No-Code Digital CX is among the hottest and most important topics in customer-centric business today. Most major companies are investing heavily in optimizing customer experience. The reasons for this ubiquitous investment are very clear: great CX delivers real competitive advantage and increases the bottom line. This post will provide the essential knowledge you need to understand the no-code CX automation revolution that is dramatically altering the way companies define and deliver great customer experiences.
CX Research
Vast amounts of customer experience research have demonstrated that great customer experience drives competitive advantage. Specifically, optimized CX is associated with six important benefits:
- More Customer Acquisitions
- More Customer Engagement
- Increased Conversions
- Lower Sales and Marketing Costs
- Increased Loyalty
- Improved Crisis Management
Many industry analysts say CX is an essential source of competitive advantage for brands going forward.
For CX initiatives to be sustained and successful, cx leaders, customer support teams, sellers, and marketers at companies need to understand their potential business value and make CX an organizational priority. Business alignment is essential. Individuals and teams must be empowered to enhance customer experience and align business processes and touchpoints toward maximizing customer satisfaction.
Alignment is critical because delivering the best customer experiences requires commitment.
Challenges of Delivering Great CX
It’s difficult to imagine anyone arguing against great CX – the challenge is that it can be difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to deliver. Automation and self-service experiences hold the promise of providing great customer experiences with low operating costs but implementing these sorts of initiatives can also be difficult, expensive, and time-consuming.
The Software Developer Shortage
First, developing automated and digital self-service experiences has historically required dev resources – either internal developers or an outside team. The challenge is that for most companies, devs are in noticeably short supply.
Nationally, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there is a shortage of almost 1M developers, and grows almost 190,000 each year.
Most companies have far more dev projects than they do people to complete them. They have long development waiting lists or dev queues that govern when a project will be initiated and ultimately when it can be completed. Fewer devs often means longer dev queues, which makes it tough for CX leaders to get their projects completed, as well as respond to competitor and consumer behavioral changes. Some of the most affected industries include:
- Banking
- Lending
- Insurance
- Healthcare
- Telecom
Mobile Talent Gap
The gap in developer talent is even more profound when it comes to mobile skills. Particularly in the US. Many American and European developers started their training and experience in PC-based programming.
But mobile now represents most connected time, ESPECIALLY IN ASIA, where, in many countries, 90+ percent of Internet access comes via smartphones. Globally. demand for mobile app developers grows about 20% per year.
Mobile app development is different in some ways. While omnichannel customer experience apps are becoming more popular, mobile tech is constantly revolving, and many of the ten biggest technology trends to focus in 2021:
- Cross-Platform App Development & Accelerated Mobile Pages
- Enterprise Mobile Applications
- Cyber Security
- Folding Screen Display
- 5G
- AI, Analytics & Cloud Technologies
- Chatbots
- Blockchain & FinTech
- IoT, Wearables, Biometric Auth & Beacon Technologies
- AR & VR
Misapplied Dev Resources
Add to that labor shortage a historical misapplication of scarce dev resources and it’s easy to see why digital CX takes far longer than most people would wish. According to the Harvard Business Review,
Advances in information technology, such as computer-aided design, modeling, and simulation, have already allowed companies to make great strides in developing better products in less time and at a lower cost. Many companies, however, have not tapped the full potential of these tools, because their management thinking has not evolved as quickly as the technology: They still approach the highly variable information-generating work of product development as if it were like manufacturing. As advances in IT continue, the opportunity to improve the product-development process will become even greater. But so will the risks for companies that fail to recognize that product development is profoundly different from manufacturing.
High Development Costs
Digital self-service and other forms of automated CX can dramatically reduce service costs, boosts conversion rates and sales, and elevate customer satisfaction. But to get to those goals the old model of manual, developer-led costing cost quite a bit of money. While some companies have progressive processes that evaluate ROI for dev projects and allocate resources accordingly, other businesses have very short-term perspectives that look at expensive projects as cost-prohibitive even if their benefits may far exceed their costs.
Another challenge is that a lack of strategic clarity can mean unnecessary changes to projects. While flexibility in a project plan can be a good thing, poorly defined objects add unnecessary cost and complexity to a project.
Multiple Waves of Tech Try to Bridge the Gap
A variety of technologies and companies have tried to enable companies to develop any digital CX application more efficiently and quickly. At FICX, we think about the progression and technology in the context of three “waves”:
Wave One: Use Case Point Solutions
Point solutions were the first set of solutions out of the block to create offerings for modern enterprises. These focused offerings fulfill a specific and highly defined purpose and offer a well-defined capability set. For example, an esign offering. Because they are limited offerings, point solutions are easy to install and use because their capabilities are limited.
