#35 The Customer Experience with Low-Code Episode with The Automation Guys

In a socially distanced world, there is no doubt that technology needs to play a larger role in your customer experience strategy. But how do you go digital when you simply do not have the resources to make the big process and system changes that are required? In this episode of the Process and Automation Podcast, you will learn how to fast-track customer and user experience in your business with the power of low-code. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. And as always with me here, my Automation Guys partner Arno. Hello, Arno.

Hi, Sascha.

Yeah, in today's episode, we want to talk about how you can go digital with your business when you simply don't have the resources to make the big process and system changes that are required. Arno, and I'm sure you're with me on this, low-code automation could be the answer, right?

Yes, we're seeing Obviously a tremendous sort of movement with inside the low-code space. You know, the pandemic has obviously altered the way that, you know, many businesses do their business, you know, and, you know, both behind the scenes, you know, back office operational processes and when serving customers. And, you know, in many respects, the world of work has been sort of launched into the future with the pandemic. And, you know, prior to the virus hitting, you know, companies were sort of used to work at the office, but obviously with the advent of the virus, companies had to sort of hastily adopt and, you know, adopt new digital ways of operating. And And if we look at our sort of virtual workplace that we all sort of work in, it's no longer a stopgap. It looks like it's sort of remote working is here to stay. And Forrester predicts that this will be a permanent thing, that people will sort of work from home. Even post-pandemic. So we are seeing a lot of shift in, you know, how people work, and I think that, you know, a lot of businesses are trying to reinvent themselves. And, you know, I think there's still a key to ensure that we still have customer experience, or CX as I call it, you know, as a strategy and within the business. Because of course, you know, customer experience is really important, that gives your brand a very good differentiator. And, you know, going forward, sort of after this pandemic, it would make sense for a lot of businesses to adopt this digital-first approach, what we call, to customer experience. And, you know, and we find that low-code tools is a really effective way to create these experiences and to ensure that, you know, we're very agile in order to change these experiences. We need to be very flexible and, you know, we need to be adaptable, and that's all critical to make sure that we could change at a very rapid speed when it comes to the need to change our circumstances based on our customer needs, our business priorities. And also to be able to continue to change. You know, it's really important for us to look at our business, see how we serve our customers, you know, what the experiences are that the customers have when they interact with us and be able to adapt to that. And I think that's where low-code comes into play because we can build those superior customer experiences and we can ever evolve them. You know, we can, we can play with it, we can tweak it, and we could bring it into the market really quickly using low-code compared to a sort of a traditional coding or high-code approach.

Yeah, absolutely agree. So, so it's rather a matter of days, isn't it? Not months anymore, weeks. So we can do it really super fast. So let's, let's dive into finding the best approach. Um, So digital-first customer experience is not really about positioning your company as a tech-savvy enterprise. It's about using technology really to make exceptional customer experience and user experiences possible. So the first one would be, yeah, begin with your customer experience goals, whether these be faster response times, anticipating customer needs better, that kind of stuff, creating new levels of convenience, or even reaching your markets. So yeah, you could think about your website, how you interact with your customers. Do you have all these latest technologies like chatbots available to make that experience fast and swift? So yeah, when you have all sorts of goals, then redesign your process around these goals. And yeah, once you know what your customers— what outcomes you want to achieve for your customers, then yeah, you can identify which slow manual tasks need to be automated. So, so when you go into all the details, you will figure that out. And there are lots of ways of, of doing that and how to figure out and how to map your processes. We talked about this recently. And yeah, which disconnected systems are not really performing too well and are letting you down in what you want to achieve. So, um, yeah, and while we're talking about technologies, the So as you mentioned, Arno, so we can do things very quickly with low-code. There are now so many tools available on the market to get started with low-code. We are working with many different vendors. So it's, it could be just low-code workflow, low-code RPA, low-code chatbots. So, so that's, that's generally what, what we have, isn't it, available these days. Our regular listeners will know that we're talking about this quite a lot here on the podcast. And if you're new, we recommend to catch up on all our episodes about low-code to get a good in-depth view on all these technologies as well. So, so that's a little info here for you. So, Arno, but we have good news, right?

