With the App Store becoming no less than a battleground, app developers need to create icons that not only stand out but also provide an overview of the key functionalities. Even though there are a dozen articles claiming to educate on the importance of app icons, it is important to revisit the basics as an app icon is perhaps the first thing potential consumer notices about the app. It must tell a story, create intrigue and make the user curious enough to find out more.

Icon designing is a critical phase that requires in-depth brainstorming even before the development process starts. Your app icon and app screenshot is what your user will see first before installing it. If your app icon takes more than 5 seconds to think what it means, then it perhaps needs to be reconsidered.

In this blog, we will discuss the importance of an app icon and how to create successful icons that rank higher in the App Store.

No Second Chance to Create a First Impression

The icon of your app is the first point of engagement for a user. A great icon can increase downloads up to 560%! With a ton of options available in the App Store, the pictorial representation of the app is important to catch your user’s attention and keep them away from meandering for other options.

One company that does a really good job at this is Slack. It has made a mark on users with its simple yet elegant design. The earlier logo of Slack had The simple “S” symbol with a soothing color palette that made it easy to spot the icon among the crowd. The color theme of the icon is nothing short of nostalgia of colored gels put over strips of solid colors. They recently changed their logo keeping the color palette same.

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Let the picture do the talking

In addition to creating a great first impression, a quality app icon should also explain the basic features of the app to the viewers. For instance, a food app should be able to convey the genre of the app by using icons related to food or delivery person.

Take for example Clear Todos – a to-do app. Even though an old app, it has an upbeat and catchy icon that suggests how life can be better by having a task organizer. What sets it apart from around a million such apps is the colors that are refreshingly new and how each color behind the tick mark represents different rows and columns.

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Following the success of Clear app, several apps including Microsoft To-Do have borrowed the concept using a tick mark to stand out on the digital shelf.

Yet the Clear app stands out for its use of colors and its unique brand identifier in the app icon itself.

Cut Through the Noise

It is difficult to find an attractive icon and it is even more difficult to make one. If you create an image that grabs the attention in seconds, then half your job is done. By making your app unique and exquisite, you can cut through the noise and make your app recognizable. It is the first thing that will connect with people both on functional and emotional levels. While the functionality of the app does play an important role in increasing the recall value, what really sticks in the mind is the picture you use as the icon. Speedtest by Ookla is a great intersection of unique yet simple design.

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While there are just two colors used in the icon, the contrast of the colors and the concept of the speedometer creates a striking impression on the viewers. It does its job of telling the audience that the app is about measuring speed.

Other apps that describe its functionality through images include:

Measure app from Apple and Scanner Pro by Readdle

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Note: To begin, start with a brainstorming session and ask yourself – what do you want your icon to communicate? Then create an image that is unique with exquisite patterns and designs.

Importance of Icons for App Store Optimization

To generate more visibility and rank higher in the App Store, developers need to optimize apps as part of the ASO. If the icon is well designed and thought through, it will get more visibility and ultimately be downloaded by the user. To design eye-catching icons, it is advised to keep the design simple and appealing. Create an icon that is relatable to your business, grabs attention and looks good even when scaled to the smallest size. Also, the icon should look equally good when viewed in light and dark backgrounds.

Even before going on to the whiteboard, it is important to establish the purpose of the app icon. Decide if you’d want to create a functional or a branded icon. While using company names may work for branded apps like Uber and Facebook, functional icons can use objectives to describe the app. Once the purpose of the app is ascertained, you can then kickstart the creation of a successful app icon by having an exquisite design along with a cherry-picked color palette.

Small details go a long way to determine the success of app icons. When designing an app icon, keep in mind the minutest of details like image quality, the element’s creativity and the uniqueness. Even though there are no tried and tested ways for app icon designing, read the following tips that revolve around the three basic pillars: quality, design, and creativity.

Avoid Text

Keeping in mind the scalability of the app icon, it is never a good idea to have text on the icon. People will definitely have a tough time reading the text which you squeeze into such a small area. But in case you decide to have it, then Apple guidelines advise to emphasize words that relate to the actual content your app offers.

‘’Use words only when they’re essential or part of a logo. An app’s name appears below its icon on the Home screen. Don’t include nonessential words that repeat the name or tell people what to do with your app, like “Watch” or “Play.” If your design includes any text, emphasize words that relate to the actual content your app offers.’’ – From Apple’s App Icons guidelines.

Take for example Line social media app and Grab. Line App is a clear winner for its legible font and idea even though both the apps use the same color (green and white). Since Grab is a transportation app, it uses a font that also tries to signify roads. But this creativity also makes it hard for the users to read the name. Either way, refrain from using text in the app icon. Even if you have discovered the perfect word that will influence users’ actions, it is better to have it where it belongs – in the description.

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Choose Colors Wisely

Your color palette can create a lasting impression and get inside your user’s head. To choose the perfect palette, look at what your competitors are using and select a completely different color scheme. In other cases, if your brand has certain color guidelines, then stick to those. In some cases, you can even use the logo of the company as Facebook does.

If you’d like to take some color inspiration, then turn to the Strata app. The icon appears to be simple patterns. But what separates it from thousands of puzzle games is the color combination along with attention to details – whether it is subtle shadows, pastel palette or faint textures. The icon simply feels at home on the App Store!

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Pro tip: it is a good practice to have a background color in the icon so that it doesn’t blend with any background when users download it on their devices.

Keep It Simple

Make more with less if you want your app icon to be successful. Mixing more graphics in such a small space can lead to confusion. Remember that simplicity will underscore the theme of your app. To make your icon stand out, try using only one symbol but in a creative way! The language learning app, Duolingo’s cartoonish approach is very creative and comparatively offbeat from the boring flags and corporate icons. It insinuates that language learning doesn’t have to be serious with its icon, which looks like a hypnotic owl!

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Consider the App Store Sizes

There are so many handheld devices in the market with different screen sizes and display. Luckily, both platforms – Google and Apple – have detailed guidelines that can help designers clarify their doubts. Android API Guides for Launcher Icons is the Bible of all Android Developers while iOS Human Interface Guidelines For App icon is used by iOS programmers.

