No items found.
Blog

How tailored applications put IT at the center of Customer Experience

IT leaders must adapt their operations to focus on CX just as much as customer-facing departments do. Low code platforms can help IT teams to deliver on this. In particular, they can allow IT teams to quickly develop tailored applications that address the needs of the customers and employees.
How tailored applications put IT at the center of Customer Experience

 In the age of the connected customer, the only thing that differentiates a brand is customer experience (CX). Increasingly, those experiences are not human, but digital and automated. This puts IT teams in a situation of both opportunity and vulnerability.

IT leaders must adapt their operations and mindset to focus on CX just as much as customer-facing departments do - transforming their organizations from cost centers to service bureaus.

 

For in fact, IT is now central to customer experience. The company can't provide a modern, data-driven, integrated experience without you.

 

Business Priorities where IT should contribute

Consider these key priorities for any business, and attempt to extract IT's influence and contribution for each. (Spoiler alert: It's impossible to do so.)

  1. Marketing is able to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time.
  2. Sales identifies opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling based on each customer's history.
  3. Customer service provides more personalized, seamless support - recognizing customers throughout their purchase and product journey, on any device, with real-time, helpful information.
  4. Product teams can isolate customer needs and anticipate future demands using accurate data from internal and market sources.

Each of these scenarios requires IT teams to collaborate closely with their business functional peers - which will be a new kind of organizational operating model for many IT leaders. It's not optional.

Nearly 77% of business buyers say tech has significantly changed their company’s expectations of how companies should interact with them and 75% of consumers agree they expect companies to provide a consistent experience wherever they engage with them (e.g., website, social media, mobile, in person).

Progress is being made. Many IT departments now act as an extension/partner of business units rather than as a separate function.

 

The question is — how can IT best help marketing, sales, and service teams deliver on their customer-centric initiatives?

 

Low code platforms help IT to deliver on their promise

Low code platforms are part of the reason IT teams will deliver on this promise of collaboration to deliver a more satisfying CX. In particular, as business needs change, low code platforms allow IT teams to quickly develop tailored applications that address the needs of key customers and market segments.

 

Screen Shot 2018-03-12 at 16.10.36

 

Here's how:

  1. First, imagine all the applications that could improve the CX at your company. Sales teams using mobile apps in the field to check product status, file reports and engage service teams. Customers accessing product reviews, how-to videos and personalized services - from anywhere. Marketing teams using apps to make media mix cost efficiency calculations in real time - saving time and money and improving advertising ROI. Financial teams automating reporting dashboards for business units. Customer service teams tapping AI-driven chatbots to increase the efficiency and timeliness of routine questions.
  2. Second, consider that not one of these applications can you buy off the shelf. Standard solutions will not solve the unique challenge of creating a CX aligned to your brand and product promise.
  3. Third, consider the need for flexible, adaptive applications. What you build today will need to be refined tomorrow, as customer and market interests emerge and change. You also need a uniform platform to manage and maintain all these varied applications.
  4. Finally, we urge to you rise to the challenge. Remember what is holding back your company from competitive differentiation - there are a lot of challenges that only IT teams can solve. For example, tailored applications are likely to replace off-line, complex spreadsheets with real time, intuitive, more accurate and faster applications for your internal teams. And, customers don't care how many different brands or systems you have - they consider you one company and want one, consistent experience across every interaction.

 

These are very high impact solutions. Provide them well, and IT will soon be one of the most important corporate functions for growth and profitability. That's a new position for many IT teams, but as you move closer to customer value, you also contribute more to business profitability.

It's not so far-fetched to dream about auto replenishment purchases, appliances that schedule repairs before an owner knows they are broken, or companies made or broken on the power of a few customer social posts. These customer experiences are happening now. IT teams need to address the need for custom applications at the same pace.

 

Oh, and did we mention that you have weeks, not months to deliver?

 

Customers know what is possible because they experience it every day. Most visibly while shopping on Amazon, perhaps, but also in their exploration of voice-activated services, the way brands recognize their location and interests every day, and the way they hold the entire Internet in the palm of their hands.

 

What the low-code platform enables

Two things:

  1. Collaborate efficiently with business users. A low code platform lets you pair an experienced application developer with a business partner who has a solid understanding of customer need, and some big ideas.
  2. A scalable, secure platform. You need an agile method for rapidly producing tailored applications that harmonize with your systems, maintain security, protect data and scale. Your low code platform becomes this competitive layer of custom applications for your business.

