User experience takes center stage in the business world today. However, at a time when commoditization of digital technologies has given rise to a plethora of siloed digital platforms that limit the flow of information, offering unified customer experiences is easier said than done. These experiences could be anything from not having to log in to multiple apps to not having to switch between apps or to collating data from different apps and providing an integrated end-user view. To this end, businesses are under tremendous pressure to make customer journeys and the experience seamless, regardless of the products or services they offer. Veriday, a Toronto-based company sees the huge potential of digital experience portal technology to dynamically integrate data and systems into one platform, helping businesses to stay nimble and deliver a unified experience to the users.

Having a rich experience in working with the open source-based portal platform, Liferay, Veriday is helping clients to transform their apps and business management tools into a single web-based, digital experience portal. The company leverages Liferay to knit disparate information systems in a single window to deliver a one-stop-shop experience to the users. Veriday's digital experience portal solutions comprise Liferay’s prominent features such as content management, the ability to align with internal organizational requirements and regulatory standards, and search capability. With improved collaboration and ease of information flow, the company is generations ahead of its competitors in streamlining the digital journey of its clients.

"Veriday provides the perfect on-ramp that helps companies move beyond the catchphrase of digital enablement and realize tangible business outcomes out of it"

Veriday's relationship with Liferay started when one of their clients from the healthcare industry approached them to overcome the complexity in allowing their employees to work with a range of internal apps. The client’s employees had to login into several systems and had no centralized access to their work-related data and systems. When they engaged Veriday to resolve the issue, the technology company scoured the market to choose the right solution for the challenge. Being an open source platform, offering rich functionalities, and available at competitive price point, Liferay fit the bill. With Liferay, Veriday provided them the centralized access by developing a digital experience portal to access data across systems. Secure and unimpeded access to systems and data made the work easy for the client’s employees.

“In every client engagement, Veriday brings to the table in-depth expertise and the tribal knowledge of implementing the Liferay platform to varied use cases,” says Chris Lamoureux, COO, Veriday. Over the years, Veriday has helped companies from various industries, including financial services, healthcare, and retail to accelerate their digital experience journey with Liferay at the core of their go-to-market strategy.

“Liferay provides a framework to integrate with different technologies such as CRM and ERP depending upon client requirements and their existing IT systems,” says Lamoureux. In addition, Veriday leverages tools built in-house to lay a cornerstone on which clients can easily scale their digital infrastructure based on business requirements. As the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of Liferay have grown manifold due to relentless innovation in the open source domain, Veriday is delivering greater value to clients by improving the usability of the modern digital systems.

Unique Approach to Digital Experience

From the outset, Veriday lays great emphasis on the overall objective of implementing digital technologies. Their approach to executing digital transformation strategy traverses six well-defined steps that include the transformation journey, knowing the end user (customer/employee), change advocacy, testing and learning, value creation, and an end-to-end approach.

Veriday carefully understands the vision and the mission of the transformation—whether the expected changes are revolutionary, bringing about drastic changes to the current setup, or evolutionary, where the steps to business transition are planned in tiny shifts. “As an example of revolutionary changes, the taxi industry which operated with little to no change in the last 100 years has been completely disrupted by Uber,” says Lamoureux. The roadmap for transformation is charted taking that ‘30,000 ft view’ while considering the internal employee requirements, budget, and marketplace dynamics. With a clear idea of these parameters, the company then delves into tailoring the journey based on the needs of the end users Lamoureux explains, “At this juncture, the focus is laid more on setting the right tone to support the decision making than the technology itself.” The assessment of current capabilities vs. future goals gives a clear understanding of the objectives and eliminates the blind spots in building effective digital transformation strategy.

“A ‘positive’ first impression is crucial for the users who will be using the next generation portal,” says Lamoureux. To this end, early stage of planning mandates involving the user community before building a portal. Holding user feedback as the stringent guiding thread, Veriday gets the ship sailing in the right direction. Therefore, as part of the change advocacy aspect of their client engagement strategy, the company takes into account representations from all of the users to ensure that the new rollout is going to resonate with the users. Lamoureux calls it ‘peer approved.’ Detailed feedback from the end users, or the focus groups, helps the client’s marketing team understand what motivates people, and how they might react to new innovation.

Touching upon the legacy code development practices, Lamoureux highlights that the project execution paradigm stifled a company’s ability to stay agile. "It was more of a one-time investment for the development supported by a small budget at regular intervals for maintenance." As businesses couldn’t update their apps and systems with the evolving regulatory and market conditions, profits declined.

Aiming to bring in continuous development culture into companies, Veriday has completely disrupted this legacy development approach. Their ‘test and learn’ idea is about being agile with the ability to bring rapid change at lower risk. This enables clients to introduce new features and functionalities into their technology in small increments, continuously. Veriday initially builds prototypes that can be integrated into a production environment and then implements analytics to understand the impact of the change better.

Veriday’s approach to value creation revolves around protecting and investing in corporate crown jewels, which can be a firm’s client data, employees, their unique technology, client engagement framework, or the technology used internally. The idea employed by Veriday is to improve the collaboration between the employees through the internal apps, so they spend less time in searching data and focus more on core business areas. As employees improve their efficiency, the effect invariably shows up in the form of happy customers. “It is more cost-effective to retain the existing customers than to acquire new ones,” highlights Veriday.

As the final and the most crucial aspect of their client engagement strategy, “end-to-end methodology” deals with delivery of value through the right channel at the right time. “One has to know the best ways to deliver the value to their clients,” says Lamoureux.

Strategy to Digital Success

Veriday has completed close to 100 Liferay projects, charting many digital transformation success stories along the journey. For instance, one of their clients, a mid-market financial services firm had several challenges concerning the look and feel and integration of their multiple public-facing websites for selling mutual funds. The modernization approach started with revamping the public-facing website to immediately have a rich look and feel on both mobile, tablet and desktops through Liferay platform, in just six months. Besides, they also had a legacy IT infrastructure which was running several siloed applications. As Veriday built a digital experience portal for them to harness complete data in one place, the client achieved a significant change which delighted the internal users. They could break down the siloed apps, allowing employees to improve their efficiency through the added advantage of analytics. Supported by digital experience, open-source portal technology, the client is looking to add new functionalities on top of it as required. Besides having a deep bench of Liferay experts, Veriday brings to bear its rich expertise in working with other technologies based on client requirements.

Backed by a team of expert developers and technicians, Veriday is fortifying its position as the leading change agent in the area of digital transformation for companies. The company is taking their value proposition to the next level through the accelerators that act as enablement vehicles on top of Liferay. These accelerators augment the value proposition of Veriday by integrating with APIs available through Liferay and connecting to client systems. The company has also introduced training for Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP). Besides, they are also certifying more Liferay technicians to achieve the integration. As the race to undergo digital transformation gets fierce and companies march toward it in droves, Veriday provides the perfect on-ramp that helps companies move beyond the catchphrase of digital enablement and realize tangible business outcomes out of it.