Follow their best practices and advice when you develop an icon. These manuals have all the necessary information required for adjusting icon to the different screen sizes. Below are some of the pixel recommendations and attributes by both Apple and Google based on the devices:

App Store

• iPhone 6s Plus and iPhone 6 Plus: 180 x 180 px
• iPhone 6s, iPhone 6 and iPhone 5: 120 x 120 px
• iPhone 4s: 120 x 120 px
• iPad and iPad mini: 152 x 152 px
• iPad 2 and iPad mini: 76 x 76 px
• iPad Pro: 167 x 167 px

Google Play

• 32-Bit PNG (with alpha)
• 512 x 512 Pixels Dimension
• 1.024KB maximum file size

Don’t Forget A/B Testing

Since no one has the answer on how to develop the perfect app icon, A/B testing is the way to figure out what works best for your app. According to a study, testing app icons can increase app page performance by up to 26%. Conduct the test on specific elements like background, colors and small pictures. You can also test different letters or numbers placed on the image to see how it performs.

Conclusion

App icons have come a long way from being just the visual expression of the app. With millions of app available on the App Store, icons need to draw the attention of the viewer and compel them to download it. With so much riding on the looks of your icon, it is not surprising that so much time is spent on brainstorming on the icon design.

Designing an app icon is one of the most daunting tasks. But with an understanding of common aesthetic rules, you can make this as swift as a breeze and flourish on the digital shelf. Just remember, whatever you design, always provide a high-resolution image and keep it simple yet bold and friendly.

An API is an interface that makes it easy for one application to ‘consume’ capabilities or data from another application. By defining stable, simplified entry points to application logic and data, APIs enable developers to easily access and reuse application logic built by other developers. It allows for the clear separation between interface and implementation. A well designed API allows its user to rely only on the published public interface, abstracts implementation details. This enables API developer to evolve the system independently of the client and augurs well for the development of highly scalable systems. In the case of ‘web APIs’, that logic and data is exposed over the network.

Now, Web API is the hot currency in the digital world. Organisations like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Salesforce etc., are essentially selling their services via APIs. So:

• APIs can be among a company’s greatest assets
• Customers invest heavily on APIs: buying, learning , writing clients.
• API is public contract, therefore its developers need to honour it.
• Cost to stop, change using an API can be prohibitive.
• Successful public APIs capture customers.

Every API in the world follows some sort of paradigm or architectural style like Control Language, Distributed Object, RPC, Resource-based architecture (REST) and query language.

Control Languages provide an economical and efficient way for application programs to control remote process, usually residing in hardware (like firmware of a printer). Hewlett-Packard’s PCL printer language is one such example of control language[1]. Control languages involve sending compact escape sequence codes that are embedded in the data stream between computer and peripheral hardware. These escaped sequence control commands are interpreted by the embedded software and appropriate functionality takes place. Control languages are by its very nature system specific and are not viable for building scalable, general purpose systems.

Remote procedure calls(RPC) allow programs to call procedures located on other machines. When a process on machine A calls a procedure on machine B, the calling process on A is suspended, and execution of the called procedure takes place on B. Information can be transported from the caller to the callee in the parameters and can come back in the procedure result. No message passing at all is visible to the programmer. However, it’s not easy for clients to invoke remote procedure calls. They may establish connections to remote systems through “low-level” protocols like the BSD Socket API. Developers that use these mechanisms must convert the data types defined on the remote computing platform to corresponding types on the local platform and vice versa. This process is called data marshalling. This can be a daunting task because different platforms use different character encoding schemes (e.g., ASCII, EBCDIC, UTF-8, UTF-16, Little and Big Endianness) to represent and store data types. App Developers who work at this level must therefore understand how the remote platform encodes data and how it interprets any byte stream received.

Remoting technologies like CORBA and DCOM have made it much easier to share and use remote procedures. Hewlett-Packard’s Orblite project is one such effort to build CORBA based distributed object communication infrastructure [2]. Orblite infrastructure can be used to communicate between processes running on computer with processes running on hardware devices like digital scanner, printer etc. The pieces involved in the distributed call in Orblite is figure 1. It involves generating common procedure call signature via an Interface Definition Language(IDL) compiler using a contract defined in the IDL language. This process generates Stub in client and Skeleton in server. Both communicating parties must agree on transmittable types before hand and this is usually done using a Common Data Representation (CDR) format. With this setup client and server can be implemented in different technology and hardware stacks. RPC protocol is free to use any transport mechanism like TCP, HTTP, TCP over USB etc

Fig 1. Pieces involved in a CORBA distributed call.

Though CORBA based system is very good improvement over RPC in terms interoperability, there is still a lot tight coupling in terms of IDL and CDR which affects scalability and independent evolution of system. The systems thus developed are also very complex in nature. You can see that in the below figure 2 which traces logical flow of a remote method invocation across all subsystems.

Fig 2. The logical flow of a remote method invocation.

HTTP mitigates many of these issues because it enables clients and servers that run on different computing platforms to easily communicate by leveraging open standards. But the challenge is how can clients use HTTP to execute remote procedures? One approach is to send messages that encapsulate the semantics for procedure invocation. One can use open standards of data representation like XML and JSON to transmit data between client and server. There are many concrete implementations/standards of http based RPC like XML-RPC, JSONRPC and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Among these SOAP is the most famous. SOAP provides a layer of metadata which describe things such as which fields correspond to which datatypes and what are the allowed methods and so on. SOAP uses XML Schema and a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) for this purpose. This metadata allows clients and server to agree upon the public contract of communication.

For example a SOAP based system for communicating between process running in Desktop and firmware running in a digital scanner will have a WSDL defining operations like – GetScannerCapabilities, CreateScanRequest, CancelScanRequest, GetCurrentScanJobInfo – and values and their correspond datatypes applicable to each operation.

