How often have we come across businesses which have had enviable success and are lost into oblivion now? Take for example, the downfall of Blockbuster with the rise of Netflix, Kodak’s failure with the rise of digital photography or the shutting down of Orkut with Facebook flourishing. All the above examples come from completely different industries, but one thing remains constant – businesses’ failure to understand consumer needs and adapting to change.

So what does this mean for enterprises today, in the era of data deluge and digitization?

With the unlimited amount of data about consumers, it might seem obvious that businesses have more than enough information to understand what the consumer exactly wants. And, that is true to some extent. That is why prudent businesses are not just reshaping their business processes but also business models.

This understanding has lead to the emergence of three kinds of business transformation –

1. Product companies transforming into Product & Services

Pure product companies are transforming to offer services and ecosystems to extend their offerings. For instance, companies like Daimler and BMW picking the pulse of the sharing economy pro-consumer of today and getting into car rental businesses or Phillips transforming from home lighting solutions to a provider of connected systems.

2. Service companies adding products to their portfolios

Service companies are going beyond their niche and launching their own products. For instance, e-commerce giant Amazon launching suite of products like Amazon Echo, Kindle and Fire Stick.

3. Customer oriented ecosystems

More and more businesses are realizing the value of creating a consumer environment where they can offer delightful experiences to their patrons. For instance, brick and mortar retailers opening up their online portals or using technologies like AR/VR and Artificial Intelligence to augment the retail experience and e-commerce players opening their physical stores are examples of businesses trying to create ecosystems that are consumer-oriented and simplify their lives while providing them a delightful experience.

While we are seeing a profound change in the way the business landscape is reshaping owing to digitization and the lines between products, services and environments are getting blurred, is that enough?

Today’s consumers seek seamless and connected experiences. Imagine a well-designed e-commerce platform with an awry checkout process. The customers will not mind abandoning the platform at the very last step, never to come back again. In fact, a complicated checkout process is one of the topmost reasons for cart abandonment on e-commerce portals.

The realization that all businesses, whether B2B or B2C are H2H (Human to Human), is imperative for organizations to build relationships with customers and Design Thinking fills the gap of the human element.

Design and Design Thinking are often confused as the same term, and that is far from true. There is a difference between Design and Design Thinking. Former is mostly misunderstood to be limited to how things look, the graphics and design element. Usability and ‘how it works’ has been the hallmark of good design for ages – even before the term Design Thinking was coined.

A good design is about creating a solution that is intuitive, anticipates the latent needs of the consumer and is future ready and thus, Design Thinking is much more than just incorporating great graphics into a product and making them look attractive.

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs

Design Thinking is a human-centered, iterative design process consisting of 5 steps—Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. It is useful in tackling problems that are ill-defined or unknown. Design Thinking is a concept that can simplify consumer journey and add value across industries and functions.

Take for example IBM created billboards their IBM’s People for Smarter Cities initiative. The billboards acted as ramps, benches, or rain shelters. Such a simple yet effective idea!

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Another hallmark of striking the right human chords and creating delightful customer experience through Design Thinking approach is the story of Doug Dietz from GE healthcare creating Adventure series MRI machines for children.

Doug Dietz was an industrial designer, working for GE Healthcare. When the first time he saw a little girl who was crying on her way to a scanner that was designed by him, the horror of the experience struck him. Doug reminiscences:

“The room itself is kind of dark and has those flickering fluorescent lights”, he adds in his TED talk “that machine that I had designed basically looked like a brick with a hole in it.”

Inspired by the principles of Design Thinking Doug created the ‘Adventure series MRI machines’ which reformed the horrid experience of going through the scanner to an enjoyable one.

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As rightly said by our CEO Ravi Teja Bommireddipall

‘’Customers cannot always articulate what they want; they can tell you their pain points but meeting the latent needs of customers from those pain points is where real innovation happens. To understand these latent needs, it is crucial for entrepreneurs and product innovators to empathize with their customers. This will only be achieved when we step into the customers’ shoes and live with them, and that cannot happen inside an air-conditioned office, looking at a heap of data. I call this GOOB – go out of the building, and live with your customers.’’

For instance, McDonald’s India wanted to make their mobile app the preferred medium for ordering. The vision was to bring the emotions of joy and delight from in-store to the new McDelivery app experience. We made several store visits, observed the customer, identified their pain points and crafted an app that delighted the customers. The new app was able to garner 103% more orders than the older one.

So what is the role that Design Thinking plays in creating a delightful end-to-end customer experience?

In a digital world, the competitive landscape is flattened and the barriers of entry are low. Businesses are continuously reinventing themselves to meet the demand of the new age consumer.

Uber disrupted the transportation industry, without owning any cars but with a well-designed intuitive app. Airbnb disrupted the hospitality industry by upgrading a simple idea of room sharing into a well-designed website and mobile app. These enterprises testify that having innovative ideas isn’t enough capitalizing on that idea with the help of exceptional design and intuitive user experiences are the key to success.

