The customer's internal IT department offers special services to let connect Business customers to the customer's services, APIs and plugins. To integrate these services in a modern and user-friendly landing page, the customer's IT was searching for a fast and high productive platform. This platform should provide a solution with a high degree of flexibility to change and adapt the APIs, plugins and interfaces as well as descriptions and manuals.
The result should be a new channel to sell these special services and promote an easy way to interact with the customer's IT solutions. Especially the extraordinary skill and knowledge of the customer in that B2B field should be shown by the solution. The deployment of this intelligent interfaces to the customers IT is supported by small demo examples and an automatic installation routine.
All in all, the provisioning page should be interactive and intuitive in use. So that one stop sale could be established.
Business Need: The customer's internal IT department offers special services to let connect Business customers to the customer's services, APIs and plugins. To integrate these services in a modern and user-friendly landing page, the customer's IT was searching for a fast and high productive platform. This platform should provide a solution with a high degree of flexibility to change and adapt the APIs, plugins and interfaces as well as descriptions and manuals.
The result should be a new channel to sell these special services and promote an easy way to interact with the customer's IT solutions. Especially the extraordinary skill and knowledge of the customer in that B2B field should be shown by the solution. The deployment of this intelligent interfaces to the customers IT is supported by small demo examples and an automatic installation routine.
All in all, the provisioning page should be interactive and intuitive in use. So that one stop sale could be established.
Solution: Mansystems and the customer as a team, has designed a solution in which existing content of the customer's IT department gets used and is going to be combined with new interactive and flexible content provided in time.
The Mendix platform was used to create an internet landing page as an intelligent user interface to win information about the portfolio around APIs, plugins and interfaces. Additionally, the end customer gets some demos around the portfolio elements and a short example how to use it correctly.
When the end customer decides to use an API, plugin or service, he can request the deployment of it and directly sign a service contract with it. The deployment is done automatically in the customer predefined environment.
A special focus was on the testimonials of former satisfied end customers to bring the value to be expected in a comfortable way to the new customer. The added value is that the new ones can participate from the experiences of the already existing customers.
That will be the start of a knowledge network potentially planned later on, from which new and existing partners and customers can benefit. The idea and target is to stay in contact with the customer over the short period of installing the APIs, plugins and interfaces and constantly provide information about the new services. Especially, in order to share the value created by the successful implementations.
Mansystems provided a lead architect, two developers and a UX/UI designer working as a team together with the product owner on side of the customer. From the beginning, the user experience and the intuitive design of the user interfaces was key target. During the development, the integration and combination of static and interactive content was one of the challenges. But of course, the technical integration of APIs, plugins and interface deployment was the most difficult technical part. Mansystems could deliver the full solution in an extremely short period of time and could surprise the customer and overfulfil the customer's expectations.
Results: Mansystems was able to meet all requirements the customer had for this project. We impressed the customer by developing and implementing really fast so that first results could be seen already after only one sprint. Thanks to the Mendix platform, we could deliver in such a short time and make the customer happy because of a great result.
And even if the customer would like to add some features or change a few functions, it can be done in no time. Some easy changes can also be made by the customer himself, as the Mendix Rapid development platform can be handled by business people as well. Due to the easy communication between business and IT, team work was also really easy.
The most powerful result of the project Smartlink by the customer and Mansystems is of course a new sales channel which could be generated. The sale of the internal IT portfolio is now easy to access and all important information around the topics are placed in one single spot. The easy way of getting information was one of the success factors and is realised perfectly by the delivered solution.
Additionally, the combination of static and interactive content, allows an easy administration process for the customer's internal IT department. With a few realised templates, it is now easy to promote and provide new services. The customer satisfaction is increased by the given testimonials and demos. He or she can easily see how the promised value is generated with existing customers. Based on that expectations and by using the automated deployment routines, he or she can directly match the promises to the deliverables. That is a perfect situation for the customer's IT department in order to stay in longer contact with the customer over the installation phase. The planned knowledge network, mentioned above, is focussed in that direction as well.