For a long time, technology has ceased to be just an area within an organization, becoming a core and cross-functional department, with technology team activities being crucial for achieving business results and retaining increasingly demanding customers.

In this article, we bring the three main pillars that a digital product, such as a platform, system or application, must have to succeed from a technological and business perspective, in addition to presenting some best practices to achieve high resilience of a digital product and ensure customer success with your company’s product.

What are the three main pillars to ensure success in developing your platform? 

We know there are many fundamental aspects for a platform to succeed, but we summarize below the 3 main aspects that every technology leader should be aware of.

Agility

Your digital product needs to be intuitive and very easy to use. For this, UX and business teams must work together so that the correct rules are reflected in your platform with design adjusted to the best usability for users.

ConvergenceÔÇì

Silos hinder usability. That’s why SuperApps and omnichannel platforms are the key to success. Business rules must be shared across all areas and the different product areas need to communicate and work together so that your platform is practical and offers all the solutions the user seeks in one place.

ExperienceÔÇì

The user experience must be the best from start to finish of your digital product usage journey. This doesn’t even count the brand discovery journey, sales and post-sales. Your user’s experience journey with your digital product needs to be highly personalized to ensure high customer satisfaction rates.

How do resilient systems increase customer satisfaction?

Systems that are down and slow are quickly noticed by customers and quickly “canceled” by users on the internet. Studies show that people are up to 3x more likely to leave a negative review when they have a bad experience using a digital product, compared to a positive experience. In this scenario, it is important to note that the user experience is also conveyed through a technologically more resilient and scalable platform.

According to a recent article released by Gartner, it is expected that by 2025 companies will invest in developing highly resilient and digitally immune systems, increasing customer satisfaction and reducing digital platform downtime by up to 80%.

Best practices to ensure your digital platform’s resilience

For the user experience on the platform to be fluid, it is necessary to build a highly resilient, automated infrastructure capable of recovering from errors and instabilities. According to Gartner, six practices are fundamental to achieving high platform resilience.

Observability

To mitigate possible failures and errors on the platform, it is necessary to implement observability practices in the system. Only by understanding how the system behaves in relation to its use will your company be able to implement practices to increase platform resilience. Some important observability practices:

• Logs: Logs will be the main information used to create dashboards and indicators that show where improvement is needed to mitigate errors and resilience problems. Therefore, it is fundamental that your team traces a log architecture and defines levels to log relevant information that will be used to trace corrective and mitigation actions.
• Availability dashboards: From logs and other platform information, it is possible to build dashboards that evaluate in real time the availability and functionalities of your platform. With these dashboards, it is possible to extract metrics and insights, such as specific times when your platform has greater instability or from what volume your platform may have availability and latency problems. This information helps the infrastructure team build a better platform scalability strategy.
• User Behavior & Analytics: Analyzing user behavior on the platform journey also generates valuable metrics that can be used by both technology teams and product and marketing teams. It is possible to see, for example, which journey steps the user went through to generate a crash on your platform, and based on this information direct the error to design, development and infrastructure teams.

Enhanced Testing with Artificial Intelligence

It is already a fact that test automation is necessary to ensure your application’s resilience. With automated tests, it is possible to automatically run regression tests whenever a new feature is released and ensure that new features do not break your platform’s legacy features. Test automation work can be taken to another level using artificial intelligence tools to automatically generate test cases, data sets and stress different scenarios to ensure your application’s availability.

Chaos Engineering

Chaos engineering is a series of practices aimed at stressing your application’s components in search of failures and vulnerabilities. The name is linked to Chaos Theory, which preaches that small changes can generate totally unpredictable results. It is from this motto that chaos engineering seeks to inject failures into the system to test your platform’s vulnerability as a whole.

A team trained in using chaos engineering is able to create highly secure and resilient infrastructures that are immune to the most diverse types of vulnerabilities.

Self-healing 

Observability practices combined with chaos engineering can result in design implementations on your platform capable of self-correcting in the face of an error. Even if self-healing is not possible, the system can proactively interact with the user, without the need for human interaction, and generate a positive perception even in case of an error on your platform.

A classic example is a user on a credit card platform trying to pay a bill and receiving an error. The system can automatically identify what type of error occurred and send an email to the user identifying the type of failure and sending an alert for the support team to contact the customer. Even if the customer was not successful in completing their journey, there is the positive perception that the platform is highly coherent in recovering from failures and interacts in a personalized way with the user.

SRE – Site Reliability Engineering

SRE is a fundamental role in building highly resilient platforms. SRE practices allow creating efficient governance in platform sustainability by combining a balance between correction speed versus stability and risks. SRE practices improve the customer service level and correctly prioritize the errors to be corrected by the development team.

Software supply chain security 

It is important to create governance within the software supply chain. Pay attention to contracts, visibility, transparency and security of the code provided so that the supplier does not deliver system vulnerabilities while providing a service to your company.

Digital experience and customer loyalty with resilient digital platforms 

With a positive experience from start to finish, your customers will have a positive memory of using your digital product, which inclines the customer to feel the positive experience again. Products that don’t cause a positive impact on the customer tend not to be remembered and the chance of repurchase and referrals is lower.

In a highly competitive scenario, customer loyalty is crucial for your business success. Recent research shows that consumers are varying between a larger number of stores to make their purchases. This evidences the difficulty of loyalty. Without a positive experience and with so many options on the market, the customer will not want your product.

The modern consumer profile, digital by nature, sees much more value in a complete and personalized shopping experience than in the benefits of the product itself. The product changes in importance and should no longer be treated as the end of your business, but as a means to offer a complete experience that strengthens the relationship with your brand. Consumers prefer companies that offer the best experiences, and this experience is usually digital. In today’s world, where relationships are increasingly digitized, acquiring a product or service has less and less importance when compared to acquiring an experience.

Need help creating resilient platforms?

Zappts accelerates the digital transformation of major brands with high-performance teams. Since 2014, Zappts has been delivering business results through technology, creating high-relevance solutions using agile processes, best practices in software development and quality, and an unparalleled ability to understand and solve the day-to-day pains of technology development projects.

We cover solutions for all phases of digital solution development, from discovery processes to solution sustainment. With defined processes and agile management, our deliveries are always based on expectation alignment, quality and technical robustness.

Get in touch by clicking here, and learn more about Zappts.