CX 101: Improving customer experience with OutSystems

The digital world revolves around customer experiences.

According to a Walker study, customer experience will supersede price and product as the key brand differentiator in the coming years. For new-age customers, a personalized online experience is more important than paying a product price. Thus, a business needs to prioritize agility, scalability, and rapid development of digital solutions to ensure that it can keep up with changing customer needs.

Typically, a traditional software development cycle takes at least 4-9 months to complete. As a result, it becomes difficult to respond to new market trends and consumer demands immediately. By the time you update a digital solution, customers have already moved on to another feature.

And this is where low-code development comes in! 

With low-code technology like OutSystems, you could reduce development time and quickly adapt to online behavioural changes, thus boosting customer engagement. It empowers brands to build customer-centric solutions that deliver personalized experiences. 

So, if you’re looking for a technology that could keep up with the pace of changing customer needs, then OutSystems is your answer.

In this article, we discover the potential role that low-code platforms like OutSystems could play in ensuring memorable customer experiences in the age of ever-changing consumer needs.

Let’s begin by looking at factors that influence customer experience and how low-code impacts them.

What Is Digital Customer Experience?

In simple words, customer experience refers to the overall perception of your brand or business in the customers’ psyche. From visiting your store or website to interacting with your representative, everything comes together to define customer experience.

But thanks to the internet and digitization, the world has now gone beyond physical stores and in-person discussions. As per reports, the number of internet users worldwide has reached 4.72 billion, more than 60% of the world’s total population.

Here’s what this rise in digitization means for businesses:

1. Your products can now cross geographical boundaries, reach wider target markets and, in turn, bring more revenue.
2. Studies suggest that 89% of consumers admit that they are more likely to buy from a brand they follow on social media. That means you no longer have to wait for a prospective customer to walk into a store to create an impression – you can now interact and reach them at the comfort of their homes via digital media.
3. Customer service is not time-bound anymore. You can remain available to your customers round the clock with virtual chatbots and social media handles. In fact, most customers now prefer self-service by going through company FAQs, social media groups, and quick tutorials.

With the onset of digital transformation, the opportunities for a business have increased manifold. However, it also leads to a complex customer journey and adds more layers to the customer experience. As digitization adds to the mix, here’s how customer experience evolves:

1. 1. Multiple touch points: There’re many ways through which a customer can reach you now, i.e., social media, search engine, emails, company websites, mobile apps, and online customer service portals.
      Action Item for Businesses: Create an omnichannel digital strategy that covers every digital touchpoint.
      
   2. Quick Response: This is an era of instant gratification. Whether it’s getting a quick reply on social media or exploring the latest eCommerce features, customers now expect immediate fulfilment of their demands.
      Action Item for Businesses: Keep track of the latest trends and ensure that they’re incorporated into your digital solutions at the earliest. Make agility and innovation your best friends!
      
   3. Omnichannel Experience: Whether they’re visiting your store or scrolling your website, consumers now expect to have a consistent experience at every interaction.
      Action Item for Businesses: Ensure that all your processes are integrated at every level so that you’re able to provide a clear, accurate, and consistent experience across all channels.

Today, an Indian homegrown brand could easily be discovered by a teen from California, USA. At the same time, someone from the Philippines could order high-end cosmetics from a store in the UK.

While digitization opens up various doors for businesses, it also poses the challenge of maintaining and optimizing customer experience in a highly dynamic environment.

You need to be alert, agile, and super-quick – everything that low-code technology can achieve.

Low-code technology can reduce the turnaround time by 90% and empowers citizen developers to bring their viewpoint in application development. With low-code, you can innovate, adapt and scale at a quick pace.

3 Ways To Improve Customer Experience With Low-Code

If you’re still in a dilemma about the role of low-code in enhancing customer experience, the following examples will clarify it for you.

Deploy omnichannel commerce in lesser time

Christelijke Mutualiteiten (CM) is Belgium’s largest health insurance fund that serves 4.5 million customers and acts as the country’s biggest patient representative.

For years, it relied on its network of 500 branches to serve its ever-increasing number of customers. However, they decided to transform their business model with changing times and resort to a digital customer experience solution to serve their clientele better.

An omnichannel digital suite would take their services to the customers making the overall experience more convenient and user-friendly. They wanted to choose a technology that could deploy faster and focus on customer experience for their digital transformation.

Keeping these priorities in mind, they developed their digital solutions with OutSystems. 

Backed by the power of low-code, they launched a mobile app and a web portal in only 9 months! With visual development capabilities and a library of responsive visual templates, their digital solution adapts quickly to user feedback and ensures a better user experience.

Their decision to choose low-code technology for their milestone project and its success proves that it can simplify omnichannel solutions and empower business operations with consistency and integration.

And this is the need of the hour!

With traditional software development, this entire process would take quite a long time. Low-code technology, however, reduces the time-to-market with a rich library of pre-set themes and pre-coded templates.

Create consistent and connected experience across all channels

Sam is a regular at your brick-and-mortar store and wins a coupon at a lucky draw in one of your outlets. He tries to use the coupon at your online store, but to his surprise, your eCommerce website doesn’t accept it.

Do you think Sam would remain as loyal to your brand? The answer is, unfortunately, no.

According to a study, 9 out of 10 customers expect a consistent experience across all channels from a brand. And to do so, you need to have seamless integration across processes and distributed teams.

If a customer interacts and shares information with your store representative in London, your email marketing specialist working from Dubai must be able to access the same data. This transparency reduces confusion, accelerates delivery time, and enables hassle-free customer service.

However, the process of enterprise-level integration is time-consuming and complex with traditional development methods. Technologies like low-code help build a single source of truth for all your organizational needs – in lesser time and with more simplicity.

For example, Yorkshire Building Society (YBS) Group, UK’s third-largest building society, adopted OutSystems to develop a fast consumer-friendly application with a new online mortgage calculator and a savings account. At present, the app provides service to customers at 40% faster rate than their legacy system.

Understand and solve customer pain points in real-time

Low-code technology has given rise to a new crop of developers – those who are not well-versed with traditional coding but have a deep understanding of what the end customers need. They’re called citizen developers.

Low-code features like visual development based on the drag-and-drop model empower non-IT team members to leverage their insights and contribute to application development. As a result, an organization has more resources to rely on and a fresh perspective towards solution effectiveness.

Since citizen developers think from a customer’s point of view, their approach is usually more client-focused, pragmatic, and agile. They act as a bridge between an organization’s technical expertise and business acumen.

By leveraging the capabilities of citizen developers, an organization can save time and costs while maximizing business productivity and customer satisfaction.

Final Takeaway

Low-code technology ramps up the development time by at least 51%, shows a 2X increase in delivery speed and provides more breathing space to your IT team.

The agile delivery and customer-facing approach propagated by low-code technology ensure that the application development process puts the end customer first. When it comes to creating customer experiences, nothing matters more than the needs of your target market, and low-code development ensures that you’re able to put it on the top of your priority list!

With low-code capabilities, your business could build clear, easy-to-follow, and immersive customer journeys.