But, it can be noted that number of operations, their semantics and parameters are unique to each system. This poses great deal of problem in integration of disparate systems, as developers have to consider WSDLs of every other system that is to be integrated. Though SOAP allows for Service Oriented Architecture (where domain specific services are exposed via http web services), non uniformity among web services is rather limiting.

For example, consider the SOAP based services to work on Amazon S3 buckets and their individual objects , we can notice an explosion of operations to be considered. Also, though SOAP web services use HTTP protocol as transport mechanism, they use only POST http method. So, we are not taking advantage of idempotence and cacheabilty of GET http method and partial update semantics of PUT method.

Bucket Webservices

• ListAllMyBuckets
• CreateBucket
• DeleteBucket
• ListBucket
• GetBucketAccessControlPolicy
• SetBucketAccessControlPolicy
• GetBucketLoggingStatus
• SetBucketLoggingStatus

Object Webservices

• PutObjectInline
• PutObject
• CopyObject
• GetObject
• GetObjectExtended
• DeleteObject
• GetObjectAccessControlPolicy
• SetObjectAccessControlPolicy

So, next improvement in web APIs is to use a Resource Oriented API called Representational State Transfer (REST). It is an architectural style that is defined by a specific set of constraints. REST calls for layered client/server systems that employ stateless servers, liberal use of caching on the client, intermediaries, and server, a uniform interface. REST views a distributed system as a huge collection of resources that are individually managed by components. Resources may be added or removed by (remote) applications, and likewise can be retrieved or modified. [3]

There are four key characteristics of what are known as RESTful architectures

1. Resources are identified through a single naming scheme
2. All services offer the same interface, consisting of at-most four operations, as shown in Table below
3. Messages sent to or from a service are fully self-described
4. After executing an operation at a service, that component forgets everything about the caller (stateless execution)

In REST based APIs, HTTP is used as a complete application protocol that defines the semantics of service behaviour. It usually involves four HTTP methods with the below semantics:

Usual semantics of REST API is that when you do a POST on a collection of resources(which has a unique URI), a new resource is created in that collection and unique URI is returned to the newly created resource. We can perform a GET on the newly created resource URI to get all its information in some representation. Using PUT on this URI, we can update partial resource(that is, only necessary parts). We can use the DELETE operation on the URI to remove resource from the collection permanently. This application semantics holds good for any resource based services and thus helping clients to integrate disparate systems and also helps us reason about communication across subsystems easily. In REST style, server-side data are made available through representations of data in simple formats. This format is usually JSON or XML but could be anything.

Most of the above mentioned operations on AWS S3 buckets and objects can be easily modelled on only two URIs and four http methods as:

GET, POST, PUT, DELETE /api/buckets ?query_param1=val…
GET, POST, PUT, DELETE /api/buckets/:object_id ?query_param1=val…

A URI can choose support a limited number of http methods and all GET requests are idempotent thus provides for caching in intermediaries and thus greatly improves efficiency.

One of the tenets of RESTFul architecture, that is less widely used is Hypermedia which provides “next available actions” in the response of an API. Roy Fielding in his paradigm defining thesis about REST called this as HATEOAS (Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State). HATEOAS allows us to develop elegant, self discoverable API system. For example, if we develop a HATEOAS API for Multi-functionality Printers, get operation on the URI api/capabilities return printer capabilities like Print, Scan, Fax with link to access these capabilities like /api/capabilities/scan, /api/capabilities/print and /api/capabilities/fax. A GET on /api/capabilities/scan will return links to access scanner capabilities like /api/capabilities/scan/flatbed, /api/capabilities/scan/ auto_doc_feeder and so on.

A HATEOS API [5]

curl http://localhost:8080/spring-security-rest/api/customers

{
  "_embedded": {
    "customerList": [
      {
        "customerId": "10A",
        "customerName": "Jane",
        "companyName": "ABC Company",
        "_links": {
          "self": {
            "href": "http://localhost:8080/spring-security-rest/api/customers/10A"
          },
          "allOrders": {
            "href": "http://localhost:8080/spring-security-rest/api/customers/10A/orders"
          }
        }
      },
      {
        "customerId": "20B",
        "customerName": "Bob",
        "companyName": "XYZ Company",
        "_links": {
          "self": {
            "href": "http://localhost:8080/spring-security-rest/api/customers/20B"
          },
          "allOrders": {
            "href": "http://localhost:8080/spring-security-rest/api/customers/20B/orders"
          }
        }
      },
      {
        "customerId": "30C",
        "customerName": "Tim",
        "companyName": "CKV Company",
        "_links": {
          "self": {
            "href": "http://localhost:8080/spring-security-rest/api/customers/30C"
          }
        }
      }
    ]
  },
  "_links": {
    "self": {
      "href": "http://localhost:8080/spring-security-rest/api/customers"
    }
  }
}

One of the downsides of RESTFul APIs is that client may need to call multiple APIs to get different resources to piece together information needed by the client. When resources are related forming a graph of relations, it becomes extra difficult in RESTFul architecture to express the need to retrieve selective information from the web of relations among resources. A new API style that is gaining currency these days called ‘GraphQL’ mitigates this problem.[6].

GraphQL is basically RPC with a default procedure providing a query language, a little like SQL. You ask for specific resources and specific fields, and it will return that data in the response. GraphQL is a query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data. GraphQL provides a complete and understandable description of the data in your API, gives clients the power to ask for exactly what they need and nothing more. GraphQL reduces the number of HTTP requests to retrieve data from multiple resources.

However, endpoint-based API’s are able to utilise the full capabilities of HTTP protocol to cache response data, but GraphQL dispatches queries through POST requests to a single endpoint. So, advantage of out of the box http caching is lost and API developers are needed to device custom caching mechanism themselves.

There are emerging standards for API documentation like OpenAPI pioneered by Swagger. Swagger allows for API design, API documentation, API development, API testing, API mocking, API governance and API monitoring. We can alternative documentation tools like Sphinx, along with its extensions. API documented using Sphinx looks something like below.

