The Right Technology Will Drive Customer Excellence

Not long ago, customer excellence was reserved for ‘high net worth’ customers who engaged with premium brands. Those customers mattered because excellent service improved customer satisfaction, which led to customer loyalty and, in turn, increased revenue. Businesses knew that if they did their utmost for their customers by delivering value from their products and services and improving the customer engagement experience, there was a high chance of customer loyalty. This meant customer retention and repeat business were important because they knew it was easier to keep a customer than find a new one. By keeping that customer, you have a good chance of recovering customer acquisition costs (CAC). 

Recently there has been more focus on the customer journey from mainstream businesses as they jostle for market dominance and increased revenue. But the pandemic disrupted the customer engagement model forever – not only influencing changes to lifestyle and affordability, but health and safety concerns forced the closure of brick-and-mortar businesses in favor of an online experience.

Online is the new face-to-face.

Now, the exponential growth of online shopping has proven to be a successful lifestyle choice for many businesses across most verticals, with many traditional retailers following suit. Being able to shop where you want and when from the comfort of your home has been well adopted, given the convenience and reality of today’s faster-paced world. But the online marketplace is more competitive than ever, with services – for example – like Click and Collect and discount voucher codes proving popular. What is clear across all verticals is that happy customers lead to customer loyalty and that will help businesses become more profitable. One key challenge businesses must address is being able to adapt and interact with the needs of customers in an instant, or as is more commonly known, in real-time, while constantly providing value.

Real-time really matters.

Jeff Bezos famously said, “When people ask me if our customers are loyal, I say absolutely, right up to the second that someone else offers them a better service.”

The phrase ‘to the second’ is important as Amazon depends on real-time processing and action – one of several significant reasons for its success. Everything happens immediately. For example, a customer can place an order for an item and behind the scenes, there is application intelligence (be it rules engines or machine learning) that can advise/suggest other items associated with the basket/shopping cart before a payment is made. Once purchased, the progress of the shipped item can be viewed on a map in real-time. So, expectations are set and met, thus avoiding delays, frustration, and potential churn. And this is not unique to e-commerce – any application in any vertical has the potential to yield success or failure, subject to its real-time credentials.

So, real-time is really important. It provides:

“The ability to act instantly on data in motion,” means: 

• When a customer is completing a banking transaction
• While a customer is shopping online
• During a fraudulent event
• Before a process breaks in an industrial machine
• Before and when a patient may need immediate medical attention

NOT after the event. Because business opportunities have finite time windows and “after-the-event” significantly reduces business value and the chance of success.

Customer interactions must mimic face-to-face continuity

Successful businesses will testify that the best customer experiences combine adaptability, richness, speed, and context when it matters – in the moment. But true, real-time applications are much more than that. The most mature real-time applications mimic and improve on the typical face-to-face interaction. They should pivot and re-decision within the constraints of a single customer interaction and perhaps even challenge, if necessary.

Businesses that can pivot based on a customer’s perpetually-switching context will become far more relevant than those unable to – resulting in enormous competitive advantage and even more streamlined operational efficiency.

Imagine having an online concierge that advises and adds contextual insights to your every consideration and deliberation – instantly. Or sitting on a tourist bus passing landmarks while real-time contextual commentary provides details and peripheral insights/trivia along the journey. Context adds truth, credibility, and relevance to business decisions. More context can potentially have more value as external market trends and behavioural shifts are identified. But some farther reaching context (like external suppliers and partnerships, for example) will exist outside of organisations in locations and formats that need interfacing to benefit from seamless, transparent, and effective partnerships – some of which exist within legacy-based systems.

The real-time challenge

To achieve all of this, you need a mature, robust, real-time platform that enables the swift design, fast build, and easy deployment of real-time applications. The platform must ingest and process a perpetual flow of real-time event-based data – in any format, from any source – and enrich each record with additional context, before analysing and executing an action, instantly. Acting instantly is the key to true real-time processing, as many providers cannot achieve this as their solutions and architectures do not have the capability.

Hazelcast: The real-time gift that keeps on giving!

Hazelcast is trusted by many of the Global 2000 to instantly act on data in motion. Our unified real-time data platform combines a high-performance, stream processing engine with a fast data store and machine learning inference capabilities, all within a single technology stack. The unified architecture ensures the best price/performance ratio underpins any application use case in any business sector, with recent benchmarks proving the utilising only a third of the resources of the nearest alternative. 

The latest release of Hazelcast Platform (5.3) has added more capabilities to deal with the ever-changing demands of a modern, innovative, real-time business. My colleague covered the technical aspects of the release in a previous blog, below I will share how they can benefit your business:

Modernize in stages, not all at once…

Application modernization is a key initiative with many businesses wanting to use core business data in modern, cloud-ready, customer-centric applications. 

Applications that are modernized become more flexible, easier to enhance, and more responsive to business demands. But the idea of overhauling monolithic application architectures is a daunting and costly challenge. Hazelcast has built the capabilities to make it easier for customers to integrate without ripping and replacing crucial infrastructure.

Kafka Connect

Apache Kafka has more than 40% of market share in the queueing, messaging, and background processing category, with a large percentage of businesses saying that they plan to incorporate it into their existing infrastructures. It is expected that businesses will build net-new applications utilizing stream processing with Kafka. 

Hazelcast has Kafka Connect, allowing you to connect Hazelcast Platform to any data source supported in the Kafka Connect ecosystem. By leveraging the wide range of out-of-the-box Kafka Connect connectors, the Hazelcast platform easily integrate and ingest data from many more data sources in your enterprise, further enriching your streaming data sets.

SQL over JDBC

Hazelcast provides JDBC connectors for its stream processing and fast data store components, making it easy to connect to any JDBC-compliant data source. In addition, SQL support for JDBC enables power users to be able to write queries against event streaming data – a capability called SQL over JDBC that allows applications to map data in external data stores to relevant data structures in Hazelcast Platform, with support for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB databases. This capability allows access to data that may be resident in partner ecosystems and environments hosting data that may dictate trends or behavioral patterns.

Enrich from terabytes of data

Tiered Storage allows applications to process significantly more quality data that can yield more accurate, context-rich insights and removing the need for guesswork when acting on data – all within your business SLAs, in real-time. With the ability to query vast quantities of data from various data sources (using the comprehensive list of out-of-the-box connectors), you can build logic to determine patterns by correlating multiple streams of changing event data based on conditions common to both streams of events, utilizing Hazelcast’s stream to stream join capabilities.

Conclusion

The idea of having a real-time, customer-facing system, responding instantly to each whim is now expected by everyone. To address these demands, businesses will continue to find new ways to demonstrate creativity and innovation. Hazelcast will continue on its mission to enable everyone to get more value from data, instantly.

Additional Resources

• More information on the technical aspects of this release
• Watch this video if you want to learn more about unified real-time platforms and this release