In the digital era, where customers are empowered by information and are spoilt for choices it is imperative for businesses to add elements of design at the heart of every brand experience.

By design, these experiences elevate the consumption of personalized content and experiences at every touchpoint. Design-led organizations like Apple or IKEA realize the contribution of human-centered design in crafting engaging customer experiences and eventually to the growth and ROI of an enterprise. Hence, Design Thinking is at the heart of their strategies.

Key aspects of creating design-led customer experiences

1. Understand the customer’s needs and perspectives

For most businesses innovation is approached from a technological point of view. However, the Design Thinking approach is about keeping the consumer’s perspective first. Understanding and resolving core consumer pain points will lead to a product that is consumer oriented and offers a delightful experience to them.

2. Create Personas

As quoted by our CEO Ravi in this article

“Know thy customer” is a familiar term to marketing and sales executives. Yet marketers who don’t take the steps necessary to better understand their customers will not be successful. Regardless of how you gather information about customers, it’s imperative that you use the information as a basis for understanding what makes the customer tick.’’

By developing personas of the customer base, businesses can come closer to the psyche of the consumer. Once businesses empathize and understand the consumer profiles, they will find a better way to not just connect with them but add value to the experience. The persona should include an image of the imaginary customer, demographic profile, attributes and motivations, needs, pain points, and actual customer quotes.

3. Empathy mapping

Empathy mapping is a collaborative process to gain deeper insights about consumers. An empathy map can represent a consumer segment and can provide a complete picture of the customer and what actions they might take as a result of their beliefs, emotions, and behaviors. Empathy mapping has 4 quadrants labeled as ‘think’, ‘feel’, ‘say’, ‘do’ to help make sense of different aspects of the customer’s experience and preferences.

4. Mapping the customer’s experience journey

Businesses today have a plethora of customer touchpoints digital and offline and hence enough data to understand the consumer. However, they continuously struggle to understand customer motivations and influences. This is where customer journey maps help.

Customer journey maps enable businesses to understand the consumer needs and hence build relationships by solving for those at every touch point. According to a research, customer journey maps improve marketing return on investment by 24 percent and shrink sales cycles by 16 percent. A great customer journey map should articulate an ideal customer experience and act as a guide for businesses to deliver that. According to a study from Adobe and Econsultancy, companies with a focused, customer-first approach are more than twice as likely to rise above competitors.

5. Create product roadmaps and prototypes

In today’s world; customer needs, market forces, and innovation across industries are reshaping the customer experiences continuously. It is imperative for businesses to adopt an Agile approach. Hence smart businesses do not go about launching a full-blown product, rather they create an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) which allows them to test, experiment and improve, more often and faster. Creating product roadmaps and prototypes before launching the final product minimizes the chances of errors and leaves scope for further development.

Iterating with customer feedback is an efficient way to create customer experience prototype, these pilots can lead to secure outcomes before scaling the product.

For instance, at Robosoft we partnered with Athenahealth, they had developed a medical reference app that doctors were using to check interactions between drugs. The problem was that the doctors didn’t find the app very useful. Based on the feedback from the doctors, the app was redesigned to include sponsored and original personalized content. The redesigned app with upgraded features helped keep doctors engaged and asking questions or sharing information, not just sending information to the doctor.

Businesses should build processes to manage these prototypes in an Agile way, through sprints and frequent feedback from users, with a focus on developing business value.

6. Product testing with the end user

The end user will not experience the product in a controlled and predictable environment, and hence Product Testing with the end consumer is one of the most essential steps of a Design Thinking process.

Most design driven enterprises have their Design labs where they are in an early phase of user research when products are not ready to be launched into the field, but insights can be drawn by observing how people interact with prototypes for different concepts. Simulated environments are created for users are created to experience the products and then the user interactions are measured with various tools like heat maps, touch maps, screen flows, user analytics platforms, etc.

Challenges in implementing customer experiences using Design Thinking

While using Design Thinking to build customer experiences seem like an easy solution, it is easier said than done. It is more than just a cognitive shift, there are organizational and business challenges that need to be met. Some of them are:

1. Short-term thinking

Manier times enterprises see Design Thinking as a short term approach to a particular project or a product. In a world where technology is changing consumer experiences and needs every single day, a short-term approach and vision will not help in yielding the best results out of the Design Thinking strategy. Business leaders have to think about the entire ecosystem where the consumer exists and the future before defining their strategy. By starting small but thinking big enterprises can work towards a successful Design Thinking strategy. Take for example, Paytm which started as a mobile recharge platform to one of the largest mobile payments platform with over 7 million merchants and 300 million registered wallet users, and now a major e-commerce platform. Paytm couldn’t have done all this without envisioning and keeping a pulse of the changing ecosystem around the consumer, and working with a long-term goal around that.

2. Scaling

Given the expanding surface of customer touch points in an always-accessible and always-on era, scaling the Design Thinking approach to every touch point can be a daunting task for businesses.