Unfortunately, those characteristics also have drawbacks:
- Multiple Toolsets: To deliver robust digital CX, you need multiple capabilities, not just one narrow offering.
- Security Challenges: Multiple platforms mean more integrations, and each one holds the potential for security leaks.
- Lack of Innovation: Sometimes, point solutions are so focused on the way that they deliver they service that they struggle to keep up with market and customer behavior changes.
Many times, businesses will end up deploying several point solutions from different vendors. This further adds to expenses, and each will require to be updated and maintained. Sounds like too much work, doesn’t it? Many companies have come to that sad conclusion.
Wave Two: Low-Code (Sometimes Expressed as Low Code) Digital CX
As in most other industries, companies have looked for ways to use third-party platforms to improve processes and cost structures. A set of providers rushed into digital CX with what are called “low-code” CX platforms.
Low-code can represent an improvement over from scratch development – after all, these companies can purpose-develop specific capabilities and give multiple companies access.
The challenge here is that low-code lightens the load for dev teams but does not eliminate it. Further, as with point solutions, the low-code platforms, many of which were developed a few years ago, have limited opportunities for customization to the needs and infrastructures that a company uses.
Consider this description from Wikipedia:
A low-coded platform may produce entirely operational applications, or require additional coding for specific situations. Low-code development platforms reduce the amount of traditional hand-coding, enabling accelerated delivery of business applications. A common benefit is that a wider range of people can contribute to the application’s development-not only those with coding skills. LCDPs can also lower the initial cost of setup, training, deployment, and maintenance.
Because additional coding is often required, the low-code platforms may well provide a better alternative than point solutions, but DO NOT SOLVE the fundamental issue that app development is dev team dependent.
Wave Three: No-Code Digital CX
More recently, a new category of solutions has materialized for customer experience management- no-code cx automation platforms. These toolsets make it possible for anyone to digitize processes WITHOUT knowing code. These tools translate instructions from simple screens and drag-and-drop builders into robust and secure applications.
The best of these offerings are flexible enough to connect to a company’s existing infrastructure. Most companies – especially large companies – cannot or will not replace their existing systems for CRM, customer data platform, account management, support, sales, etc.
To accommodate whatever systems a company may utilize, no-code platforms utilize API-based tools to exchange customer data with a company’s array of systems. APIs can bridge the technology and data silos that hamper customer experiences. Application development is made far easier by leveraging pre-built connectors and robust APIs in a simple, yet powerful connection builder.
Finally, the best no-code tools can also integrate with pre-deployed point solutions. For example, if a company uses DocuSign, the platform can integrate that third-party offering into the broader customer experience.
Further Reading
If you would like to explore more content about no-code tools and digital CX, whether for customer service, sales, or marketing applications, visit our dedicated summaries for:
- CX Automation
- Customer Service Automation
- Digital Customer Experience
- Digital Customer Service
- Digital Self-Service
The FICX No-Code CX Automation Platform
Every leading services company is in a race to deliver more powerful customer experiences that improve revenue, boost profit, and improve satisfaction.
New no-code digital CX platforms like FICX are helping companies optimize sales and service experiences by automating processes, clearing bottlenecks, and empowering customer-facing teams to be more productive in their efforts to improve user experience. By deploying the FICX No-Code Digital CX Platform, you can use the powerful workflow and analytics suites to automate and digitize any digital customer interaction without taxing tech resources and deploy the experiences across multiple channels. That means for all customer touchpoints and digital channels:
- Web
- App
- Chatbot
- IVR
- Call Center
- In-Store
The latest digital process automation tools empower you to streamline, automate and remove friction from the customer journey, enhancing customer experience and lowering costs across your organization. The cloud-based or locally deployed FICX platform digitizes and automates any customer processes and delivers it to your choice of customer touchpoints.
- Architect efficient and satisfying business process parameters – configure navigation, add logic, build integration and QA workflows, and publish to any customer channel
- Use a robust drag and drop UI to quickly create responsive and intuitive screens that can be used to engage customers on any connected device in a digital journey
- Leverage powerful digital forms to streamline customer workflows and compliance. Easily embed form components and capabilities with advanced logic
- Ensure complete brand and channel consistency. Use robust styling options or add custom CSS to ensure a perfect match with existing customer apps and experiences
With the FICX platform tool, business users can deliver customers a consistent, seamless digital experience on the web, in an app, in the contact center or in brick and mortar. Employee and customer feedback on FICX experiences is universally positive.
Visit our homepage or request a demo now.
