Modernisation de-risked: Unleashing a smart, safe, rapid impact strategy for transforming legacy systems

One study puts the figure of sales lost due to poor user experience at $3.8 trillion. And this is part of a downward trend, with Forrester noting the average customer experience (CX) quality in the US has been declining for the past three years. In the case of enterprises, legacy systems can be pinpointed as a key reason for these poor customer experiences. 

According to Gartner, it’s a “system that may be based on outdated technologies, but is critical to day-to-day operations.” These outdated technologies cause limitations that make legacy systems increasingly incapable of delivering the level of experience customers demand. 

Their key issues include:

• Instability and scalability limitations: Outdated technologies cannot handle the increasing demand for seamless digital interactions. 

• Technological stagnation: Incompatibility with emerging technologies makes innovation and integration difficult. 

• Reduced employee engagement: Developers and engineers often avoid roles tied to maintaining outdated systems, leading to attrition. 

This results in a slower time to market for new products and features, a reactive posture and high customer churn.

It’s incumbent on CIOs and other digital leaders to be proactive in ensuring their systems are capable of delivering exceptional customer experiences. These are the key signs that a legacy system is due for an update: 

1. Declining user satisfaction: Low customer satisfaction scores, high drop-off rates and/or negative feedback. 

2. Slow time to market: Making changes or adding new features runs over schedule, and is done reactively, rather than proactively.

3. High operational costs: Maintenance, upgrades and manual workarounds are draining time and money. 

4. Inadequate personalisation features: Failing to deliver context-aware, hyper-personalised experiences for your customers.

5. Accessibility issues: Platforms are not compliant with accessibility standards, alienating key user groups​​.

“A key reason so many enterprise modernisation projects fail is technical leaders often start without clearly establishing ‘why’ and ‘how’ their legacy systems are holding the business back. It means they start initiatives on the wrong footing, don’t take a customer-centric approach and end up not resolving the underlying problem(s). This leads them to waste time, money and resources on initiatives that don’t give customers the experiences they expect.” Lefteris Paraskevas, Technical Director, Nearform 

Nearform’s experience-led modernisation proposition addresses customer experience pain points by tackling them at their root cause, ensuring that the solutions bring the right business outcomes. It’s a customer-centric, value-orientated approach to modernisation that brings genuine ROI.

Thin slice modernisation is a strategic and customer-centric approach to transforming legacy systems. It focuses on modernising small, manageable “slices” of legacy systems and lays the foundation for future transformation efforts. The result is that enterprises can quickly modernise their customer experiences without overhauling the entire legacy system at once. 

Our process starts with alignment between the business and technical stakeholders to prioritise needs. Upon identifying the top priorities, Nearform’s product, design and platform experts take a “thin slice” approach to specific modernisation initiatives, thereby both de-risking the process and enabling rapid business impact — as seen in our work with Travelex.

Nearform's approach to modernisation prioritises modern technology, tooling and thinking. We leverage proven patterns and principles that have been developed over 15+ years of developing quality software. This means that while every enterprise is unique and each modernisation initiative is different, we know there are certain characteristics in the top-performing systems behind exceptional customer experiences: 

1. Custom API development: APIs connect modern frontends to legacy systems, enabling seamless digital experiences without replacing the entire stack.

2. Composable architecture: Modular systems are developed that can evolve over time.

3. Cloud-native solutions: On-premise servers are transitioned to scalable and reliable cloud infrastructure.

4. Enhanced security practices: New systems are robust and protect against emerging threats.

5. Business-aligned data modernisation strategy: AI-driven insights are unlocked by unifying data, ensuring governance and enabling seamless migration and integration.

6. Enhanced observability: Provides real-time insights, ensuring system reliability, reducing downtime and enabling proactive issue resolution for seamless transformation.

7. Endless scalability: Modern systems seamlessly scale to handle increased workloads and customer demands. 

8. Rock-solid resilience: Advanced architectures ensure stability and high availability, delivering exceptional customer experiences that perform under intense pressure.

9. Boundless flexibility: Modular systems make it easier to integrate new technologies and adapt to evolving business and customer needs.

10. Future-readiness: Enterprises have a scalable and flexible infrastructure capable of supporting innovation and growth.

“Modernising legacy systems empowers teams by reducing technical debt and enhancing productivity. This enables them to focus on building modern, innovative customer experiences that deliver greater business value. The result is enterprises reduce customer churn, improve employee retention and cut hiring costs.” Lefteris Paraskevas, Technical Director, Nearform 

The impact of system modernisation is immediate and powerful, with every stage of customer experience improved by it. 

With a modern tech stack and processes such as DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), enterprise systems will be quicker and more reliable. This ensures the delivery of customer experiences that perform successfully under pressure and at the speed users demand.

Critically, modernising key system aspects can reduce the time to market for new products and features, enabling organisations to take a proactive posture in anticipating customer demands.

Enterprises that stall modernisation initiatives risk being left behind by “digital first” rivals. With the global customer experience market forecast to grow at 14.7% annually through 2032, now is the time for ambitious enterprises to begin modernising their systems. 

“We see in our work with global enterprises that customer experience [CX] is one of the key enduring aspects of business success. Digital-led organisations who invest in CX gain new customers and retain their old ones because they give them the experiences they not only want, but expect. The opposite is true for digitally immature enterprises, and the underlying cause of their poor CX is often legacy systems.” James Malone, Head of Design, Nearform 

Contact Nearform today to understand how the process behind systems modernisation can be a rapid path to business impact.