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Contributed by J.J. Jakubik, Chief Architect, Vlocity

Digital Transformation Will Be Accelerated by Industry-Specific Clouds That Are Truly Omnichannel

Digital transformation is a drive to improve customer satisfaction by enabling customers to help themselves through modern customer interaction channels, including mobile and social media. But to improve customer satisfaction, that customer experience must be seamless across all channels of interaction including chat, website, phone and retail.  Modern, industry-specific clouds are accelerating the speed at which companies transform their customer experience by dramatically reducing the effort required to customize and deploy the applications. But the journey is still time-consuming, expensive and error-prone following the old channel-specific architectures since the same processes and functionality have to be developed into separate systems for each channel. Companies that adopt modern cloud infrastructures supporting true omnichannel capability will win the race to the finish line of their digital transformation.

So what does it take to deliver true omnichannel capability? True omnichannel requires that a single customized and developed process is deployed once and delivered across multiple channels. For example, a "change my address" process that is developed once and run on the customer website, mobile app and call center application. This is difficult because different channels often run different architectures and the user experience needs to morph to satisfy the needs of the channel audience as well as the constraints of differently sized screens and different user input methods.

A truly omnichannel application must:

• Use technology compatible across all channels, such as HTML5, Javascript and CSS.
• Employ a responsive UI that automatically reformats according to the  configurations of desktop, mobile and various other screen sizes. 
• Provide a user experience that can be rendered simply for customer self-service or rendered with additional features for fast-moving call center agents.
• Provide modular components that can be composed into multiple applications built from different technologies.
• Provide solutions that are web-scale from the ground up in order to support thousands of call center agents, customers and partners simultaneously using it. 

True omnichannel capability has been elusive for a long time. But with the emergence of rich standards-based and responsive UI frameworks, a focus on metadata driven architectures, the performance and scalability of cloud platforms, and the professional design that becomes affordable when amortized across multiple tenants, Vlocity is now able to provide true omnichannel capability. Companies that adopt Vlocity industry cloud applications will be able to leverage those across channels and therefore greatly speed-up their digital transformation.

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About the Author

J.J. Jakubik has over 25 years of enterprise software experience as a business application designer for companies including Siebel Systems, Oracle and Vlocity. His experience spans all aspects of customer relationship management across industries including communications, media, financial services, retail, consumer goods, automotive, life sciences, energy, utilities, technology and the public sector. At Vlocity, Jakubik has design oversight of the data model, web APIs and system architecture across each of Vlocity's industry solutions. He is passionate about designing software for usability and flexibility and brings that passion helping Vlocity deliver digital, omnichannel experiences.