Yeah, I think the good news is that, you know, you don't have to have a massive technology overall when you want to improve your customer experience or create digital customer experiences. I think what we're saying is that, you know, a lot of your legacy systems can still stay in place, but what we want to do is we want to bring automation technology and sort of overlay it in front of those legacy systems, create those experiences on those layers, and be able to create very adaptive experiences experiences that follows trends, new trends. Experiences is very connected. Of course, what we don't want to have is disconnected experiences. That's very frustrating for a customer. And really what we want to do is leverage all of those existing investments that you've got and bring in some of the progressive tech to provide sort of a glue that holds everything together, that forms a very, very good, I guess, foundation for your customer experience initiatives. And, you know, again, I think low-code solutions are designed to solve process problems from the ground up. And, you know, because the development of process itself is made a lot more user-friendly, and it's a lot more easier. It's very commoditized, democratized, you know, whatever you want to call that. And also, I think that it sort of reduces the gap between IT and, you know, the rest of the business. So, you know, you could have a very kind of a cross-functional approach when you look at transforming your CX. And really, you know, a lot of people talk about bridging the gap between the business and IT, but I think that With low-code, because it's such an efficient way to create software and underlying sort of user experiences automation, it is really very engaging. It's very fast. It's very results-driven. You know, it produces value very quickly. So it keeps people quite engaged. It keeps people quite enthusiastic about the problems. Projects don't tend to be very long-running, so it feels like there are sort of results very quickly. That's when you see that, that's sort of that, that kind of differentiation between business and IT sort of really becomes a bit sort of fuzzier when, because, you know, everybody is just very engaged, everybody is very involved. You know, perhaps people, process owners, know what they want to achieve in terms of their CX or their customer experience. IT know that they can deliver it very quickly because they've got perhaps very good low-code platforms like low-code RPA, low-code chatbot, low-code workflow and forms designers. So everybody kind of just works together very nicely and very quickly, you know, and it's kind of sort of a very nice combination of people rather than have like a polarized view.

Yeah, so we recently had a new cohort of our graduate program starting, and one big part of this is actually also building a low-code sort of skill set and building an application. And they just pick this platform because it's cloud-driven, it is approved by IT, everyone knows it is secure, everyone knows it is capable in so many different ways. So they don't have to worry about that once it's set up and configured and approved by IT. And everyone knows sort of the best practices. Yeah, they just got started and after a week they already say, wow, we haven't thought this is possible. So they progress so fast and the results are there. Yeah, so every business can really do the same. So they are graduates coming out of university and with a bit of maybe tech enthusiasm, but otherwise they, yeah, with low-code they can do it. Otherwise they wouldn't achieve that much after a week.

Yeah, and I think, you know, graduates today are actually quite a good sort of demographic of people to create these experiences because, of course, that demographic of people are very used to sort of interacting a lot on their mobile phones, for example. You know, they're quite tech savvy, they you know, they're plugged in digitally across a lot of things. So I think they've got a very, I guess, a sort of a natural way to design really good experiences because, you know, they sort of grew up with good experiences because of their technology use. And I think low-code is just that enabler, right? So where if, if we look at a specific experience that you want to create for end user, um, that can be very defined, but then to execute is very quick. So you can test it. I think that's, that's where the power comes in because obviously the low-code platforms are quite easy to learn. So you've got ideation on the one side, really good ideas. You've got execution on the other side, which is very quick execution. Which drives very quick results. And then also you've got the ability to change very quickly if you perhaps find an experience needs to be tweaked, altered. Perhaps, you know, you need to plug in a separate element in there like an RPA bot because there's a gap in the experience, somebody waits, or there's a chatbot built in that can interact. So all of that's quite dynamic and very fast moving. And I think with the low-code tools or the low-code approach, it really accelerates that and it kind of brings that benefit out very quickly. And again, you talk about graduates, but I think that's such a great demographic. We see it as well where, you know, they are used to CX because like I said, they sort of grew up with it, not, you know, not ugly buttons and stuff when we sort of grew up with sort of the first, so, you know, some of the first initial, I guess, sort of case management systems, which is quite heavy and very hard to sort of use.

Yeah, they actually also very used to sort of more high-level thinking, so what they very often get this tasked when they're at university to think about the problem, how that can be solved. And they come up with high-level or maybe mock-up screens because they don't know generally any other kind of tech at that stage. But now with low-code, you go very, very quickly from your sort of mock-up into a functional application. You go nearly instantly anyway, isn't it? So they can really transport that high-level idea they had before now into proper app in no time. And yeah, that exactly that power every business now has.