Another issue in maintaining resource based APIs like RESTFul APIs is versioning. We have API URI and at some point it will need to be replaced or have new features added while keeping the older APIs still supporting existing clients. There are many solutions to solve this issue, each having its own merits and demerits. One popular approach is to embed version number in the API URIs like /api/v1. But REST purists frown upon this approach as they see it breaking the fundamental concept of REST – evolvability. A resource is meant to be more like a permalink. This permalink (the URL) should never change. But the practical downside to version approach is that pointing v1 and v2 to different servers can be difficult.

This issue of server setup for different version can be resolved by putting version number in in the hostname(or subdomain) like “https://apiv1. example.com/places”. Another approach to API versioning is to put version info in body or query parameters or custom request header or as part of content negotiation. [7]

Overall, Web APIs are the new digital currency using which digital services are sold. Essentially services provided Facebook, Google, Amazon, Salesforce etc are via APIs. So, organisations take great care in defining, documenting and maintaining their Web APIs. Web APIs are public contracts and hence every software engineering due diligence exercised in developing key software systems should be followed for Web APIs also.

References:

[1] http://www.hp.com/ctg/Manual/bpl13210.pdf
[2] https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/97feb/feb97a9.pdf
[3] Distributed Systems, Third edition by Maarten van Steen and Andrew S. Tanenbaum. ISBN: 978-90-815406-2-9
[4] https://spring.io/understanding/HATEOAS
[5] https://www.baeldung.com/spring-hateoas-tutorial
[6] https://blog.apisyouwonthate.com/understanding-rpc-rest-andgraphql-2f959aadebe7
[7] Phil Sturgeon. “Build APIs You Won’t Hate”.

Digital transformation is changing the face of every industry today. Though the insurance sector has been a late adopter of the technology boom, it is definitely catching up. Digital transformation has become a priority for many insurers and that’s why they are investing not just in technology but are also building teams adept in taking their digital strategies a step ahead. According to a 2019 survey done by Accenture, 40% of the insurers say technology can improve customer loyalty and around half as many say it can help in boosting operational efficiency.

For most insurers going ‘digital’ implies having online portals, a mobile app, some automated processes etc. While this may be a good start, it will still keep them at a very nascent stage of the ‘digital transformation’ journey.

Imbibing true transformation will require a change in the broader ecosystem, including both front-end and back-end systems

Digital Transformation in insurance –need and the opportunities

In the near future, the insurance marketplace is going to exist and operate out of the digital environment. Earlier, going digital was mostly limited to e-commerce, but with the rapid adoption of the internet, mobile, technologies like wearables, social media, big data and cloud computing the need to go digital is irrefutable and opportunities are immense.

The digital disruption in the insurance sector is primarily driven by market forces like changing consumer preferences, competitors, technology innovations and the ever-changing regulatory model.

Here is a view on how these factors are changing the insurance landscape.

Changing consumer preferences

By 2021, e-commerce sales are expected to reach $4.5 trillion nearly double its value from 2017. However, the insurance sector has a long way to go when it comes to providing seamless and delightful digital experiences.

Customers are demanding more customized and digitally optimized solutions from insurers. 90% of insurance respondents say that in five years, consumers will buy most of their insurance through online and mobile apps. However, the sector has taken only baby steps to cater to those. While nearly half of the customers expect more digital transactions, a survey suggests only 22% of insurers have launched personalized, real-time or mobile solution.

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The paper-based processes and legacy systems of the insurance sector rarely meet the expectations of today’s technology-savvy consumer. Hence, consumers prefer digitally mature insurance partners who can provide faster and advanced solutions.

With the number of mobile users set to cross the $5 billion mark in 2019, today’s consumer is more connected than ever. Their expectations have also risen. Today’s digitally savvy consumers expect their insurers to provide value at every stage of the sales cycle and even post-purchase.

Prudent insurers are already using digitization to provide consumers personalized experience. According to Oracle analysts, insurance companies deem customer experience more important than the product or sustainable growth.

Many insurers are already moving away from mere transactional relationships with the consumer, to a more engaging one. They are looking at partnerships beyond financial enterprises to provide value-added services to their customers. For e.g. “Panasonic Smart Home & Allianz Assist” have partnered to provide integrated solutions which provide home monitoring and control systems along with home protection services. This solution protects people’s home from potential damage like break-ins, glass/window breakage, water leakage etc.

The emergence of a new breed of competitors

Legacy insurers are waking up to competition not just from direct insurance players but also from Insuretech start-ups. While new entrants impose significant competition for the established players, many foresee competition coming from outside the insurance industry.

According to a survey, 74% of insurers believe that some part of their business is at risk of disruption from Insurtech startups moving into their market.

Digital stalwarts like Amazon and Walmart are capitalizing on the insurance industry’s sluggish evolution into the digital world to disrupt the market and scoop their share of the insurance space by catering to niche customer groups. Digital maturity is enabling these competitors to move and innovate with agility and offer personalized customer experience.

The rise of aggregators’ business model has also given the power in the hands of consumers to compare quotes and coverage from multiple players, hence making the competition even stiffer for insurers.

Technology Disruption in the Insurance sector

The emergence of technologies like Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), Predictive Analytics, Telematics etc., presents a huge opportunity for insurers to collect and exchange data about consumers, identify new growth opportunities and personalizing consumer experience.

Here is how the rise of technology is disrupting the insurance space:

Blockchain – Increasing digital transactions, complex compliance protocols third-party payment channels fraudulent claims, etc. are some of the challenges that the insurance sector faces. According to Mckinsey, five to ten percent of all insurance claims are fraudulent. This is where the insurance sector is starting to see the potential of blockchain technology. For instance, Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative, B3i, launched by organizations such as Swiss Re, Aegon, Allianz, Munich Re, and Zurich aims to explore the potential of distributed ledger technologies to better serve clients through faster, more convenient and secure services.

Internet of Things (IoT) – Insurers are using IoT and the ever-connected ecosystem to provide proactive solutions to consumers. IoT is opening up non-traditional insurance data to insurers which could reveal risk factors, enabling insurers to offer a price differentiation or new value propositions.