3. Challenge of pace

Today, global brands have to address and engage with customers and offer a personalized experience to tens and thousands of customers at a time. Which might need technology and access to a huge amount of data and process in place. Effective design needs to be efficient, as well as engaging. Not all businesses are equipped to do that at every stage.

4. Building a design culture

As Design Thinking becomes the buzz word in this age of the consumer, businesses will need to align the organization to have a design-oriented approach. Most organizations try to do that in two ways – by either having a team of designers across all their product teams or by creating a design team that rotates among project groups. While organizations have to identify their own approach basis their organizational culture. Each of these approaches might have their own shortfalls for instances having a siloed team of designers for n number of projects may lead to disjointed products as product team’s and design team’s vision might be different. Similarly having an internal consultancy might take up only big projects leaving the minute design gaps to be filled by the product teams. Airbnb has a unique approach to having a consumer-oriented design culture Every project team at Airbnb has a project manager whose explicit role is to represent the user, not a particular functional group like engineering or design. According to Alex Schleifer, product head at Airbnb

“Conflict is a huge and important part of innovation, this structure creates points where different points of view meet and are either aligned or not.”

5. Designers’ and product stakeholders’ perfectionist block

More often than not product stakeholders want to launch a product that is ‘perfect’. However, that is one of the major roadblocks in the Design Thinking approach. Design Thinking approach is iterative, Data and Analytics-driven. In this ever-changing world product managers and enterprises should be ready to launch a Minimum Viable Product and then iterate it basis consumer feedback and data and then scale further in a step-by-step manner.

In conclusion:

The most innovative companies in the world like Apple, Coca Cola, IBM, etc. have one thing in common, they use design as an integrative resource to innovate more efficiently and successfully. According to the DMI index design-led organizations outperform S&P by a whopping 228%. The convergence of technology, business environment and changing consumer preference is opening doors for unlikely competitors as well as newer opportunities. To succeed and take advantage of the opportunities, enterprises will have to adopt an Agile, design-led development process with the continual redesign and understanding evolving of customer journeys.

Today, security is a major concern for enterprises across domains than ever before. Last year, malware-based cyberattacks have led to a sales and revenue loss of almost $300 million by leading global enterprises.

In the previous article, we outlined the top security threats that organizations are facing today. In this article, we will dig a little deeper into the topic of security considerations that enterprises should keep in mind while implementing a digital enterprise solution.

Whether you are planning to build an enterprise digital solution in-house or buy one from a third party, here are the points to remember and guidelines to follow before making a decision:

Identification of Gaps in The Current System

Properly analyze the need and pain points that the digital solution will help resolve. If your business can really benefit from an enterprise mobility solution, you can immediately figure it out from the information dissemination flows within the various processes. Unfortunately, this seemingly simple step is often overlooked in the race to stay ahead in the industry.

Scalability of the Digital Solution

Before developing any digital solution, you need to ensure that you have a solid software architecture that is scalable and resilient. Having a robust software architecture exemplifies several important attributes like performance, quality, scalability, maintainability, manageability, and usability.

Making scalability and resilience an integral part of the development will allow the app to sync up with the changing business requirements and the evolving risk landscape. It can also save you from bad customer relations, cost overruns because of the redesign, and revenue loss.

Involving Just the Required Functions

Try not to impose solutions on your frontline staff. Instead, understand how the business will leverage it. Investing in an enterprise mobility solution without completely understanding its usage can leave open gaps in the system and leave the staff clueless about its functions and utility. Therefore, an in-depth understanding of the day-to-day operational activities and how these solutions will enhance routine tasks is crucial while selecting the solution.

Performance of the App

The same effort that you would invest in product conceptualizing and development should be put into testing and quality control for your digital solutions. App testing is paramount if you want your software to perform well. Ask your team to test the application so that there are no loopholes identified during its usage. Needless to say, you would want to ensure that your app performs well to give an enhanced user experience.

Data Management on the Device

Data management on devices is critical for the security of the app and goes beyond locking down the devices. The device data should be encrypted, protected with a password, time-bombed, and even remote-wiped. Some of the other ways to protect data are by granting/denying permission to store a file and building security for data flow.

Evangelizing the Technology

A huge roadblock for the organizations is the inertia towards adopting the technology itself. Most teams set in the traditional operations are often unwilling to shift to a new style of working. The only way out of it is to test the solution on a small set of employees and see how the product works. It is all about gaining the trust of a few people who can then become natural influencers of the product.

Going big-bang with any new technology can backfire and is naturally not a good idea.

Cloud Security

The cloud has provided organizations with a completely new frontier for data storage and access, flexibility, and productivity. But with all this comes a world of security concerns. Ensuring that you follow the best of cloud security can avoid data breaches and malware attacks and keep your organization’s integrity and reputation intact.

Protecting the Source Code

Reviewing source code for vulnerabilities and security loopholes is an important part of the software development process.

