and integrate data, while allowing IT teams to monitor end-to-end application performance.
Artificial intelligence
The use of artificial intelligence is a differentiator to drive business results. When the use case and desired results are clearly defined, AI offers significant benefits. For example, business leaders are leveraging sentiment analysis to harness consumer reactions to the services and offers they offer. Similarly, IT administrators are capitalizing on the anomaly detection capabilities of machine learning to give them early warning of infrastructure or application performance issues.
For example, financial institutions use sentiment analysis from social networks like Twitter and Facebook, as well as consumer feedback received through omnichannel support platforms. Sentiment analysis allows business leaders to gauge consumer reaction and adapt quickly when necessary so they can consistently deliver a positive customer experience.
Increasingly, IT support teams are moving from a reactive to a proactive operating model and performance data streams are now delivered via machine learning algorithms. The goal is to identify anomalies and raise awareness that something out of the ordinary is happening in the environment. To achieve the most meaningful results, subject matter expert knowledge is applied to the results through a set of rules or filters to remove the "noise" of low and over priority alerts.
IT teams focus on the most important applications for the business. Service level objectives (SLOs) are defined for each of the applications. The end-to-end application must be completed before the time frame defined in the SLO is reached to ensure that the end-user experience is delivered as intended. Applying advanced analytics and machine learning to historical data can detect anomalies in real time and accurately predict SLO violations, giving IT the opportunity to correct problems and avoid missing targets.
Artificial intelligence cannot predict everything. No AI or anyone could have predicted that members of an online community, Reddit, would successfully orchestrate a stock run of GameStop through coordinated mass buyouts, resulting in significant financial losses for companies that had shorted. action by undoing their positions. . However, the introduction of automation has allowed companies to instantly expand to handle unexpected demand.
automating
Automation is a powerful instrument. You can play a key role in business information. For example, by automating sentiment analysis and conveying the results to business leaders, even the largest organization can focus on the user experience, responding with agility and speed to changes in sentiment. In the IT shop floor, IT process automation delivers fast, consistent results for repetitive and complex tasks. Automation allows IT and business managers to focus on the highest priority tasks.
The power that automation offers is multiplied when used in combination with integration and AI to achieve business goals. In the worlds of insurance and finance, IT teams are aggressively automating necessary corrective actions in cases where advanced analytics and machine learning predict that an SLO is about to be missed. This automated process occurs thousands of times a day in large stores without the need for human intervention, ultimately ensuring that the business delivers and the consumer receives the services they seek.
Retirada
In the future, increasing customer demands will continue to drive further changes in business operations. How you orchestrate your business and IT stack will determine whether your organization can keep up with changing customer expectations. Your customers are yours to win, time and time again. Loyalty cannot be assumed; it must be fed and cultivated.
The truth is that when any part of a process or system is out of sync, the client is affected. When an instrument sounds out of tune, it can ruin your experience of the most promising symphony. It's the same dynamic for front-end experiences and back-end systems. Orchestrating data and processes across the mainframe and cloud through integration, AI and automation is key to delivering the best experience and getting it every time. Together they add value to your customers and ultimately to your business.
Start differentiating yourself and improving customer experiences today by integrating Mainframe and Cloud.
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