Businesses that want to win, serve, and retain customers on digital platforms are increasingly turning to American IT firms who can get them to market faster with more effective customer engagement solutions than offshore providers, according to a new CapTech study (www.captechconsulting.com).
New numbers reveal that 63% of IT sourcing decision makers will hire more onshore third-party service providers for digital transformation projects in the coming year. Late projects, poor communication, poor quality, and escalating total costs were cited as the main reasons for bringing offshore work back onshore. The survey found that U.S. service providers deliver more value and consistently better results for meeting the demands of today’s digitally empowered customers.
A key driver behind this outcome is that onshore services are more grounded in agile development. Using the agile approach provides U.S. firms with a distinct advantage in being able to quickly deliver complex and innovative applications that are functional, scalable, maintainable, and secure, the study found.
The study, “Onshore/Nearshore Services Thrive in the Age of the Customer,” a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, a global research and advisory firm, on behalf of CapTech, was released in May 2016. CapTech is a national IT consulting firm that bridges business needs and technology. CapTech serves as a trusted adviser to some of the largest companies in the United States in the retail, banking, utilities, hotel and entertainment industries, including a number of clients ranked in the Fortune 50, as well as some of the largest state governments in the country.
Commenting on the findings, CapTech’s Chief Technology Officer, Vinnie Schoenfelder, said: “More business than ever before is conducted in a digital space, and consumers are quickly moving towards deeper engagement through mobile devices. Consumers are looking for rewarding experiences, and they move quickly in search of them. As a result, we are seeing a fight for customer engagement and brand affinity.
“In this environment, there is no bigger cost than the lost opportunity of a great design. Digital transformation is about developing complex consumer and business applications, doing it quickly, and analyzing and responding to customers’ shifting demands. A well-engineered transformation is your best opportunity to delight a customer and win them as a long term advocate. This research shows the importance of three components: engineering discipline and rigor, agile development practices, and mature DevOps. And it finds that U.S. services firms consistently get businesses to market quickly with more innovative and targeted solutions because they excel in these areas.”
The CapTech study reported that the need to innovate when building customer engagement models for the digital world has disrupted conventional approaches. The importance of continuous development of consumer-facing digital technologies has led to the growing adoption of agile development methodologies, which creates the need to partner with U.S. professional services companies.
