Analyzing Low-Code’s Effect on CX
- By Brian Sathianathan, Iterate.ai
- November 07, 2022
Low-code application development has become a mature, efficient, and secure approach to aligning these capabilities. Executed correctly, low-code strategies allow brands to build and deploy customer solutions far more rapidly — but still have all the customized bells and whistles that make a customer experience stand out.
Many low-code technologies also provide a visual building environment that makes it easy to understand what’s happening under the hood and to make continuous tweaks to improve and perfect customer experiences without rebuilding applications.
Let’s dig a little deeper and look at four specific advantages low-code development offers when it comes to supercharging brands’ abilities to deliver superior CX that can stand out.
1) Low-code gets all stakeholders on the same page
Low-code democratizes application development and the ability to visualize application interfaces and experiences. With low-code, applications are assembled out of Lego-like code modules, which encapsulate — and make it easy to harness — powerful emerging technologies with no deep technical expertise required.
Existing development teams without specific AI training, for example, can still create powerful applications. (And for brands with highly trained developers, they can create and iterate on these applications much faster.)
This accelerated pace of development drives more compelling customer experiences as iterative improvements and new creative ideas are launched into production in hours or days rather than weeks or months.
This same facet of low-code development makes it possible for stakeholders with no development experience to examine the interface visually and in detail to more accurately see what the customer sees.
In practice, this low-code feature helps to align the entire organization. Stakeholders from product managers to business leaders to P&L managers to development teams can all communicate their perspectives with no ambiguity as to the fine details of a given customer experience. Eliminating these potential disconnects pays dividends when it comes to the speed and grace with which new experiences come to market.
2) Low-code creates a bridge between developers and designers as they bring new experiences into being.
When developer and design teams aren’t in sync, that friction slams the brakes on application development timelines and impacts the overall quality of those experiences. Low-code can solve potential disconnects between these teams by including integrations into existing experience-related design tools.
For example, designers working with the popular graphics editor Figma could complete a draft of their design work and use a low-code platform to generate application code that perfectly matches their design intentions automatically. By eliminating interpretation and misunderstanding, this seamless bridge between the designers conjuring user interfaces and the developers incorporating those designs can achieve faster and more accurate execution.
3) Low-code abstracts front-end and backend development, enabling customer experiences enhanced by the “five forces” of innovation.
Customer experiences are no longer merely front-end-centric, where UX and aesthetics shape the entire interaction. Today, successful consumer applications, websites, or portals need to know everything about the customer to deliver the personalization and contextualization required to meet customers in their moment.
Achieving those heightened loyalty-building interactions requires a backend to harness AI/ML and high-performance processing to provide the right data quickly. Creative utilization of the other significant forces of innovation—big data, the IoT, blockchain, and emerging startup solutions—further enhance the quality and unique appeal of a brand’s digital experiences.
In one case-in-point I’ve been particularly close to, a nationwide company had relied on an agency-built point solution to offer car repair estimates to its customers. The app had an elegant front-end, and customers could easily navigate forms to fill in details and receive their estimates. However, the backend lacked the AI/ML intelligence necessary for accuracy: estimates were often as much as 40% off. Customers who had a good experience using the application, but then brought in their cars only to learn they’d be charged much more than expected, ultimately had less-than-ideal experiences.
The company subsequently adopted low-code to replace that application, introduce more effective AI/ML-based capabilities, and iterate on their intuitive front-end interface — and did it with drag-and-drop simplicity. As a result of that move to low-code, repair cost estimates are now accurate within 5%, vastly improving customer satisfaction.
4) Low-code lets small teams easily connect capabilities and flexibly build experiences.
Brands with smaller teams often struggle with the trending shift to headless commerce: the shift to decouple their front-end and backend functionality by using APIs to enable connectivity. On the other hand, companies with large development teams have the resources to stitch APIs together to assemble headless applications the old-fashioned way.
Low-code is a great equalizer for smaller teams by enabling drag-and-drop integration of API-based capabilities. This way, teams of any size can quickly and flexibly create connections to a CMS or other solutions, introduce customizations, and configure the front- and backends to augment customer experiences continually.
Low-code is the cheat sheet for high-speed development
Introducing customer experiences that stand apart in the marketplace requires tremendous reaction speed, flexibility, and access to transformative technologies. For brands eager to elevate their capabilities in these areas, low-code offers decisive competitive advantages by vastly increasing the pace and ease of development and experimentation.
Brian Sathianathan, the chief digital officer at Iterate.ai, wrote this article.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CDOTrends. Image credit: iStockphoto/krugli