Editorial
Most organizations want to deliver a superior digital experience (DX). But it's an easier goal in theory than practice.
“They find very quickly they’re not providing a consistent experience across channels and touchpoints,” Chris Preston, senior director of digital experience customer strategies for Oracle, said during a recent CMSWire webinar.
But often, he said, “Experiences are not seamless. They’re almost what we call friction based.”
What are the solutions?
Be quick. Be consistent. Ensure your customers are in a secure environment in your digital experience pathway, Preston said during the CMSWire webinar, “Making Mobile the Cornerstone of Digital Customer Experiences.”
Personalized, Targeted and Innovative
Enterprises need to provide customers and prospects the opportunity to engage anytime, anywhere on any device, especially if they’re trying to boost sales or engagement.
“To do that even more effectively,” he added, “it has be an experience that’s tailored. It has to be highly personalized.”
Target the right people. Use the right promotions, right content and messages. Make it innovative. “There’s a lot of noise out there,” Preston said. “Everyone is trying to do this.”
Start by ensuring the experience matches the brand. And remember, mobile is the cornerstone to these experiences, Rob O’Farrell, senior director of mobile customer strategies at Oracle, noted during the CMSWire webinar.
Mobile Demands
Mobile is only part of the digital experience journey. But it’s an area that creates high expectations for customers and prospects — and can easily disappoint them. Mobile promises constant engagement and connectivity, and “in the context of personalization is just critically important,” he said.
Businesses should enhance the mobile experience both internally and externally. “That's the cornerstone of how we’re approaching mobility with digital experience,” O’Farrell said.
No Easy Task
Launching a mobile app, though, is not as simple as publishing a blog post.
As you start to bring your application forward and the developers jump in, the complexity increases. Developers must think about security aspects, integration, client development tool options, supporting cross-platform requirements and then understanding the behavior.
Who is fostering changes to the app? Are those processes in real time?
“It becomes quite complex,” O’Farrell said.
Back-end architects need to collaborate with designers and front-end developers to move the project forward.
“We still see a need for cross-platform support," O'Farrell said. "And when you think about digital experience, you think about types of applications. You think about the multiple form factors whether it’s iOS, maybe it’s Android, Windows, desktop and that sort of thing. But having the ability to support those different form factors is not necessarily having one application that works on all of them but maybe having purpose-built applications that are targeted toward different systems of choice whether it’s a tablet vs a smartphone.”
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Integration Mandate
Mobile is not always about building the front-end designs and screens. It includes building integration, the security aspects, efficiency in exposing data from different systems and making it reliable and secure for front end developers to use that data to wire it into their program itself.
In short, it depends on top-of-the-line DX that simplifies mobile integration.
“A lot of our customers are also significantly increasing the roadmap of significant applications and these are applications about how they touch their customers and how they touch within their businesses,” he added.
Enterprises need a platform or infrastructure that provides mobile-first capabilities, including location-based services, push notifications, offline mode access, synchronization, user management, analytics, diagnostics and storage.
That means organizations need a platform service that supports the ability to connect to systems of record in an optimized way. They must offer mobile-first capabilities that allow for an organization to build front-end experiences across channels.
Enter Oracle MCS
“That mobile back-end of service ultimately is where Oracle is driving our platform of service capabilities,” O’Farrell said.
Oracle’s Mobile Cloud Service (Oracle MCS) allows users to drive and build mobile applications. Oracle MCS allows for a setup of APIs, O’Farrell said. It’s built on top of a framework that allows for extensibility with built-in mobile services like push notification and offline synchronization.
“It’s very well integrated into a development environment that allows your line-of-business and the folks that drive your digital experience to work with IT to focus on building those mobile applications and doing it in an enterprise-grade way,” O’Farrell said.
It provides a level of security that is diagnostic to the client development tools that some use to build their mobile apps.
“At the end of the day, Oracle’s MCS is open and agnostic,” O’Farrell said. “It does support these other types of technologies whether you’ve chosen to build your mobile apps in JavaScript, HTML or maybe in a native or cross-platform way. Being open and agnostic really gives you and your mobile strategy the foundation of being able to support extending that part of your services out to mobile devices.”
For More information:
- 3 Things You Probably Forgot in Your Mobile Strategy
- Mobile Experience: If You're Not Testing, You're Not Trying
- How Mature is Your Digital Experience? #DXS15
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