Protecting the source code of the app is important for two main reasons:

• First, it protects the business’ intellectual properly while encouraging digital innovation,
• Second, it protects the organization and its clients from attempted attacks on the company’s digital solutions.

Use a strong security check over source code by limiting access, auditing the source code periodically and reviewing the codes independently.

Firewalls and Updated Virus Definitions

A firewall protects your computer and digital solutions from being attacked by hackers, viruses, and malware. Having a firewall allows organizations to create online rules for the users and set up access to certain websites and domains, enabling them to control the way in which employees use the network. Some of the ways a firewall controls online activities include:

• Packet filtering: analyzing and distributing a small amount of data based on the filter’s standards.
• Proxy service: saving online information and sending to the requesting system.
• Stateful inspection: matching specific details of a data packet with a reliable database.

Use SSL Certificate Links

Certificate underpinning means using an SSL certificate to verify users. An SSL certificate links an organization’s details with an encrypted key to allow users to connect securely to the application’s servers. There are several organizations that do not use certificate underpinning, which makes them susceptible to cyber attacks.

Using Complex Passwords and Encryption

Needless to say, having weak security measures is as good as having no security standards. Organizations are always advised to use strong passwords and change them frequently to avoid security breaches. Using end-to-end encryption ensures that user data is secured and is at the least risk of being compromised or jeopardized.

Looking out for Impersonating Solutions

Another security aspect of digital enterprise solutions is the existence of impersonating solutions. These impersonating solutions are malware that creates almost a replica of legitimate copies to fool users into downloading them.

Once downloaded, this fictitious software can harm the system in several ways, from remotely accessing devices and stealing information to bombarding users with pop-ups and advertisements. In any case, whenever an organization’s security is compromised, it is always the user’s data that is at the risk of being exploited.

App Distribution

Once you’ve created an in-house app, the challenge will be in distributing it. Enterprise apps can either be distributed in-house or can be provided through various operating systems. However, the job is not as easy as it sounds.

While a private app is not intended for distribution through an App Store, there are several ways they can be distributed outside it, including iOS app ad hoc, through Xcode or Apple Configurator 2. You can also sign up for Apple’s Enterprise Deployment Program for app distribution.

Final Thoughts

Cybersecurity has to be one of the priorities of organizations when developing enterprise digital solutions. But with this, you need to understand how to test your solution’s security to safeguard your organization. The security considerations mentioned above are not necessarily the only thing to keep in mind while developing the solutions, but they are definitely a good place, to begin with.

After all, if your business isn’t already digital, it soon will be. To prepare for that, you need to offer the most secure digital experiences to your clients, employees, and business partners, irrespective of their location or the devices they use.

Enterprise digital solutions can be really beneficial for your organization, but they can be equally detrimental if security isn’t your top concern.

We live in a digital age where information is sacrosanct. While digital transformation is forcing business leaders to either disrupt or be disrupted, it is also leaving the doors open for data breaches and cyber threats. With data privacy taking the center stage in 2019, organizations cannot let vital information slip between the cracks in the coming years. Data theft or loss can cost organizations millions, whether it is direct business losses, audit, and regulatory fines, compliance remediation costs, or most importantly — the loss of client trust, reputation, and brand equity.

With so much on the line, businesses need to devise a robust security infrastructure while developing enterprise digital solutions.

Several organizations around the world are spending hundreds and thousands of dollars on data security.

But is that enough in the digital world?

Cybersecurity is the main focus of several organizations that rely on advanced technologies such as cloud computing, business intelligence, Internet of Things, machine learning, etc. For such organizations, threats of ransomware and distributed denial of service attacks are just the start of a long journey towards digital transformation.

Let us look at some of the top security threats that organizations are facing today.

Lack of a Complete Enterprise Security Architecture Framework

It is a known fact that enterprise security architecture is a methodology that addresses security concerns at each step. But more than often, the current enterprise security architectures are not that evolved, if not completely absent.

Uncontrolled Cloud Expansion

The frenzied pace at which businesses are adopting the cloud as a key part of their digital transformation has raised several eyebrows in the last few years. While businesses remain undeterred in adopting the cloud, there is a growing need to create and implement resilient security to support this rapid adoption. Today, protecting data in the cloud environment and supporting the cloud’s native security capabilities are critical.

Network Security

With the drastic increase in cyber-espionage groups trying to compromise vulnerabilities in routers and other devices, network security is also causing sleepless nights for network managers across organizations. The continuous evolution and escalation of threats and vulnerabilities make it a concern that is here to stay for long.

Security, which was once a tiny component of any organization, has gradually evolved into a significant function that will determine any organization’s success. Rising security threats in today’s world have emerged due to new age digital technologies. Security and risk management leaders are currently tasked to safeguard their organizations from cyber attacks with tighter regulations. Security breaches can disrupt the business model of organizations and jeopardize their reputation almost overnight.

