When we journey to a new place we are attracted by the surroundings and we like to take selfies and pictures that we can post on social media. If it’s a short trip, we want to make the most of the available time and visit more places. But if it’s a longer stay or a medium to long-term on-site assignment, travelling in that city or country, an exciting experience before, becomes a routine and mundane one now. The initial enthusiasm fades away naturally!

Similarly, in business, enterprises need to constantly look for new ways to delight their customers. Businesses must design customer journeys to weave a coherent and contextual experience at every stage. Keeping the customer at the center of any business decision rewards the business in the long run in terms of revenue generation and profitability. The customer is attracted to the initial offers like cash back on fund transfer, zero convenience fee and added benefits on digital wallets or debit/credit cards to book travel tickets/hotels/movie tickets/pay bills. Such positive experiences that intersect with customer’s profile encourage them to use more and more of the varied offerings of a business and enhance loyalty. For a retail customer it could be offering personal loan or student loan to young customers to offering an insurance product, mortgage loan, loan against securities during a later stage of life. Banks can also offer working capital loan, term loan for a manufacturing entity as per the different requirements as a customer’s business evolves and grows.

Digital objectives of any business also need to consider offering new products and services to its customers based on changing customer behavior and demands to enhance the overall experience with the engagement. This may call for the following:

• Perform architectural changes (moving from monolithic to micro services architecture) to become more customer centric and agile.
• Use cloud for scalability and 24X7 availability.
• Use cloud native technology for faster deployment time, improved scalability and cloud portability.
• Provide an intelligent app for interactive experience on customer’s smartphone that offers data-driven insights and personalized offerings which are preapproved using digital technologies like analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
• Collaborate with the ecosystem players (competitors, third parties, Fintech players, developers) through the open banking model and offer automated business-to-business interactions to exchange data at scale using APIs.
• Listen to customer interactions on social media about one’s own brand and the competitors’.
• Offer value to customers in the form of financial and non-financial offerings through preferred customer channels or touch points.
• Participate in a blockchain network to enhance transparency.
• Offer augmented reality (AR) solutions for faster clarification and resolution of problems.

All these steps will in turn offer a full suite of products, services and experiences which the customer wants today and in the future, thereby enabling value creation for all participants. Thus digital technologies ensure ease of doing business, offer instant gratification to customers and empower them for better decision making. Use of these technologies also offers faster, secure transactions end-to-end with lower transaction costs. But the choice and convenience which the businesses offer the customer should not come at the cost of their data and privacy breach.