Mobile-Based Telematics – Mobile-based Telematics enables innovation in usage-based insurance (UBI). Telematics mobilizes the data collection process using telecommunications and information processing tools. Right now, it is largely used in the auto insurance sector where data collected through mobile devices deployed in the vehicles can help in analyzing driver behavior and provide customized services accordingly.

Predictive Analytics – Predictive analytics techniques can help insurers analyze real-time data from the web and social networks and reach out to the right audience with personalized products and services.

Gamification – Gamification as a tool helps in gaining higher customer engagement. Insurers are using it to incentivize customers through rewards and loyalty points or discounts. Gamification apps using fitness data from wearables can help insurers to incentivize with lower premiums for maintaining healthy habits.

Artificial Intelligence – According to IDC, by 2020 the amount of data available will grow 10-times, and there will be 1.7 megabytes of new information created every second for every human being on the planet. In the next few years, we will be collecting more data on how people make decisions on a day-to-day basis and this will give insurers more understanding of the personal risk attitudes of people and therefore drive better insurance products and coverage in new areas.

AI can be useful in analyzing real-time data and assist with fraud identification, identifying subrogation opportunities, shorten claims cycle time, improve claims forecast etc. According to a survey, 79% of insurance executives believe that AI will revolutionize the way insurers gain information from and interact with their customers.

In 2017, Lemonade Insurance made headlines when its AI Jim settled a claim in less than 3 seconds, while the topmost insurers take 316,800 times longer to complete the settlement vs Jim.

Changing regulations of the insurance industry

The compliance regulations of operations in the insurance industry are constantly changing and the legacy systems requiring tons of paperwork is not built to keep up with the ever-changing nature of the industry. Automated digital platforms make it easier for insurers to comply with regulatory guidelines, reduce the number of resources required for managing compliance and mitigate risks.

The insurance industry is seeing the emergence of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to deal with the ever-changing regulations system. RPA can help in capturing the changes in the business rules, interpret data sources and communicate the changing compliance regulations to the current systems.

Creating a successful digital transformation model for insurance firms

Becoming a digital insurer is not just about implementing technology at an organizational level. Instead, it’s about creating a wider platform that can connect customers, partners, and employees all at the same time.

Here is how insurers can implement a successful digital transformation plan for their organization.

Mapping your digital maturity

Assessing where you lie in the digital transformation map is the first step towards this journey.

The ‘Not Digital’ status was common for most insurers several decades ago, when everything was produced through a paper-based model. For many legacy insurers, it is still a reality. The categorization in the below figure will help you in mapping where your organization lies on a scale of ‘not digital’ to ‘extremely digital’

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Aim for an organizational transformation

Becoming a true digital insurer, cannot be limited to operational automation, it has to permeate every aspect of the organization from front end to back end processes, from policy to purchase claims and from finance to HR.

Achieving an organization-wide change would require commitment at every touch point. Digital transformation is not just meant to benefit the end user, but also making your organization change ready and agile enough to adapt quickly. That’s why aligning the organization for the change is an important step towards this journey.

Implement an agile approach.

Creating a step by step plan for digital transformation is critical and planning ahead is required, but over planning should be avoided. Change is the only constant and it is as true for the insurance industry as well. The digital transformation plan for your organization should be flexible enough to incorporate the changing dynamics and technological advancements getting introduced in the industry during the course of implementation.

The best approach would be having a long-term goal but a phase-wise plan. Insurers can start with analyzing market trends and start with the markets where digitization would solve most problems or bring the most benefits. For eg: bringing improved experience in areas with most consumer activity.

The next rational step would be to develop a plan to modernize core systems with cloud-based technologies to better support middle and front-office systems. This will help in improving the technical efficiency, streamlining costs and schedule risks of the modernization efforts.

Some of the process integrations that insurers can bring in their existing systems can be:

Mobile Capture — this process can help in expediting the applications and claims process significantly by allowing policyholders to apply for policies or initiate claims digitally at their convenience. It takes away a lot of manual processes like data entry or postal efforts because insurers can use mobile capture to send in forms, reports, and status to clients.

Customer Communications Management (CCM) — establishing a CCM system will help insurers built better customer relationships by enabling timely communications with relevant information. CCM can take care of real-time tracking, status updates, on-time alerts etc. leaving employees to focus better on other business tasks.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) — RPA can help insurers to improve customer management and making sure that compliance requirements are met. RPA system can collect and integrate data from the external website, portals, and applications and therefore automate activities like price matching, coverage comparisons or keeping a tap on regulatory compliances etc.

Case Management — one of the major challenges that the insurance sector face is doing away with the highly paper-based system. The automated case management system can help in digitization of documents, tracking case status, managing caseloads etc. With the help of Business Process Management (BPM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems case management system can be highly effective. Integrating the case management system with CCM can lead to highly optimized and enhanced customer experiences as well.

Set up a dedicated “digital transformation team”

70% of Life and P&C insurers lack the confidence to execute complete digital transformation because they feel they don’t have an achievable plan with critical elements such as a clear vision, compliance, and risk processes.

A digital transformation plan cannot be successfully implemented with an ‘ad hoc’ team; doing so will only complicate the process. In fact, a poorly implemented system will lead to insurers spending more time, money and effort in managing the disparate system. Therefore, it is important to build a “digital transformation task force” for the job. Prudent insurers are realizing the importance of having a dedicated team in a survey almost 87% of insurance firms said they have a dedicated ‘digital innovation’ teams.

The dedicated team should comprise of members from each area of digital impact in the journey, this will help in bringing expert advice and planning across each touch point in the journey.

Create a robust IT infrastructure to support digital strategy

The infrastructure is the backbone of the entire process. It will play an important role in the seamless implementation of the digitization process (release cycles, automated testing, and deployment) and managing interactions across the partner ecosystems. Therefore, it is important to have a robust infrastructure which can help in redesigning of the front-end systems to provide rich user experience and also their integration with the back end operations.

A typical insurer’s operational cycle would resemble the below matrix.