 

In the past, IT may not have been at the top of the departments focused on customer experience; but it is now. The emergence of low code platforms to enable rapid development of secure, scalable applications makes it easier to deliver on this new challenge. How will you #SpringboardGreatMinds at your company?

 

Download our free whitepaper about Low-code in Swedish. A guide to technology that can dramatically increases the speed of application development and at the same time enables harmonization of the application portfolio.

 

{{cta('e24dc760-61be-460e-8194-13a13d84e96d')}}

 

 

Explore more

Screen Reader Text
Blog

AI in Application Development: Beyond the Hype

Are you tired of AI yet? It seems like there’s no escape from AI – it couldn’t be any buzzier than it already is. From fashion to politics, healthcare to entertainment, big tech, and more, people love talking about AI. And for good reason. While forms of AI have been around for decades (yes, we’re all still trying to get over 2001: A Space Odyssey), this new wave feels different. Some even compare it to a new industrial or (more frighteningly) nuclear age.
2024-01-01
Screen Reader Text
Blog

Low-code vs. no-code: guide to the best app development approach

This post will review the key questions everyone should ask themselves to determine whether low-code or no-code is right for your next application.
2024-01-01
Screen Reader Text
Blog

Your low-code future might look like this

Where is low-code heading? And how should you use it in your business? According to Gartner®, “Low code has emerged in the last five years as one potential tool in both enabling business transformation and scaling these initiatives cost-effectively over time.” But is it right for your business right now? Read on to find out.
2024-01-01
Screen Reader Text
Blog

A guide to application development success: why leading organizations choose low-code

Is low-code the right choice for my organization? Thanks to new application development technologies anyone has the power to create business applications.
2024-01-01
Screen Reader Text
Blog

Why Improving Quotation Management Is Your New Competitive Edge

As we shared in a recent post, there are many CPQ challenges that cause pain throughout the quotation process for many organizations. But we didn’t stop there, moving on to reveal specific ways a perfectly tailored CPQ application can solve those challenges, and many more.
2024-01-01
Screen Reader Text
Blog

The Top 3 CPQ Pain Points (and How to Solve Them)

‍Some call it Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ). Others simply refer to it as their quotation process. Whatever terminology your organization uses, how quotations are managed by sales, shared with customers, and converted into paying orders is a critical process for companies large and small.
2024-01-01
Screen Reader Text
Blog

What type of CEO are you?

In their article, MIT Sloan has analyzed the technology decisions of more than 8,300 companies around the globe. Leaders grow revenues 50% faster than the average 20% of the companies they studied and as much as double the bottom 25%.
2024-01-01
Screen Reader Text
Blog

Low Code: Your Agile Legacy System

What is needed is a way for legacy systems to be as agile as the marketplace, where innovation and responsiveness are required.
2024-01-01
Screen Reader Text
Blog

3 steps to rapid app development: Sketch, Build, Launch!

Crossing the communication gap between business and IT has sunk many projects. Translating business requirements into code is a tricky job, and often a slippery slope - potentially holding up an application development project for months. We've all been there. What if another scenario was possible?
2024-01-01
Screen Reader Text
Blog

CIO: What keeps you up at night?

For many CIOs, the stress points are those projects that have ballooned out of control, suffering from feature creep, budget depletion and missed deadlines.
2024-01-01
Screen Reader Text
Blog

CIOs Say YES to Expanding the Competitive Layer

Knowing how much technology drives business performance and customer engagement today, wouldn't it be nice to say YES more often to business growth ideas? Unfortunately, too many pushes for traditional digital transformation fail to account (and budget) for the very real impact on developer resources, harmonization and application portfolio management.It's also true that declining the opportunity to have technology innovation lead the business forward is not an option.
2024-01-01
Screen Reader Text
Blog

Low-code and Rapid Business Decision Making

Strong business performance relies on high-quality decision making. The three essential ingredients to good decision making are; clear goals, defined roles, and strong, respected teamwork.
2024-01-01
Screen Reader Text
Blog

Low-code 101: An Introduction

Join the low code revolution - speed up your business' digital transformation with a new modern way of creating applications.
2024-01-01
Screen Reader Text
Blog

How a Low-Code "Competitive Layer" Reduces APM Costs

A low-code competitive layer lets you build business-centric applications quickly, engage users in both the design and the utility, and save money on APM.
2024-01-01