The explosion of connected devices and changing expectations from millennials are driving demand for Omni-channel applications that move beyond traditional store, web, and voice channels to give customers what they want, when they want it. Recognizing this, Synechron was approached by a leading insurance provider to create an Omni-channel Customer Experience. Their existing systems were monolithic and lacked the foundation and flexibility to support their Omni-channel vision.

Synechron and the client defined 8 architectural challenges this Omni-channel needed to meet:

• Consistent Experience - Provide the same set of features, functionality, and operational controls irrespective of the engagement channel.
• Context Preservation - Maintain the user context as the customer moves between channels.
• 360 Degree Visibility - Record and recognize all customer interactions across channels and learn preferences and habits.
• Content Publication - Develop and control content publication and enable faster content deployments
• Personalization - Tailor channel-specific interactions to suit customer needs.
• Agility - Roll out incremental improvements quickly and often with minimal impacts.
• Speed - Build solutions for different devices and platforms quickly by reusing existing capabilities and without having to tear down entire infrastructures or re-platforming completely to reduce time to market.
• Elastic Scalability - Rapidly scale specific application components instead of the entire application for maximum cost-efficiency and elasticity.
• Operational Flexibility - Write once, deploy anywhere.

To develop an effective Omni-channel Customer Experience, Synechron would integrate three primary technologies, Microservices Architecture, Containerization and Cloud Computing.

Synechron adopted a Microservices architecture style, decomposing large, complex software applications into many, small, isolated services. The decentralized architecture offers freedom from a unified schema, allowing components to evolve independently of the overarching system and be free to use the best tools/platforms to solve their specific responsibility. Microservices is well-suited for Agile development and Application Program Interface (API)-first design.

Implementing Containerization offered an operating system-level virtualization method for deploying and running distributed applications without launching an entire virtual machine (VM) for each application, delivering portability, flexibility, efficiency and speed.

Lastly, adopting Cloud Computing provided the on-demand infrastructure and application services to efficiently provision, monitor, manage, and scale the distributed components of the Microservices Architecture. By hosting many of the applications/microservices on the Cloud, it significantly improves cost management, particularly as the scope of the Omni-channel offerings grows.