Flexible customer on-boarding, that follows their natural interaction flow, leads to happy customers and faster revenue realization.

But good service is not enough today. Service must be secure. We want a defect-free customer on-boarding experience.  Each potential touch point is an opening for mistakes and, let’s face it, disruption by bad guys. Yet here, customer choice is also important. Using SMS PINs in a transaction (two factor challenge authentication) increases security and provides non-reputability, but currently lowers conversion rate. Some customers want it and others can’t be bothered.

Risk mitigation must be built into every service resource, every process touch point. But the mitigation approach must be calibrated to customer choice. However, in all cases, data must be protected from unwanted intrusion and capture.  Data must also be presented only to those with the rights to view or change it. This is pretty obvious today. We know what we should do. But we still have problems actually doing it.

And service innovation does not stop. Digital transformation has no foreseeable end. In 2016 that means the widespread adoption of mobile payments. Our smartphone has become a wallet paying with NFC transactions. How will we react to mobile payments, to Android Pay and Apple Pay, becoming the dominant method of tomorrow’s checkout? How will we scale to accept and broker billions of transactions?  We can be sure that Apple is thinking about this. We must provide for the next big thing by future proofing our product portfolio development tools.

The Innovative Provider

There is no fairness in competition. Accommodating Omni-channel is quite challenging. Insuring adequate security is imperative. As service providers and ecosystem suppliers we created the networks, the Internet, the infrastructure that allowed the explosive growth of the digital life. But our existing infrastructure and culture, which created this opportunity, was developed for the old world. Execution is the hardest part of transformation - more so because our transition to the digital world is bound by existing capital investments, business processes and culture.

So we need to start each service product development with a small initial investment in infrastructure and reliable test market validation. Then a quick ramp up when the offering proves successful. That means embracing the virtual cloud paradigm. When the new service takes off, there will be billions of transactions which means supporting distributed computing with Map Reduce and Hadoop. It is likely the applications which got you to the digital world cannot make this leap. Fortunately, retiring redundant applications is a good thing for EBITA and necessary to enable zippy e-commerce. This is pretty obvious today.  Again, we know what we should do.  But making the leap is difficult, and can be even a bit scary at first.

New technology can fuel this transformation. If freed to concentrate on the customer experience, and not slog through burdensome development, your creative ingenuity will drive development of winning customer journeys. Apptium works side-by-side with operators to enable the Digital life. We work together to enhance the digital experience - creating solutions that attract subscribers and delight new and existing customers. Every interaction becomes an opportunity to positively influence the customer’s impression and build a stronger relationship with your customer.

You want to make headway in rationalizing your order process. If you could automate over 90% of your orders in one year, what else could you do? Appitum’s current customers answer this with ever higher targets of customer satisfaction. Their customer satisfaction target is “digital delight."

Perhaps we are not eclipsing the customer delight that comes from reposting a cute cat video.  Yet it is perfectly possible to be so good in each digital interaction, meeting the customer’s need, that your customer takes a few moments of his precious time to write a 5 star review. Sweet success.