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The above image represents the core function of an insurance policy lifecycle at the top, from left to right(New Business, Underwriting, Policy Maintenance, and Claims). Any core function of the business will have a trigger to initiate, then data collection, data evaluation, customer/stakeholder interaction and closing the deal. All of these functions at an organizational level would be supported by functions like HR, Marketing, Accounting, IT etc.

This means the insurance process is highly integrated across organizational levels and therefore it is important to have a robust IT infrastructure to support each and every element of this integrated ecosystem.

Leverage data and technology to innovate and create a personalized user experience

The new-age consumer is evolving into a more technology savvy and connected consumer, resulting in an explosion of data through multiple channels data through multiple technologies like IoT, wearables, social media etc. Drawing actionable insights from all this data like analyzing customers’ pain point, anticipating their needs and providing a customized solution will help insurers stay ahead of the curve.

In the healthcare insurance sector, health insurance provider Humana in the United States has partnered with Apple, and they let consumers share their Apple HealthKit data with the Humana Vitality app.

Any digital transformation plan should involve a process to unlock internal data sources, leverage external data sources and better gather, mine, analyze and visualize that data with advanced analytics technologies and finally, turn this data into action to provide a personalized experience to the user throughout the value chain.

Choose the right technology partner

Choosing the right technology partner is the most important step in implementing a successful Digital transformation plan. Many insurers have started realizing this fact.

51% of insurers plan to partner with major digital technology and cloud platform leaders within the next two years.

It is important to carefully choose a partner who understands not just your business well but is also capable of understanding your operational processes well. The digital transformation process is going to be integrated across all your processes, therefore it is critical to work with a partner who is comfortable with your processes, knows the limitations and will help you in improvising during the course of implementation.

Digital transformation in the insurance sector – opportunities that lie ahead

Digital transformation in the insurance industry is not just a means of adopting market trends but is an ongoing process to innovate, stay relevant and stay ahead of the competition. The legacy insurance ecosystem is usage based and telematics- led industry and incorporating advanced digital propositions will help insurers capitalize on the future.

A fully digitized process can go a long way in optimizing processes and reducing costs. For e.g. an integrated claims supply chain can enable insurers to reduce costs across the enterprise, improve customer service and mitigate risks even before an event occurs. Forty-seven percent of insurers say a lack of collaboration with the IT function is preventing them from realizing their technology investments’ value. Digitization of operations will help to break down silos within the organization and allow for faster processes.

In this age becoming a digital insurer is a mandate for insurers to stay relevant, sustain growth and increase profitability. However, it requires an org-wide transformation to reap the true benefits of digitization.

In the light of changing consumers needs, increased competition, technology, and data disruptions and ever-changing compliance landscape, it has become a must for the insurers to choose the path of digitization.

However, a successful digital transformation requires a broader approach, than just introducing automated processes. It will require these 7 steps to truly transform your organization: assessment of your digitization capabilities, stakeholders buy-in, an agile plan, dedicated task force, robust IT infrastructure, capitalizing on data, and most importantly choosing the right digital partner.

If done right digital transformation can enable your organization to not just stay relevant but gage and capitalize on the upcoming opportunities as well.

The use of automation to drive tangible business benefits has become a reality today, with nearly all organizations riding the wave of emerging cognitive technologies. The insurance industry is no exception and lies at the crossroads of digital disruption. Traditionally considered as a highly regulated and cautious sector, today it faces a radical shift due to the rising benefits of intelligent technologies.

According to a research, up to 25% of full-time positions in the insurance industry will either be consolidated or reduced in about a decade as a result of the prevalent digital disruption. With such headwinds in the industry, automation can be a game-changer strategy that can help insurance companies increase their profit margins and revolutionize customer experience.

To gain a competitive advantage, several insurers have already deployed an automation strategy in areas like New Business Processing, Claims Processing, & Finance, and more are following suit.

The insurance industry is now aggressively evaluating use cases for cognitive automation to boost efficiency in their current processes and thereby lower operational costs. They are embracing digital solutions to remain profitable amid stringent regulatory norms while handling complex portfolios in a low-interest rate environment.

The good news is that the insurance sector is quite digitally savvy and an early adopter of new technologies. Especially, the players in the short-term insurance sectors (auto, home, health, etc.). Prudent players who have been the disrupters have reaped the benefits of digitization and will continue to do so. According to a Mckinsey report, a large insurer could more than double profits over 5 years by digitizing existing business.

For digitally savvy insurers, most of the routine activities like quote, purchase, policy documents, renewal, claims (processing) etc. are completely digitized and requires least human intervention and offer higher customization. For example:

• LexisNexis Data Prefill solution helps in pre-populating insurance applications using only a few customer data points leading to reduce costs, and faster & and accurate quoting and underwriting process.

• Progressive Insurance, enables customers to “name their price” and choose elements of a policy that fit their budget—the level of deductibles.

• Some insurers offer pay-as-you-go auto insurance whereby drivers are charged by the mile.

• Ladder Insurance has partnered with Fidelity Security Life to offer life insurance without the use of agents directly to consumers online without charging any annual policy fees.

Opportunities in the Insurance Industry

The insurance market has become competitive and more robust over the last few years with the coming of the online P2P insurers, technology, and insuretech players.

Far-sighted insurers acknowledge the looming competition from companies such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook, which can leverage their users’ pool of data to provide customized insurance products. Amazon has already taken in a leap in this area by hiring insurance professionals and is set to transform the insurance market in several European countries.

While digitization in the insurance sector is set to create opportunities, it will also present newer challenges for traditional players. With low-interest rate scenarios, the revenue streams of legacy insurance companies are quickly drying up, as investing customers’ premiums in several financial institutions are not paying the same returns when compared to the last few years. In the future, these challenges may increase, owing to the fast pace of digitization and changing customer preferences.

For instance, in the auto insurance sector, traditional insurers might face challenges as the use of sensors and telematics makes driving less risky and liabilities from autonomous cars go to manufacturers. The McKinsey report suggests, in the future profits for traditional personal lines, auto insurance might fall by 40 percent or more from their peak.

