If you want to swiftly scale your business you have to continuously innovate customer touchpoints, be it customer acquisition process, core product offerings or customer service. In order to maintain or grow, you must rethink, reinvent and revitalise the entire customer journey. And by doing so it will help you to stay ahead of the competition, even before the competition hits the market.
Philip Kotler, Marketing Guru: “Poor firms ignore their competitors; average firms copy their competitors; winning firms lead their competitors”
I have worked with businesses that uses technology as growth enabler and it essentially also core revenue source, it is no more a disparate function. Despite this fact many businesses think technology adaptation and investment merely as IT budgets and not as principal growth/revenue source. And quite often they readily admitted that they are late to invest in technology. It is a sad state!
In my experience, businesses predominantly consists of applications that are developed over the years and are used to disseminate knowledge and expertise. So if this is their primary channel of customer consumption (services), it should be a mandate to aim for continuous improvement of these systems which enables to deliver the best customer experience and performance. However, despite being the main driver, they ignore these applications – until the circumstances leave them no choice but to evolve.
It will be worth to evaluate upcoming technologies and the kind of benefits it can provide to your business. The question is, are you open to evaluate the benefits? What does it take to improve your customers’ user experiences? How can you deliver the wow factor in the user interface? How can you get rid of the irritating performance issues that customers face? Or how can you add more devices or content delivery channels for your audience?
Let us take example of existing business applications and see what can be done. They (legacy systems) are predominantly built over Microsoft MVC or Open Source frameworks or solutions, most of them function well but they lack in performance and don’t carry advance UI theme/features. The obvious reason – it was neither their primary purpose, nor was the need at that time. Does it make sense to deploy new technology and migrate before the system becomes obsolete? Does it help to kill your competition before it becomes one?
Amongst many different aspects within the technological advancements, front end technologies have dramatically evolved in recent years, here are some of the immediate benefits you can gain by using the current trending/popular Javascript frameworks:
- Ability to implement advanced UI features
- Fast performance due to different nature of rendering/programing
- Reduced time of system development due to reusable components and Restful API based development abilities
- Ability to quickly change presentation layers
The investment you do today can reap benefits in the form of acquiring and retaining customers and hence should be considered for proactive migration or to address technical debt issues.