Yeah, I mean, one example is that if you want to build an app, for example, and you want to have a, you know, the sort of the classic approach is, you know, you need to think about the app, you need to think about the data model, and you think about designing a database, and then you need to think about, okay, what type of forms am I going to put in the application, you know, so it's the security. So there's, there's so many things to think about. You know, with low-code development, you don't even have to worry about creating a database. You can just use a modeler to model what your data objects should look like. And obviously that could be your data objects, underlying relationships, So you don't even have to create a database anymore. Of course, the platform will create something in the background for you that could be used for reporting. Your data is still accessible, but it's just, it removes all of that complexity. So you can really just focus on the problem you want to solve. You don't want to, you know, bog people down with creating databases and knowing scripting language to create these databases. What you want people to do that creates these apps it's really just give them a platform to say, right, what is the problem that you wanna solve? What is the journey you wanna take the users through in order to, you know, create those solutions? And, and that's where the sort of the UX elements comes into play quite a lot. So you can focus a lot on that. And then all of the other kind of technical peripheral things like security, logging controls, password resets, database creations, you know, styling, you know, all, all of the, the sort of heavy-duty stuff that takes a long time and is also very, very costly in terms of, you know, project development. If you use high-code, all of that goes away. So you can spend a lot of time on really creating really good CXs. And that's why we like the low-code approach. You know, we like the, this sort of the speed.

Yeah, and I think we don't have any other choice really if we see what kind of sort of revolution we are now in. So everything has been kicked off 12 months ago, and before the pandemic, it was already estimated that it will just grow like crazy when it comes to automation and intelligent document processing, all that stuff. And some industries long overdue anyway. So actually, to achieve all these changes, you don't find enough, you don't have enough resources to do the traditional way anyway. So I think this is the only chance businesses have. And some businesses, they have to overhaul and change applications, like hundreds of them actually, within a company. And that's the only way, I think.

Yeah, I think a lot of businesses we speak to, a lot of customers, they do have quite mature processes, you know, the processes are there. It's, it's, it's not a question where you speak to people and, and, um, you, you know, you still have to kind of figure out what these processes are. I think the, the issue we see is that it's just translating those processes into something quite meaningful that's automated. And this is where low-code sort of really, um, flourishes because you know, you could, you could, you could have a discussion with somebody around the table, you know, they the process owner and the subject matter expert. And, you know, once you get to grips with what that process is involved and how people interact with it, it's almost kind of quite natural just to listen to what people say and sort of just map that out with inside the low-code tool. And generally the way people speak, and the way they want stuff to work, that there's such a nice mapping of just literally taking that and then mapping it within Site Tool and then almost refreshing the screen and say, is this what you mean? And then they look at it and they're like, yeah, but can you, could you perhaps change that? So, you know, this step here is merged into one. And you can do it quite rapidly and always just show them the result straight away. I think that really impressed me a lot about the things we do is again just that speed and agility that you could take a requirement from somebody, show them something, bring it to life. Immediately you've got somebody's attention because you you've done that very quickly and they look at it and they say, "Yep, that's spot on." Or, you know, "Can you sort of just change it slightly because, you know, we want to have a sort of a slightly different way how this is presented to the user?" Or, and it's a process, perhaps the process could just behave slightly different rather than sending out an email. Maybe it sends out an SMS message or WhatsApp message or whatever that be. So again, you know, you always talk about the kind of the Lego blocks, but I think it is literally like that, where you could sort of use those components, string something together, test it very rapidly, see if it aligns with your strategy, see if it aligns with your process, see if it aligns with the goals of your of your customer experience that you want to set and test it, you know, do a test. And, you know, normally it feels quite, you know, when it's right, if, you know, once you start sort of kind of putting it through its paces, there might be scenarios where you think, well, it's not quite there, but at least it is a starting point and we can evolve into a sort of a final version of it, or it could just be ever-changing where you just have to be very adaptive because there's new trends that you want to follow. Like I said earlier, there's new things that you want to sort of build into the process. We talk a lot about chatbots, so, you know, maybe you want to create an integrated chatbot experience as well as part of that. So there's just so many possibilities with Insight, this kind of Lego set, and you know, the landscape around it to create something that is sort of fit for purpose for today, but might need changing without the expensive investment in very expensive coding that you have to throw away because you've changed your mind.

Yeah, sometimes if you don't have the right Lego blocks over time with low-code, you develop even a few special Lego blocks and then you have your set of your sort of your preferred, or let's say your top 10 list of Lego blocks you have for pretty much all your applications, then low-code nearly becomes, in some companies, starts to develop into a no-code experience. So the more components which can be used are defined, then it's just nearly more configuration than actually coding. So speed is even higher. And after like 6 months using the code, the low-code platform within the business.