The cost of breaches and security compromises can be in millions and result in reputation damage almost immediately. According to the 13th annual Cost of a Data Breach study by Ponemon Institute and IBM, the global average cost of a data breach has climbed 6.4 percent over the previous year to $3.86 million. With these numbers expected to rise in the coming years, organizations around the world cannot afford to ignore a robust IT security system amidst rising cyber attacks and tight regulatory requirements.

Today, there are merely two types of businesses left – the ones who have experienced cyber attacks or security breach and others who are highly likely to experience it in the near future.

It is really not a question of if, but only a matter of when!

Therefore, having a robust digital solution has become an imperative that just cannot wait.

In the next article, we will talk about the security guidelines that enterprises will need to consider before implementing a digital enterprise solution. Stay tuned.

Each passing year
How technology deconstructs
Teaches to start afresh

As we come to the end of 2018, this Haiku seems to be a fitting goodbye to the year. Endings are always about looking back appreciating what went well, gathering the learnings and moving ahead.

All year long, we have tried to do good work with our partners, explore and learn newer technologies and also sharing our experiences through our blog posts, e-books and case studies. So, as we arrive at the end of the year, we are taking a look at all that we learnt and shared through our blog, in 2018.

In this article, we have picked the 5 of the best reads for you. We hope you enjoy reading all of them…once again!

Read on.

Mobile Fintech vs Traditional Banking products: 15 awesome things winners do well

Ease of use of a digital product is paramount to client satisfaction and both FinTech companies and traditional banks realize this. And, as we all know – client satisfaction is the key to overall customer engagement, sales, long-term banking-client relationships and growth.

But do banking executives understand just how important exceptional user experience is for consumers? According to a recent survey, banks are misinterpreting and miscalculating the role user experience plays in the overall satisfaction customers have with a banking product. Something which FinTech enterprises and some prudent banks have gotten right. However, most banking executives are completely missing the mark at correctly understanding the rise in popularity for fintech products.

In this article, we will show a series of 15 different user experience features which have reached mass adoption among consumers. In doing so, we want to help banking executives visualize the difference between what their digital experiences offer and what consumers expect. And, hopefully, help them bridge the gap.

Read more

The road towards a cashless world – digital payments and the future

According to a recent study by U.S. Bank, 46 percent of people say that they do cash transactions less than eight days a month and 5 percent say they never use cash. Even if they do cash transactions, the amount spent is on the lower side. Most people keep less than $50 cash in their wallet. While for smaller transaction values cash remains the predominant mode of payment, spending through digital payment modes are on the rise.

It is predicted that by 2025, the overall spending through digital wallets will have increased by ten folds!

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In this ebook, we outline how digital payments have evolved over the years, the current state of the industry and what lies in the future.

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How Design Thinking can accelerate Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation is imperative for all businesses. However, Digital Transformation will look different for different companies. At Robosoft we understand both the necessities as well as the risks surrounding Digital Transformation. That’s why when we work with our clients to implement Digital Transformation in their organizations, we do it based on the principles of a holistic problem-solving framework: Design Thinking – a practical and creative method for problem-solving that has evolved from fields as varied as engineering, architecture and business.

In this article, we outline what is design thinking, the key principles around it and how it can accelerate an organization’s digital transformation journey.

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Voice assistants in retail – what consumers want

Voice searches and voice assistants have piqued users’ interest over the years. According to Gartner, about 30% of all searches will be done without a screen by 2020 and as per Comscore, 50% of all searches will be voice searches. Voice assistants have changed customers’ relationship with smartphones from being a communication device to being enablers of simplifying some of our daily tasks.

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In this article, we outline how today’s consumers are using voice assistant and how the retail industry can use voice assistants to engage with consumers and offer a delightful user experience for them.

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Changing Perceptions — creating a unified healthcare system

Health and technology are coming together like never before. From self-prognosis to smart diagnosis, from wearables for technophobes to object sensors for elderly care, from real-time health monitoring to remote patient management, from smart pharmacies to timely medicine dispensers, and from biostamps to injectables — processes, services and devices in the health spectrum are being vehemently explored. Today, we are witnessing varied types of innovations being explored in order to achieve a democratic approach towards healthcare. However, these healthcare interactions are happening in isolation. They are solving one problem at a time across the journey, waiting for the rest to be solved by another. So, there is a gap that the industry still needs to fill – integrating all the pieces on technologies together to create a connected ecosystem.

In this article, we outline, how process innovations, technology innovations and business innovations are changing the healthcare landscape and the need for a unified healthcare ecosystem and various possibilities towards achieving that.

Read more

And a bonus read…

5 must-read books on business thinking for CXOs

As we begin our preparations to welcome 2019, a lot of us will be keeping our reading lists for the coming year ready to grow in our professional and personal lives. As our CEO, Ravi Teja Bommireddipalli, puts it across –

‘’Aside from hands-on experience, I realized that the holistic thinking outlined in several books helped me immensely to grasp the problems at hand and offer solutions.’’

Among many such books, here are Ravi’s top five picks, which would help CXOs and budding CXO’s take a 360-degree approach in solving business problems.

