A modern low-code, digital CX platform is purpose-built to drive personalized customer engagements across channels without sacrificing development speed, app quality, and security and compliance.
When developing a new customer experience, engineering teams are often forced to choose between hard-coding a custom application and digital experience from scratch or building “quick-and-dirty” applications using legacy low-code development solutions. Custom development provides flexibility but comes at a high cost with complex app development, maintenance, and infrastructure setup. On the other hand, adopting legacy low-code tools is a trade-off between scalable, production-ready experiences and fast development, which introduces a new opportunity for enterprises to reevaluate and revamp their platforms where they interact with customers. This is why there is a need for a modern digital CX platform.
A modern low-code, digital CX platform is purpose-built to drive personalized customer engagements across channels without sacrificing development speed, app quality, and security and compliance. Here are the top five characteristics that define a next-gen digital customer experience platform.
1) Extends existing digital properties with “build once, use everywhere” API integrations
When building customer applications, the most difficult part is often integrating brand new digital interfaces with your existing systems of record. This means hours of expensive development time is spent building, testing, and publishing custom API integrations while ensuring they meet security and compliance requirements. Automating apps to be able to share information and communicate can help speed up customer experience processes without outside help.
A modern stack for building digital CX must easily connect to your backend, CRM, contact center, transaction systems, and more to trigger personalized customer experiences and pass information back and forth to your core systems. Build once and deploy everywhere with pre-built API integrations and reusable logic that can be configured to automate queries, triggers, and actions. This saves valuable time and resources for your engineering team while driving customer action integrated with your existing digital properties, such as deflecting to digital self-service from your Contact Center as a Service solution or providing PCI-compliant payments over the phone.
2) Orchestrates customer journeys that flow uninterrupted across channels
Customer journeys don’t always happen in one place—the modern customer journey spans across channels, whether that be phone, text (SMS), email, chat, voice, or web. According to Gartner, 70% of white-collar workers will interact with conversational platforms on a daily basis, most likely via chatbot. However, chatbots alone aren’t always enough. Let’s say your customer switches from chat to voice. Most chatbots won’t be able to connect these two conversations. A common customer complaint is having to repeatedly re-identify oneself on each channel of engagement.
Taking the next step toward customer satisfaction includes a better understanding and delivering on your customers’ needs. Enterprises need to unite all these channels together to provide a seamless digital experience. Modern digital CX platforms preserve session states to recognize and verify who users are and keep track of their journey path. For example, if a customer starts to fill out a form on the phone, receives a reminder email, and opens a link, the customer is in the exact same spot.
3) Provides built-in security, compliance, and governance for consumer applications
Consumer applications rely heavily on having adequate security to maintain consumer trust. A top concern for consumers is digital privacy. According to a study by Pew Research, 70% of adults say their personal data is less secure, while 79% of Americans say they are not confident that companies will admit mistakes and take responsibility if they misuse or compromise personal information. With so much personal information being shared on consumer applications, having the proper security measures in place will keep users engaged and content to continue using the app.
That’s why it’s critical that your low-code, digital CX solution securely collects complex and sensitive forms of data – such as documents, photos, location, payment, banking – and then passes them back into core systems in a secure and compliant manner. This is especially critical in industries that host large amounts of sensitive information, such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, and government. Choosing the right platform means they offer out-of-the-box and continuously up-to-date compliance and data privacy certifications, such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR, and SOC 2, as well as enterprise-grade security measures, such as data encryption, secure user authentication, organizational controls, and more.
4) It Makes it easy to customize for on-brand customer interactions
Consumer interactions are often heavily influenced by design. It’s important to have brand-consistent styling to increase familiarity and confidence with your digital experiences. However, ensuring the same style is applied to every single interaction from your brand shouldn’t require re-configuration each time you deploy a new digital experience.
Mixing reusable themes with familiar functions like buttons, and progress bars, help to create and redeploy the precise visual styling according to your brand guidelines across mobile, web, and chat as well as voice styling for Interactive Voice Response (IVR). This makes it simple for all customer journeys to have a consistent look, feel, and even sound.
5) Ensures app quality and accelerates the entire development lifecycle
Modern low-code platforms allow you to build higher-quality software with less technical debt. This includes support for CI/CD processes, versioning and multi-environments, app preview and debugging, and UAT on all devices. This allows developers to resolve software errors on the fly, version to smoothly flow changes, use development profiles to save on time and human errors, and deploy with one click – all while reducing development time across the entire software development lifecycle.
Last word
To meet increasing customer demand for digital, enterprises have to abandon the DIY approach to building digital CX. Getting to market faster requires a modern low-code, digital CX platform that is purpose-built to drive customer engagements and developer speed without sacrificing app quality. Using a micro-app approach (think microservices), you can innovate faster, building incremental customer interactions without disrupting your existing digital properties and while driving big results for your business.