Yeah. And I mean, I'll tell you a real-life story. You know, we're currently busy with quite a large project that deals with insurance claim management and it's a fairly complicated area. And so we're sort of a month into the project and, you know, if we've managed to solve all of the sort of pre-claim setup. And it's fairly complicated in terms of claim perils and activities, fees, fee sets, and all sorts of very, very difficult thing that goes into claims management system, including sort of who's brokers, where's the underwriters, all of that configuration, the roles, how people interact with each other, the sort of rules around it. And, you know, we haven't wrote one line of code. We have just used configuration and we are able to model an extremely, extremely complicated sort of problem, you know, being insurance. You can imagine that there's a lot of things that hangs off an insurance setup, you know, policy management, all of that. And that's very impressive. I think we sometimes look at it and we still say, well, how much code did we write? Well, we didn't write any code yet. And it's just incredible. It is so different to 10 years ago where if you were to say this to somebody that you'll be able to do something as complicated as this without writing a single line of code, They wouldn't believe you, right? Absolutely.

And that applies as well to sort of integration low-code as well, isn't it? So nowadays you should integrate lots of these cloud applications and other systems actually with just really low-code or no-code, which was a big, big task 5, 10 years ago.

Yes, I mean, it's absolutely matured so much, and I think It is such an exciting thing to bring into your business, and it's such a great thing to see people's responses to the speed of execution. And also just to change the way you create software, change the paradigm slightly on you know, the possibilities that exist, even if it's really complicated. I think, you know, people, skeptics of low-code might look at it and say, well, it's only for simple things that it works, but that's not, that's not the truth. You know, you can create really, really sophisticated, omni-integrated systems with very, very sophisticated modules, you know, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, you know, RPA for the robotic side, where you can train software bots to do repetitive tasks. You can obviously bring in the mobile elements as well, because of course if you create forms in a low-code platform, it's automatically ready for mobile. So, so, so, so there's so many advantages of, of using this approach And again, you know, we always think about real-world scenarios and, you know, is, is it fit for, for, for real-world kind of application stuff that's really difficult? And, and the answer is yes, it is very mature. There's a lot of features as, as the low-code landscape has changed over the last 5 years that allows people to really create very complicated applications very fast. And that kind of shifted the sort of attention to the customer experience more because we know we can create these complicated applications, so we're not scared to do that anymore. What we're doing now is we were really focusing our efforts in sort of the innovation around how these systems perform, how they look like, how they feel like if people interact with it. That, that, that's where, you know, this low-code approach is, is, is, you know, it's really quite special.

Yeah. And then we, we started working with a couple of startups actually. So they, they have these ideas and new business ideas, new customer experiences, maybe in a very well, well-established industry, but they just think, okay, we need to change the customer experience to this level. And then instead of they're going off and building from scratch with code like they maybe have done 10 years ago. They hired their coders on Angular, React, and all that kind of stuff. Now they're just getting onto this low-code platforms to actually prove that business model to the stage of sort of MVP, so that that will be the sort of the first level. But these platforms these days, you can keep them actually and not move away after MVP. You can actually then scale and roll it out to your end customers. And they do this now in incredible speed. They have all these great business ideas and they're using local platforms now to get it out to the customers. Because that's very often where startups are different, isn't it? Startups in fintech, they're not really doing things fundamentally different. Still about transferring money from one person to another maybe. But the whole customer experience, how you, how you become a customer, how you then do the daily things in your, your financial requirements, that is different. And then testing all that stuff with low-code as well.

So yeah, absolutely, because, because it's cheap, right? It's cheap and very, very quick to do it, and that's where it gives you the competitive advantage. Because if you have an idea to create a new journey that will attract customers. You want to be able to execute fast. You want to be able to put it out very fast. You want to be able to test it. You want to be able to fail fast as well if you feel like this is not going to work and not have the burden of, you know, quite a very expensive IT build because you are innovating and experimenting, right? So it is kind of ever pushing that boundary without breaking the bank. And I think that's very, very important. Especially, you know, IT budgets are spread across a business and, you know, do more with less. And so it's all of that. I think low-code is definitely one of those solutions that is worth looking into just to understand. And, you know, we always challenge people that we talk to, any prospects, prospective customers, to say, you know, give us a scenario, you know, Show us, show us, show us a scenario of something that you feel needs automation, or we need to plug a new process in, or you need to create a mobile app or a digital experience, you know, and generally in a couple of days, you know, we've got something functional, which was sort of high-code or conventional development will, you know, would take a lot longer. And, um, you know, and that's a very effective way to, to, to actually test out low-code and almost, um, you know, be, be, be sort of converted into that. It is, it is, it is something very tangible. It is something, um, very progressive. It's very fast. And, uh, you know, it is, it is something that, that I think, you know, should be in every business and every organization.

