By using AWS Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancer, IMIconnect scales up and down automatically based on spikes in actual customer interaction volumes.

Think back to an occasion when you made an online purchase and subscribed to email notifications so that you could continuously track the package’s whereabouts. Or the time when you received an alert from your bank asking you to confirm a transaction. What you might not know is that these notifications are part of a carefully orchestrated customer journey across multiple systems, where each step in the journey is triggered by an event such as scanning a package at a courier service’s processing center. IMImobile provides the canvas for enterprises to compose, orchestrate and automate customer journeys through its IMIconnect platform, used by companies such as AA, Centrica, Hermes, and Vodafone.

While emails and phone calls may have been the norm in the past decade, millennials are changing the way we communicate. They increasingly use digital messaging channels such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat. IMImobile observes that B2C enterprises need to transform the way they engage customers to stay relevant, but struggle to keep pace due to inflexible systems. For example, if a bank wants to send fraud notifications over digital messaging channels based on real-time system events, there is no easy way to do it. More often than not, the bank has to pick apart and redesign existing systems to make them work with new communication channels. IMImobile’s Enterprise CPaaS platform solves this challenge by offering a visual flow builder that allows enterprises to build and iterate multichannel customer journeys while seamlessly integrating with existing systems.

With IMIconnect supporting billions of customer interactions, risk of disruptions and downtime needed to be minimised. Providing geo-redundancy and disaster recovery were key considerations in IMImobile’s decision to deploy IMIconnect on Amazon Web Services (AWS). IMImobile deployed a multi-availability zone architecture on AWS that ensures high availability without having to deploy a separate disaster recovery (DR) set up.

IMImobile also needed a hosting platform that enables it to maintain a single architecture across all countries where it operates. IMImobile established a multi-tenant version of IMIconnect across multiple regions enabling it to onboard customers quickly across North America, Europe, and Asia.

Having a flexible and easily scalable platform is also essential to accommodating seasonal and ad-hoc needs of IMImobile’s customers. During big shopping events such as Black Friday where the number of packages skyrocket, IMImobile has to address increased traffic through its platform. By using AWS Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancer, IMIconnect scales up and down automatically based on spikes in actual traffic.

In another instance, IMImobile had a telecommunications customer that required assistance in managing customer consent and preferences after the EU General Data Protection Regulation came into effect. With IMIconnect hosted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), data migration could be completed within minutes.

Such is the pace at which modes of communication change that IMImobile has a dedicated team focused on understanding which messaging apps or forms of social media are relevant for its clients and should be incorporated into the IMIconnect platform. But it’s not just the modes of communication that are evolving – technology is also heralding a new era in customer interactions through artificial intelligence and machine learning. New services such as Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Polly are positioned to help IMImobile leverage these trends.