Read more

We hope you enjoyed reading all these articles we are looking forward to learning more and sharing more in the coming year.

With the hustle and bustle of shopping bags, the excitement of the Holiday season hangs in the air. While customers may find themselves excited to hit stores to find that perfect gift for their special someones, e-commerce platforms must focus on giving those customers an unforgettable, seamless, enjoyable holiday shopping experience.

Online retailers get swamped with surges of traffic hitting their platforms during this season. In 2017 alone, companies such as Macy’s, Square, Walmart, and Amazon all saw web outages that likely cost them millions of dollars. These issues can lead to frustrated customers and sales losses this year and for years to come if online retailers cannot adequately mitigate these disasters before they occur.

In this article, we outline eight tips e-commerce platforms can follow to prepare for the holiday season to ensure a seamless experience for their customers.

Optimized for Mobile

“Mobile is undoubtedly the most disruptive force in retail since the onset of e-commerce,” says Salesforce Head of Consumer Insights Rick Kenney.

Your customers shouldn’t be restricted to your desktop site to find a seamless shopping experience when searching for those perfect holiday gifts. Based on a recent report from Salesforce, almost 70% of ecommerce visits and almost 50% of online orders were done using a mobile device.

Even while in-store shopping, 83% of customers between 18-44 years old are on their devices interacting with those retailers in real time. If you don’t prioritize the medium where they spend most of their time, you’ve missed the mark.

Even simple UX features can make a great impact when it comes to offering delightful experience on an e-commerce platform. For instance, online footwear retailer JustFab does an excellent job of simplifying their checkout page by allowing users to log in with their Facebook account to save time and effort filling in form fields.

Ensure Your Website Is Prepared

You can prevent your site from crashing during peak periods and sustained, heavy website traffic by preparing with a few of the following considerations far in advance of the season:

• Confirm (and update) your bandwidth and capacity for spikes
• Install new hardware and software
• Review performance expectations and SLAs
• Monitor SSL certificates for validity and expiration
• Host stress tests

Ensuring your company has made these preparations and advancements to your site will significantly reduce errors and blackouts, enhance your UX/UI design, and increase consumer confidence during an otherwise stressful season. Optimizing your site is one of the most critical things you can do to help increase e-commerce sales.

Add a Progress Bar to Your Checkout

Showing customers where they are in the online buying process gives them time to prepare the information they’ll need to have ready next to complete their purchase. Research shows that the greatest drop-off point is at the checkout stage. This simple design feature gives customers a sense of organization and control over their purchasing power, which instills a sense of trust and, subsequently, creates a loyal customer base.

Nixon has only 3 tabs on its progress bar, enhancing the simplicity of the checkout process for customers while also offering other features on the related pages, such as guest or member sign-in and various payment options, as customers work their way from “Add” to “Purchase.”

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Save Their Spot

Customers appreciate small but significant features such as saving their spot from when they last visited your site, should they need to leave suddenly or want to return to shopping when they have more time and focus. Saving their spot gives customers the impression you have been patiently and eagerly waiting for them to return, at their leisure. Use local storage features to track and store unique customer data to ensure a smooth transition back to your site.

Walmart allows shoppers to select their items and return later to schedule a time for delivery or pickup, depending on the items and time frame they’ve selected.

Proper Labelling and Layout

Don’t leave your customers guessing what info you need from them to make a purchase. Make it clear and eliminate any unnecessary information, graphics, and words. Customers read in an F-shaped pattern, so consider what information is important and place it near the top left corner of your site or in bold headlines.

Stats show that “the average e-commerce site can gain a 35.26% increase in conversion rate” by designing a better checkout process, even for large retailers such as Walmart, Wayfair, and ASOS. This increase in conversion rates, through better page layout and design, means big dollars…of the roughly $740 billion USD e-commerce market in the US and EU, this could mean an additional $260 billion in sales.

Keep the Questions to a Minimum

Ensure your purchase process is simple from adding items to their cart to entering payment details. According to the Baymard Institute 2017 survey, “28% of US online shoppers have abandoned an order in the past quarter solely due to a too long/too complicated checkout process.”

For those questions that must be asked during the checkout process, ensure that you let your customers know why you are asking, so they can see the value to them if they answer.

Ensure Products Shown Are Available

As a rule, don’t show items that you can’t offer your customers.

If someone uses filters to narrow down exactly the right gift for their friend or relative, only to find out that it is out of stock, they’ll likely be frustrated and leave without purchasing anything…even if they had items in their cart when they left.

Live Chat Feature

H&M is an excellent example of a retailer using chatbots effectively, providing fashion advice based on consumers’ preferences and offering to help if customers find themselves stuck on a decision about a product.

Chatbots and live chat features can offer customers an infinite amount of accurate product details.

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Summary

Retailers should remember that their potential customers begin preparing and planning well before the holiday season starts. A November 2018 report from the National Retail Federation reported that, of the 164 million customers that will shop through the Thanksgiving long weekend, almost 25% said that’s when they start their holiday shopping.