Insurers who have picked the pulse of the digital disruption and have innovated their products and value chain have seen growth. Some of these insurers are Progressive, Direct Line, Geico and more.

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It is only a matter of time when the likes of Facebook jump onto the bandwagon and provide stiff competition to the traditional mortar and brick insurance companies. Therefore, the need to adopt cognitive automation in the insurance industry has never been so pressing. And the call of the hour is to optimize operational costs, enhance accuracy, improve customer experience and get the most returns out of the allocated capital.

Challenges Faced By Insurance Companies In Adopting Automation

• Scattered Data

One of the biggest challenges in the insurance industry is that data is collected both electronically and on paper, making it extremely difficult for cognitive technologies to play their role efficiently. Dealing with mixed data format means that companies need to transfer this data into their machines, which can be costly and susceptible to human errors.

• Legacy Applications

Larger insurance organizations today use several legacy applications and point solutions. This leads to operational inefficiencies and excessive costs used by administrative functions.

• Manual Processes

The insurance companies are infested with several back-end processes which are usually labor-intensive, time-consuming and repetitive in nature such as underwriting, renewing premium and conducting compliance.

Use Cases of Intelligent Automation in the Insurance Industry

• Smart Data Reader

RPA (Robotic Process Automation) can be used to replace the manual paperwork involved during policy issue and claims processes. With the help of RPA, a smart media reader can be developed that can extract relevant information from the scanned documents. This solution has the potential to eliminate the manual extraction of data and its entry into the systems.

The RPA in insurance can use capabilities such as OCR, NLP, and machine learning to read, extract and validate data. This system can be seamlessly integrated with existing operations that deeply rely on extracting information from documents.

• Customer Service With Chatbots

Over the last few years, there has been a growing geographic and functional diversity of chatbots. Whether it is US-based Liberty Mutual Insurance’s “skills” for Alexa or “Nienke,” the “virtual host of Dutch insurer Nationale-Nederlanden or India’s HDFC Life’s chatbot collaboration with Haptik, all these chatbots have been deployed to enhance the customer support services.

Chatbots in the insurance industry can be used to analyze customer needs, modify product offerings and even solve the customer’s questions or provide them useful links.

• Automated Underwriting Solution

Creating a rule-based system for underwriting processes can increase efficiency and productivity. The automated system can identify if a submission or renewal can be handled by a machine or needs human intervention.

In the case of the first scenario, predictive models and machine learning algorithms can easily evaluate and provide a price for the submission. In the latter case, human intervention would be required in addition to the insights provided by the system.

• Smarter Process Analytics

One of the fundamentals to improve processes is by measuring several parameters including the number of requests and transactions processed. In the paper-intensive insurance industry, failing to measure outcomes can result in hefty losses in not just operational efficiency, but also in customer satisfaction.

With automation, organizations can measure not only the number of transactions but also have an audit trail that can be really beneficial for complying with regulatory norms. All this further enhances customer satisfaction, streamline applications, claims, and response of the customer service.

Quick Points to Remember

• Now that you know the use cases of automation in the insurance industry, let us look at some important points to remember before you decide to automate processes.

• Identify the areas to be automated. Trying to automate all complex processes is of no use if they do not provide any substantial savings.

• If you are new to automation, then try to begin with baby steps and then eventually expand. Starting small can help you clearly define objectives, the scope of work and the desired outcomes.

• Understand the extent of automation and avoid going overboard. Using cognitive automation in all areas may not lead to significant savings. Rather than automating all complex processes, insurers should focus on hybrid processes to achieve desired goals.

Future Of Automation In The Insurance Industry

Use of automation in the insurance industry has had a positive impact on customer experience and satisfaction. Several insurance companies have benefited from this, including a UK-based company that used automation to proactively identify customers inflicted by floods. The system then created a waiver plan for the next month’s credit and notified those people that their dues were waived.

With cognitive automation in the insurance sector becoming more and more sophisticated, it will provide a cost-effective way to meet rapidly changing regulatory requirements and help businesses concentrate on strategic long-term issues. Artificial intelligence enabled assistance can lower the documentation time by as much as 80%, thereby making insurance companies more profitable.

Today, companies need to rethink how they want to use human potential and how much they can trust a computer to handle their operations. By doing this, one thing becomes clear that human touch will become premium in the future, especially when robots will do most of the repetitive and mundane work.

Only the work involving a higher degree of human intelligence will not be automated. Positions in operations and administrative supports will likely be prone to layoffs or will be consolidated. However, the extent of the impact of automation will greatly depend upon the market, group, and the potential for automation.

The high-frequency products are digitized and automated to a larger extent. Whereas there could be challenges in converting the legacy policies into this new arena, it is not just technology challenge, but also the product has to evolve to meet current market conditions and tech/regulatory landscape. Insurers will have to re-look at digitization from a broader perspective which is inclusive of product innovation, services, and business models.

Looking Ahead

While the prospect of automation has been there in the insurance industry, the speed of its adoption has been increasing over the last 12 months. As disruptive technologies challenge the traditional ways of operations, organizations need to become “comfortable” with being “uncomfortable”.

The insurance sector can only optimize costs, enhance decision making & productivity, lower costs, optimize the customer experience and alleviate accuracy by embracing smarter technologies such as RPA, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

As digital technologies continue to disrupt the insurance sector, the industry will have to move from its current – ‘reactive’ mode to ‘predict and prevent’ mode. And, this evolution will have to be at a faster pace than ever before as the stakeholders in the insurance value chain like the brokers, consumers, financial intermediaries, insurers, and suppliers become more adept at using advanced technologies.

Cognitive automation in the insurance sector can help businesses automate key operational processes and maximize returns amid stiff competition. As insurers evolve, the focus will be more towards adding value to key functions by working with intelligent solutions.

All these can only be achieved if organizations strike a balance between automation and human intervention. Businesses who fail to adopt smart solutions will eventually lose to new market entrants, while the ones who do too much too soon to get the early mover advantage will also be at risk.

The key is to have a balance by running test programs to see the capabilities of these technologies and align them to the business’ objectives and expectations. These are extremely interesting times for the insurance sector.

