Why Building the Best Customer Experience Means the Right Multi-experience
Building contextual, fit-for-purpose customer experiences that work across a range of different devices and modalities is no small task. One crash, one more redundant form to fill out, one too many screens can make your users rage quit and never return. Which is why a number of organizations are looking to multi-experience development platforms (MXDP) to support efforts in developing applications for mobile, progressive web, augmented reality, IoT and a range of other experience types.
Last year, I talked of the promise of multi-experience. Gartner predicts that throughout 2024, “organizations with an established multi-experience strategy will outperform competitors in customer experience and employee experience satisfaction metrics.”
The clock is ticking, and it’s high time that you delivered on that promise. There’s no better place to start than with an MXDP.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s time for a change.
Mobile, first.
According to PWC, nearly 80% of American consumers say that “speed, convenience, knowledgeable help and friendly service are important elements of a positive customer experience.” Users aren’t expecting the bells and whistles of cutting-edge technology–not right now anyway. They just want something that works. Considering that 68% of all website visits stemmed from mobile devices and 29% were desktop, “works” means experiences that deftly move from one to the other.
In other words, mobile is vital. According to Daniel Sun, VP Analyst at Gartner, mastering mobile is vital, because “mobile is typically the gateway to multi-experience.”
The beauty of multi-experience development platforms is that you can build mobile applications that offer the speed and convenience you need now, but also architect for future technology when it makes sense for your organization and user base.
Mendix’s leading MXDP enables you to leverage best-of-breed mobile architectures from a single platform. You can build mobile apps for customers and employees that cater to your organization’s and users’ needs. By uniquely supporting Native for the best AppStore-based experience and PWA for the best browser-based mobile experiences, Mendix gives you the ability to deliver best-of-breed experiences that meet users where they are.
Octo—a Dutch smart-building solution provider—used Mendix to build a mobile application that tracks the number of people in Octo’s customers’ offices on any given day. The app was built in a week. Previously, Octo customers were using an array of Excel files and emails to manage building capacity. With this mobile app, their customers are shaving off nearly 4 hours of work per week for office managers.
Multi-experience, fully realized.
The MXDP field is incredibly varied in terms of approach. Mendix sets itself apart from other MXDP players with its focus on business-IT collaboration and low-code philosophy. The application of a low-code development philosophy to multi-channel experiences just makes sense. Going with a low-code solution like Mendix to address your multi-experience needs allows you to build rich, enterprise-grade customer experiences without requiring the specialized (read: costly) skillsets required for mobile, AR, conversational UI, and others. Naturally, professional developers can extend their Mendix low-code applications with custom coding for maximum openness and extensibility.
One such way that customers are applying a low-code philosophy to multi-experience development is Solomon Group, a US-based entertainment production company. Without any programming background, Solomon Group created applications that interacted with IoT-enabled turnstiles to help monitor venue capacity. Such technology helped their customers see a $700k increase in ticket sales in one instance, and, in another, a 50% increase in sales, thanks to the transparency their IoT app provided.
Creating tailored, fit-for-purpose applications requires collaboration not just within IT, but with business units who are closest to the users. The better you can incorporate domain expertise, the closer you get to delivering to your users the experiences that they want and need.
Mendix gives you two separate IDEs that support developers and business users. Mendix’s visual modeling empowers business stakeholders to get involved in the process of building custom experiences. The Mendix Platform orchestrates process, feedback, and collaboration throughout the entire software development lifecycle, ensuring developers and stakeholders can create, validate, and iterate their ideas quickly and together.
What are you waiting for?
Customer experience is only getting more important. Your employees expect more and better experiences from their work applications, too. It’s time to turn and face the not-so-strange changes and find a multi-experience development platform that allows you to build cohesive experiences.