Many sites have compiled a handy checklist of UX basics retailers should consider when implementing UX strategies, especially when typical website traffic is expected to increase. Don’t be caught in a tidal wave of traffic that debilitates your customers’ experiences with your company.

As a famous, anonymous individual once said, “There’s only one shopping day left until tomorrow.”

With the growth of eCommerce market, retailers across the globe are working towards creating delightful digital experiences for their consumers. UX/UI design plays a critical role in creating such experiences.

Over the years, we at Robosoft have created such experiences for global retail brands and its an honor to be recognized for our work. We are thrilled to be named as one of the Top eCommerce web design agencies by Design Rush a leading listing platform for full-service agencies, web design companies, digital marketing firms & top technology companies.

You can see more of our work here.

We live and work in the information economy. Information is sacrosanct. Most struggling organizations I have seen, struggle because either vital information fell between the cracks in the communication chain, or good quality information was never channelled through to the right people in time.

This happens all the time in sales leads, CRM operations, customer discovery, inventory management, and the list goes on. This is why we have processes because we want to ensure that information is passed around as easily and as efficiently as possible. These processes work like a charm in smaller organizations. Information flows around quite fluidly. But as the organization keeps getting bigger, these processes start becoming a big overhead. A lot of times, they act as a crutch rather than an enabler. Communication becomes difficult, and often information is restricted to functional silos as opposed to being spread around the entire enterprise.

Consider a large digital services company. When the on-ground sales representative identifies a potential lead or untapped segment, he emails his boss about it. This, in turn, is relayed to his boss, and then to his boss and so on. However, the higher up the information passes, lower the weightage is attached to it. The next salesperson having a similar idea will face a similar outcome. Thus, the obvious pattern was missed, and the opportunity lost. This affects not only company revenue but also employee morale.

This kind of information asymmetry actually gets more acute in the presence of poorly designed and deployed enterprise solutions. The need of the hour is an easy-to-manage, easy-to-access, centralized application that takes care of all your communication and process needs.

We are talking about Enterprise Mobility Applications (EMA). Let’s take a minute to understand these terms.

Traditional enterprise solutions can be defined as a suite of applications that perform certain functions like CRM, ERP, ticketing platform, internal communications and more. These disparate set of applications serve their own individual purposes. However, as more and more organizations feel the need to start communicating faster and passing information quicker, the suite of enterprise solutions stop becoming the conduit and start becoming the bottleneck. Enter Enterprise Mobility Applications (EMA). EMAs are nothing but enterprise utility applications on mobile phones. These applications are so ubiquitous that they can be installed and run on employee mobile phones also. These mobility solutions can provide employees with the ability to enter and read vital pieces of information without having to wait to get to a computer, or without the fear of it getting dropped off somewhere in the chain. This will definitely help boost business productivity. I am not alone in my thought. In a recent survey by Apperian, 43% of respondents stated that the primary goal of their enterprise mobility applications was improved productivity.

Why Do You Need a Change?

Before we deep dive into the world of EMAs, let’s take a step back and understand why a solution is even required in the first place:

1. To improve employee productivity that is hampered today by either communication gaps or information asymmetry
2. To quickly identify new revenue channels or predict the latest trends in the market
3. To increase your bottom line by eliminating the unnecessary costs of travel and time delays in decision making
4. To expedite processes that employees find unnecessary but management needs for better control and security
5. To ensure higher productivity, transparency and thus higher levels of satisfaction of employees

How Employee-Facing Business Processes Are Changing with Digitization and EMAs

Let’s try to understand some specific ways in which enterprise mobility applications are effecting a paradigm shift in the landscape of processes in organizations:

An Instant Communications Platform

Any organization, big or small, realizes the importance of instant communications. But only a large enterprise can appreciate the need for an exclusive deployment of a communications platform for the company. This kind of platform can not only enable the linear model of communication but also transactional and interactional models of communication, and is a huge improvement over emails and personal/verbal notes.

A good example of how a large enterprise has adopted a communications platform for its employees is the Ozone communications platform used by ICICI Lombard. ICICI Lombard wanted to develop an end-to-end solution to serve food using cashless mechanisms in their office premises, provide Bus shuttle booking, Visitor management, Cab and travel bookings etc. As a solution, we built Ozone app to host exclusive services so that employees can get everything need at the click of a button.

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This app has helped employees not only communicate amongst themselves better but also better manage their meetings and logistics.

Another real-world example of this is NewsCorp, which has managed to establish strong lines of communication between their 25000 employees using EMAs.

Sales Leads and CRM

Every sales organization understands how critical it is to make timely follow-ups on leads and act on information specific to that customer. No more written notes and disorganized emails. This will help ensure greater horizontal and inter-functional collaboration within the company. A robust and ubiquitous CRM solution helps the entire sales team to rally around information on customers and helps them close out deals faster and more efficiently. A cloud-based CRM solution is any day of greater use and significance than one maintained on desktop applications like excel.

