Frictionless customer service applications: The future of CX

Seamlessness, simplicity, and self-service – the modern customer considers these three elements to be the most important characteristics of a frictionless customer service applications. Thanks to the influx of digital technologies in every walk of life, they’re more comfortable in navigating customer service applications on their own rather than depending upon your customer care executives. In fact, there are many reports and statistics that support our claim. Let’s have a look at a few of them – 

1. Around 89% of customers in the US expect brands to have a self-service portal.
2. Almost 86% of B2B executives prefer to use self-service tools rather than dealing with a salesperson.
3. By 2030, at least a billion tickets will be raised by customer-owned robots due to the deployment of AI in self-service.

Clearly, frictionless customer service applications are winning the battle to better conversion and brands should realize their importance sooner than later. However, ensuring self-service takes streamlined operations, automated processes, and quick response to changes – all of which require a modern low code application development platform like OutSystems.

With its model-driven approach and prebuilt templates, OutSystems combines the speed of modern technology with the excellence of traditional development techniques. In fact, we have wonderful examples of how it has helped organizations achieve a competitive advantage with quick CX transformation. But before we get to them, let’s explore the impact of frictionless customer service applications and the challenges that a business may face in building them. 

How do frictionless customer service applications lead to better profitability?

Today, a customer has sufficient purchasing power and multiple options to choose from. What they lack, however, is time and the brands that are successful in accelerating their journey tend to become their favourites. They are no longer impressed with out-of-the-box designs, clever phrases, and long customer service calls – all they want is simplicity, value for time, and as little friction as possible.

And this is where customer service applications come in. They empower customers to find solutions on their own, discourage long phone calls and are responsible for introducing the element of self-service in the entire process. In fact, this inclusion often leads to better engagement, conversion, and retention. Let’s have a look at how frictionless customer service affects the following major phases in the conversion life cycle – 

Customer acquisition

Getting your visitors to sign-up is usually the first win towards building a long-standing customer relationship. But what if your potential customer gets annoyed at this very step and retracts back from taking any further action? How do you ensure that their acquisition is simple, timely, and engaging?

Well, your answer lies in frictionless customer service applications that support digital onboarding; especially if you operate in the finance and banking sector. From ensuring top-notch security to reducing time and money spent on customer acquisition, digital onboarding reduces friction at every step of this journey leading to a lesser drop-out rate and better customer retention.

Customer engagement

This is the most crucial factor that determines whether your customers are happy with your offering or not. Are they satisfied with your site design or do they leave the journey in the middle? Do you notice them repeating their purchase or do they face difficulty in completing even one order?

The aforementioned queries give a deeper insight into your site’s customer experience and it turns out that frictionless self-service functionality could enhance the majority of these factors. With a customer service application, you could enable faster checkout, allow quick redressal to queries, and promote personalized interactions. With seamless and fast services, customers have a better browsing experience, spend more time on exploring your offerings, engage happily, and thus, convert more.

Both customer acquisition and engagement are pivotal metrics in determining the effectiveness and profitability of your business. These two experiences alone can make or break your customer satisfaction ratio, word-of-mouth index, and growth rates. If you can manage to delight your customers when they first interact with your app and then keep them hooked, you’ve already won the digital transformation game.

However, what stands between you and your improved profitability is nothing but slow response to changing preferences, complex customer journeys, and a fragmented customer experience. Thankfully, there’s good news- you can still work around these issues by incorporating a low code application development platform like OutSystems. 

But before we get into the “hows”, let us show you why your current development methodologies may be harming  frictionless customer service.

What are the challenges that prevent frictionless customer self-service applications?

Speed to change

Once you’ve identified the points of friction in your UX, your first step would be to optimize them as soon as possible. This process, however, takes way more time than expected with manual coding or traditional development practice. As a result, you keep leading your visitors to a less-than-ideal customer experience and may even lose out on engagement and conversion.

Multiple channels

Let’s say the UX of your web solution is frictionless but it turns out that most of your visitors come through a mobile device which causes a lot of friction! In today’s times, it’s not enough to focus on only one channel and it is, in fact, more important to have a mobile responsive solution. 

Quickly evolving customer expectations

Every new day brings a fresh development in market trends and thus, in customer expectation. In this scenario, you have to keep up with the changing trends and apply them to your UX to prevent any dissatisfaction or friction. But with multiple channels and quickly changing demands, it’s nearly impossible to keep pace and you end up missing out on big opportunities to engage your customers. 

All of these factors are prominent and in fact, inevitable in today’s digital landscape. You cannot ignore them, instead, you need to migrate to a modern application development platform that helps you combat these challenges and make sure that you can curate a contemporary UX at all times which is as frictionless as possible.

Why is OutSystems the right choice for frictionless customer service applications?

To begin with, OutSystems lets you develop with speed while maintaining delivery quality . With OutSystems, you never compromise on performance but you accelerate your time to market and respond to demands quicker than before. Recognized as a leader by Gartner mobile application development platforms magic quadrant, OutSystems ensures the CX transformation takes a centre stage in the process of application development.

Here’s a quick look at why it could help you in building a frictionless customer service application better than any other low code application development platform – 

Visually-driven development

OutSystems comes powered with a rich library of pre-built templates and themes. You could build 80-90% of your application with a drag-and-drop methodology which not only accelerates the development speed but also lets your team focus on what truly matters in differentiating your application – CX transformation.

Cross-channel functionality

Thanks to OutSystems’ cross-platform capability and reusable codes, you can build digital solutions meant for both web and mobile platforms as well as PWA with a single code. As a result, you not only reduce the development time but also ensure that every change you make is deployed on all channels at the same time. 

DevOps support

Powered by built-in AI and machine learning tools, OutSystems helps in leveraging intelligent insights and data analytics in your business without the need for a huge investment. An OutSystems app could help you bring more personalization and sophistication to customer journeys because of all these factors. 

Best-in-class performance and developer expressiveness

If you truly want to build a frictionless customer service application, you need to rely on the expressiveness of the traditional development process. But, you also need speed! Enter OutSystems – it integrates the swiftness of low code applications development with the expressiveness of traditional practices. Thus, you could still develop a powerful application within a lesser period and with much more CX differentiation.

Final take

Since its inception, OutSystems has been successful in tying together the business and technical users. With OutSystems, you can be mindful of your business needs without putting pressure on your development team. A low code application development platform like OutSystems can help you in your CX transformation journey and also in eliminating friction at every step.