If CXOs are asked to name the one aspect which is likely to impact their future business the most, chances are ‘customer experience’ will likely rank high. Providing a great customer experience at every touchpoint is an imperative for every business across domains – be it retail, healthcare, media & entertainment, banking and more. Even enterprises in the B2B domain which hitherto did not give priority to a great design experience have come to realise their folly.

Consumers are consumers everywhere – be it as someone interacting with a beautifully designed taxi-aggregator app or a poorly designed human resources tool within the office. So a consistently good customer experience today improves chances of brand loyalty, strengthens brand affinity and may even result in brand evangelism. 81% of companies recognize customer experience (CX) as a competitive differentiator, yet just 13% rate their CX delivery at 9/10 or better. This is not relevant only for consumer-facing businesses – even enterprises which have niche B2B communities as target audience – say, healthcare professionals, logistics and more should take cognizance of these developments.

There are several sets of numbers floating around to indicate the huge market potential of IT Services. According to a report, the ‘global customer experience management’ market size is expected to reach USD 32.49 billion by 2025. The report goes on to say that the retail sector is one of the largest end-users segment of customer experience management software. However, software is only one aspect of ‘customer experience management’. In fact, digital solution providers are only a small component of the larger digital transformation market: Digital Solutions Providers, Cloud Solutions Providers, System Integrators, System Administrators, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Providers, Platform as a Service (PaaS) Providers and many more play a role. Some of the services include Cloud Computing, Big Data & Analytics, Application Development & Maintenance, right deployment of Emerging Technologies (IoT, Blockchain & Artificial Intelligence) and more.

Suffice to say that even with Digital Experiences – a small component in the overall IT & ITeS industry the full potential of how it can benefit enterprises has not been full explored or understood by a large number of CXOs. According to Forrester Wave:

A digital experience platform architecture will help to align strategies, teams, processes, and technology to meet this integration imperative with six primary themes:

• Coordinate content, customer data, and core services to drive reuse and quality
• Unify marketing, commerce, and service processes to improve practitioner workflows.
• Deliver contextually and share targeting rules to unify the “glass.”
• Share front-end code across digital touchpoints to manage a common user experience.
• Link data and analytics to add insight and drive action.
• Manage code and extensions for maximum reuse while avoiding over-customization.

As you can see there is room for diverse skill sets and offerings. However, when it comes to technology partners, many view them with the narrow lens of coders and app development teams. The B2B service companies offering such services should also take a share of the blame as many have not made the endeavour to position themselves on a higher scale…up the value chain. To be able to get the attention of CXOs, digital experience partners should empathise with the business issues they grapple with and offer to be their design thinking and technology partners. They need to pitch their offerings at a higher level and not just as mere designers and coders. Also, the distinction between design and design thinking has perhaps not been highlighted enough over the years. Many enterprises still see design as ‘how things look’ and focus on the ‘beauty aspect’ (surely an important one) and not on the more process-driven design thinking aspects.

Today, digital experience partners such as Robosoft are uniquely placed to lead process of transforming the fortunes of enterprises by implementing processes that facilitate rapid product development. It begins with an understanding of the client’s business and is designed to be an ongoing process.

This helps cut long lead times to develop digital products and helps enterprises execute faster, learn quicker and iterate to get better. The process is cyclical and hence keeps pace with changing customer expectations.

We have worked with a few leading enterprises across key domains in going beyond the proverbial tip of the iceberg when it comes to integration of product roadmaps and emerging technologies.

Healthcare

While the domain includes hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, health tech and more, our focus is in offering the benefits of blockchain in these areas:

Our team developed the mobile Clinical Trial Management System for a few leading pharmaceutical companies in the US. We have also created custom software solutions for Clinical Trials, Patients & Enterprise. A current clinical trial project integrates Blockchain, AI, ML, Mobile, Chatbots (Text & Verbal) and more. Apple is investing heavily behind healthcare where the focus is on using the ecosystem of the Apple Watch and iPhone working together to collect & share vital patient data.

Retail

Aside from blockchain, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Chatbots, Robo-advisors, & Voice Assistants, Big Data & Analytics, Internet of Things & Wearables are some of the technologies in different stages of development and adoption in retail. Here are some great examples:

Sephora introduced AR into their platform in early 2017 by way of their Virtual Artist platform, which shows customers a realistic “mockup” of how certain skin care and makeup products would look with their face shape, skin colour, and other distinguishing features.

The app for Bareburger harnesses AR technology to allow customers to “see” the menu item in front of them on their device before they order, giving them a better, more mouth-watering ordering experience.

Banking & Finance

Banks and financial institutions have a unique opportunity to use technology to create a tailored approach using empathy and automation for the delicate and sensitive nature of finance. Voice Assistant technology is one such. Aside from voice, blockchain, AI, Machine Learning and human-like interfaces are also opportunities in this segment.

The engineers at JP Morgan have created ‘JPM Coin’ – the first US bank-backed cryptocurrency

In 2018, Bank of America launched their artificial intelligence (AI)-driven virtual financial assistant, Erica, “to help clients tackle more complex tasks and provide personalized, proactive guidance to help them stay on top of their finances”

An Australian bank UBank is set to debut Mia (short for My Interactive Agent) a digital assistant with a human face powered by artificial intelligence technology.

Data Science is also a specialisation which banks tap into for use cases such as fraud detection, risk modelling, personalised marketing, predicting lifetime value, recommendation engine and more.

Enterprise Apps

Enterprise mobility applications are effecting a paradigm shift in the landscape of processes in organizations. Some of the areas in which they play a role include instant communication platform for employees, sales leads & CRM, Supply Chain & inventory management, workflows & approvals, onboarding & training to name a few. Digital experiences can play a role in boosting employee engagement too: interactive learning modules, HR operations, payroll come to mind.

To sum up, enterprises are skimming the surface when it comes to possibilities with digital experiences which can simplify lives of people. The future is exciting in this context as we discover more exciting possibilities of digital experience which delight.

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.