The digital engagement model is rapidly evolving. Customers now expect high service reliability and a consistent user experience across all of their devices. The way we interact with a brand has become increasingly self-service too, often involving modular touchpoints that abstract complex commands into simple, actionable digital workflows. In this era, customer support is changing too, incorporating more ongoing conversations instead of one-off support tickets.
However, delivering on the promises of the digital age isn’t without its complications. Transforming customer engagement for the better is often hampered by legacy IT systems that don’t always speak the same language. Digital projects may be inhibited by a lack of development talent and expertise. And, while big tech players benefit from the use of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, small-to-medium enterprises may be left behind without the resources to improve their application development.
A low-code approach may be able to help overcome some of these customer journey challenges and accelerate things. I met with Stephen Ehikian, co-founder and CEO of Airkit, to discuss how low-code is dominating conversations around digital business. In the future, Ehikian foresees a convergence of low-code platforms and the customer experience journey. Utilizing low-code development platforms could help companies refine their digital customer engagement, reduce customer inquiries, and decrease reliance on human support agents.
The New Customer Engagement Model
In our accelerating digital economy, consumer experiences are evolving quickly. Brick-and-mortars have become merely points along the way. No longer do customers interact with a business from a single portal—the digital journey may include various websites, forms, native mobile apps, email, chat, phone, or voice-driven environments. No matter what the touchpoint is, customers now expect an effortless experience overall, said Ehikian.
Regardless of the application, users also expect self-service capabilities and ease of use comparable to ordering a product on Amazon. For example, finding an insurance quote should be achievable through an automated process without involving support agents. “Ninety-nine percent of companies are feeling the threat of how to go digital and meet that customer experience,” said Ehikian. This new digital experience requires greater context into user history and preferences, he added.
The communication model is changing too. Surprisingly, 50% of users download zero apps per month, found the U.S. Mobile Apps Report. To overcome install reluctance, brands must be proactive to meet consumers where they are. As a result, Ehikian notices a move away from native apps and email and a pull towards chat and messaging that occurs near the “moment of intent.”
“We’re moving away from asynchronous conversations, and toward a continuous set of touchpoints,” said Ehikian. In the process, customer support should become a more intelligent relationship that incorporates more context into the user’s history rather than one start-and-stop interaction.
Issues Managing Customer Experience
Operators may run into a few issues building out their digital customer service. For example, keeping a record system intact can be difficult, as tools often don’t talk to each other well, says Ehikian. Compiling a comprehensive customer background may require fetching data from a CRM system, payment system, or marketing automation tools. These systems often produce disparate data that can be difficult to link together with a support ticket system.
All of us know the strain of arduous customer support calls that seem to lack insight into our problems. Customers expect a better experience. Yet without solid integrations, companies cannot reference a full customer profile and history; this creates an impediment to handling customer tickets gracefully, said Ehikian.
Oftentimes, it’s a simple task that a user could accomplish on their own. However, the self-service capability is missing from the UI. “Whatever the agent can do the customer should be able to do as well,” stressed Ehikian.
Automation of backend processes is required to catalyze more competent digital services. Though some strides have been made to connect disparate systems using RPA, Ehikian called this “duct tape on legacy systems.” With the dawn of standard web APIs, customer support systems are better positioned with a stable machine-to-machine communication format.
Using Low-code For Customer Experience
Increased automation that syncs customers directly with cloud-based systems could reduce reliance on support representatives. So, how can we enable these effortless, self-service digital interactions?
Low-code development is one solid option, according to Ehikian. Low-code platforms could empower customer experience leaders or heads of service operations to build out a consumer experience with reusable components. “[Low-code] is not new. It’s very much a tactic in mind,” said Ehikian. “When code is obfuscated away, it enables business leaders.”
A common platform stitches together fragmented user journeys across applications whose integrations are challenging to maintain. “APIs are a big reason to open up and enable them to configure these experiences,” said Ehikian. Integration security is also hard to build out of the box, and a common platform could help reduce bugs and enable compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and HIPPA.
To Ehikian, many customer experience issues are also low-hanging fruit for AI to solve. AI-driven bots could recommend the next-best actions before transferring users to human agents. As I’ve covered before, more and more low-code platforms are beginning to offer standard AI components and even neural network training.
Benefits
In addition to bringing self-service abilities and solving the integration hurdle, some other benefits of using low-code platforms to build out customer-facing experiences include:
- Democratize AI: Low-code presents an opportunity for AI to recommend the ideal customer experience.
- Empower business professionals: Due to a lack of resources, many companies have a backlog of customer experience-related projects, says Ehikian. Low-code helps business professionals close the gap.
- Reduce boilerplate code: Low-code helps generate code to support multiple platforms, which can be tedious and repetitive to maintain.
- Actionable data: More accessible customer data can empower chatbots and agents with more context.
- Reduce customer support agent time: More self-service abilities and improved routing of user requests can help avoid human interaction and thus save resources.
- Increase digital competency: Having prebuilt components for customer relationship management increases overall digital competency.
- Consistent branding: Most low-code platforms offer custom HTML, CSS, and the ability to configure on-brand templates to standardize style.
Downsides
Of course, there are some potential drawbacks of relying on common development platforms for any project. And, customer engagement is no different.
- Trade-off between speed and power: Using low-code, developers sacrifice control in lieu of increased speed to market.
- Pitfalls of too much automation: Software development teams often suffer from over-automation. This is when engineers must exert too much effort to comply with the confines of a development environment.
Consistent User Journey
At the end of the day, digital business acceleration is about architecting a consistent user journey that works. Achieving that smooth instant gratification on the front end will require connective tissue between existing systems on the backend.
However, for most non-tech companies, constructing seamless digital experiences isn’t exactly their core expertise. “If it’s not your core product, it probably shouldn’t be built in-house,” said Ehikian. As a result, Ehikian expects more companies to explore low-code creators as a way to architect the user experience journey.