Salesforce is one of the leading CRM solutions in the world. Urban Ladder has greatly improved its abilities to follow up on its customer leads, track SLAs and mine better consumer insights with the implementation.

Supply Chain Management and Inventory Management

No one cares about the timely delivery of services and goods more than the customer. If you delivered on time, you merely lived up to the customer’s expectation. However, if you delay your shipment, you will be branded as inefficient. Having access to real-time updates on the exact location of your inventory (for hard goods) or progress on your project (for soft goods) puts your front-line employees in a good position where they can make educated decisions for their customers. Just in Time delivery models and agile supply chains thrive on the timely availability of critical information.

An extension of mobility applications is technology in wearables. DHL has successfully implemented a pilot program using Augmented Reality in their wearables to improve their warehouse operations by 25 per cent.

Another good example is that of Flex, the electronics manufacturer. Using a combination of IoT and cloud computing, Flex has increased connectivity between all stakeholders and consequently, productivity.

Workflows and Approvals

How many times have you had to stall some critical work because you didn’t receive approvals in time?

The prevalence of mobility solutions will ensure that all your approvers will get notified every time they have to approve some workflow, and give them the ability to do so from their mobile phones itself. Prevalence of cloud-based workflow models have fostered faster turnaround times.

A prime example of a solution that helps track workflows and maintain high standards is the BSI Entropy tool. Some of its biggest customers are GlaxoSmithKline and Vodafone, who have managed compliance and their customers better.

Onboarding and Training

If you run a sales organization, and you have new batches of people joining every month, you don’t want to be stuck conducting training throughout the year. A simple application that stores extensive training material on the cloud is the perfect solution to keep your organization agile. Another use case is to keep your executives and top leadership up to date with the latest happenings in the industry and thought leadership articles.

We have worked with the client to create a solution similar to this for Fortinet called the CISO Collective. This application has helped Fortinet executives and CIOs across the globe be on the top of their industry updates and consequently make better decisions.

CVS Health Corporation, the retail pharmacy chain has also ensured higher levels of collaboration between its executives using EMAs.

How to Select Applications That Work for You?

Whether you wish to develop your applications in-house or license them from a third party provider, enterprise app development requires you to follow some simple guidelines before making a decision.

Identify the Gap in Your Current Process

The first step in implementing a technology solution is to always identify the gaps that you want the technology to fill. Often times, companies fall prey to buzzwords in the industry without analyzing the need correctly, which results in a massive failure of the technology and a dip in employee confidence. Multiple ERP system implementations come to mind as examples. If your company can truly benefit from an enterprise mobility solution, you will know it from the information dissemination flows within your units. It is also possible that for various reasons unrelated to the technology, you are better off without the enterprise platform. This first step, though seemingly simple, is the most overlooked step of them all.

Work with the Functions Who Need It the Most

You can’t solve something unless you know what you’re solving for. Instead of imposing solutions on your frontline staff, it is always prudent to spend some time understanding the use cases of the business unit. A deep understanding of the daily operational activities and how these applications will augment the tasks is crucial in choosing the solution. This will give you a good idea of which features are the most important and which need to be shelved for the time being.

Evangelize the Product

A huge roadblock when it comes to adoption of new technology products is the adoption itself. Most teams get set in their ways of operations are often unwilling to move to a new style of working. The key is to target only a small subset of your workforce and test out the product with them. Work closely with the team to see how the product can be tweaked to suit them better. Once you gain the trust and confidence of this team, they become naturally influencers for the product across the company. Going big-bang with any new change is never a good idea. Working with teams while slowly building up confidence is the best and most effective approach.

Incorporate Feedback Regularly

No technology product can cater to 100 per cent requirement of everyone. Certain trade-offs are always required. However, never shy away from incorporating feedback from your teams. They are the ones who use the product daily, and consequently, they are the ones who will have a more informed opinion of it. Apart from making the operations smoother, you are also ensuring that your employees feel heard and appreciated.

Ensure Quick Technical Support

Though adoption is a slow process, rejection of a new solution can be brutally quick. To ensure that employees do not face technical difficulties in working with the product, ensure that they can readily access a technical support team to guide them through their roadblocks and hurdles.

Know the Pain Points Beforehand

In our collective experience of working in the enterprise, we know a few big reasons why such projects never see the light of day. It is in your best interest to know of them before you start the project so that you may be well prepared to circumvent any hurdles. Some reasons cited by other organizations are – the disparity in platform types and OS types; management of BYOD devices for contract employees; no budget from the higher management; prioritization of less important enterprise app features, thus not adding value to the chain. Prior knowledge of such impediments goes a long way in preparing the organization for rough waters.

The Ball Is Now in Your Court

Every organization might not benefit from employing an enterprise mobility solution. But the ones that might, seldom do it the right way. The advantages are evident; the process, not so much. A sensible decision-making body with common sense and an inclination for collaboration is all that is required to ensure that enterprise apps boost employee productivity in your organization.