Yeah, and this is why we're doing this, um, as you, you and, uh, and, and we doing this, these workshops, isn't it? Just one week getting together and getting actually that kind of stuff done, isn't it? So to try to convert, um, people into, into this, into this mindset, low-code can, can achieve it. Like one week, two weeks is enough doing the process mapping workshops, that kind of stuff, and just build the first thing together and and then everyone is just amazed. We had it with RPA, everyone couldn't really believe what it can do. And, um, and this is a really good way of, um, just getting started, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly. So I think in summary, what we're saying is that, you know, with, with the low-code approach, um, you can start very small, you can transform a process at a time, and this allows you to, to innovate the customer journeys that you need in small manageable steps, I suppose. You know, you can begin with this sort of routine manual processes that waste a lot of time within inside your business, and then later on tackle more complicated problems as people get confidence in the low-code approach. You know, also we say we want to unite IT and the business, and I think low-code platforms create this environment where specialists from, you know, different business units can work together to solve these sort of customer and end-customer pain points and solve for better customer experience. So, you know, it just means that you can kind of build these solutions based on insights gained from your customers and, you know, how they respond to the type of solutions you roll out. And you can really change that quite rapidly and fully exploit the full potential of low-code then because you can constantly adapt. And I think the customers will know the difference. They would know the difference that you are constantly trying to make those experiences better. Yeah. We want to build solutions faster.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, building solutions faster with low-code. Means a simple drag-and-drop user interface for the developers and tools that really span the entire app lifecycle. So really everything from idea to deployment and scaling, security, everything really. So this saves a huge amount of time when designing and developing these new processes, and in general you will get more out of your process optimization initiatives. And yeah, that also lets developers get more done. So that's the traditional developer, um, maybe needs some time, but when they start using low-code technology, they can really speed up the whole development cycle. Skilled developers have more time to focus on other projects that are important to the business and to the customers. So they may be overseeing a lot of low-code implementations to just make sure architecture or general governance, that kind of stuff, and maybe other bits. But otherwise, you don't need the super skilled developers to do low-code, right? So everything is defined, uh, pretty much, um, just a little bit of oversight and guidance maybe.

Yeah. And I think, you know, you need to be able to adapt with, with the times. You know, COVID just taught us a lot of lessons. You need to be able to respond quickly. And I think the most important thing here is, is really to be able to refine and automate your processes rapidly. And, you know, and this will allow you to continuously react to new customer needs and keep up with changes. I think that's the bottom line.

Great.

Yeah.

So if you like to go deeper into this topic and, um, yeah, explore why low-code systems play such a, such a valuable role in in any company and in your company and then in the whole company software strategy. Yeah, just visit our website, theautomationguys.net, and they will find plenty of free resources around low-code and other intelligent automation areas. So yeah, we have their previous episodes and white papers, everything for you to, to use to get started on low-code and improving customer experience. And we also cover all aspects of intelligent automation and hyperautomation on the podcast. So yeah, I suggest please subscribe to the podcast and you will be notified. So yeah, that's it, I guess. Thanks a lot for listening and your interest in low-code and customer experience. And if you'd like to learn more, feel free to join the Let's Talk Automation community. Join our Let's Talk Automation room on Clubhouse. So we, yeah, Arno and I, we host the room every Tuesday at 4 PM BST. And anything else, Arno?

No, I think that's it. Like you said to the listeners, there's a lot of content on the automationguys.net website. Obviously a lot of previous podcasts that we touched on the hyper automation wheel. So obviously I would invite everybody to go listen to those episodes. You know, a lot of things I've covered and, you know, there's a lot of useful content and useful information out there. And as usual, you know, feel free to reach out to us if there's any problem that you guys out there has perhaps got or you want to run past us, you know, more than happy to assist or, you know, give you some guidance on how to approach it and perhaps where low-code and RPA, all of the progressive technologies fits into a potential solution for you.

Great. Yeah, thank you all. See you all very soon and let's automate it. Unfortunately, that's it again with this episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time, and until then, let's automate it!