To Create a Great Customer Experience Developers Need a Great Platform Experience (PX)

Did you know that focusing on Customer Experience (CX) can increase a customer’s spend with your company by 140% on average! Don’t take my word for it, that’s based on research from Harvard Business Review. According to the research, when a company makes your life a little easier you are as much as 12 times as likely to continue to do business with them. Given this, it’s not surprising to see so many companies evolving to focus on growing and improving their CX – with large investments, reorganizations, and hiring.

Much of this experience is being transformed by the deep integration of technology into the value exchange. We order off iPad kiosks that remember our favorites, or apps that have our favorite coffee waiting at the drive through on our morning commute. These fundamental experiences are driven by data that is processed by an application that links what is known with an outcome that benefits the customer and the business (e.g., favorite coffee ordered and waiting … would you like to add a muffin with that?).

This type of multi-system integration is not always easy. You may have to link a mobile app running SWIFT to a back-end server running a SQL query and linked to a POS system with a POSXML post. And there may not be decent APIs to work with, making the developer’s life more challenging.

Ideally, if you had an end-to-end ecosystem of products along that data journey it would provide a Platform Experience (PX) for the developer. Developing products with a PX mindset means that every new product is built from the ground up thinking about how developers would want to interact and extend the products. Every product has well documented RESTful APIs published in Postman Collections to make snippet integration in Python, Java, C, etc. super simple. By developing products with a robust Platform Experience they are no longer a product, they evolve to become a platform.

Cisco gets this, and has created over 1600 APIs with over 900 documents detailing each set of APIs for all our platforms. You can check out these APIs and more on the Cisco DevNet website.