Unleash your CX Innovation: How low-code fosters business-IT collaboration to improve customer and user experience
When IT and the rest of the business work together, you can achieve amazing things. Especially for your customer experience (CX). CTO Richard Billington tells us why (and how!).
High on the agenda for CEOs in all sectors is customer experience (CX). So what’s stopping businesses meeting the increasing demands from its customers?
Many organisations have legacy systems and complex IT structures to contend with. It’s a recipe for disconnected processes and data silos, not to mention poor CX. According to EY.com1 many attempts to meet customers’ needs are hobbled by back-office processes and systems incapable of meeting these digital expectations. If you’re stuck in this constant cycle, what’s going to help you get out of it?
One technology that is pioneering a new and effective approach to modernising front and back office processes is low-code. A recent Forrester survey found that half of developers are now using or plan to use low-code platforms2. It’s proving to be a powerful and important answer to the customer experience challenge.
Our CTO Richard Billington lives and breathes technology. In this interview we asked him to share how low-code is successfully supporting transformation journeys for financial services, public sector, retail and beyond.
Low-code is fast becoming a widely recognised technology. For those who aren’t familiar with it, can you explain?
Low-code enables citizen developers (aka business users) and IT to collaborate on application development to radically improve processes without the need for complex code. This makes the whole process of delivering change faster and more accessible, even for non-IT professionals.
By removing the requirement for developers who have traditionally been needed to bring digital transformation to fruition, low-code is helping to overcome shortages is digital skills. We’re finding that when collaboration between IT and line of business departments takes place, great things happen. For further information on the benefits see our what is low-code feature.
Another common challenge is legacy technology and the restrictions of broken processes. How does low-code help?
Legacy is a big deal. Existing tech and core systems are mentioned in almost every customer conversation we have. Legacy tech is responsible for disconnected processes that have a big impact on operational efficiency and CX. The good news? Low-code doesn’t disrupt your existing IT infrastructure. It’s designed to complement core solutions so you don’t have to ‘rip and replace’.
Our low-code solution, Liberty Create integrates with a huge range of systems from enterprise platforms to bespoke, internally developed solutions. This in turn provides smoother processes, making them quicker, reducing costs and improving the experience for everyone involved from start to finish.
One example of this is Hampshire Trust Bank, who launched their low-code Property Finance solution four months ahead of schedule. This demonstrates the power of low-code in supporting even highly regulated organisations to drive innovation and achieve their transformation goals to improve CX.
Change isn’t just about tech, it’s about people and culture too. How does low-code lend itself to cultural adoption?
With a low-code solution like Liberty Create, you don’t need to be a coder to build applications. This makes the tech accessible to a much broader range of users. It means change is a faster, more iterative process and project teams can introduce smaller step-changes and see results quicker, compared with traditional, large-scale transformation.
With this in mind, low-code aligns nicely to an agile approach to project and change management. It empowers teams to quickly prototype specific features and functions to demonstrate how a new process or application could work. Then test, learn and evolve along the way.
We’ve seen among many of our clients that low-code fosters a collaborative approach between IT and line of business. Allowing them to work together on apps that radically improve processes, by harnessing the knowledge of customer-facing and wider business teams.
This delivers change that is closely aligned to the needs of the organisation. It also helps to bring people on the journey, as they begin to re-imagine a better way of doing things to improve customer experiences. And see iterative change happening with their own eyes.
For a more detailed overview of low-code and to see it in action, check out our low-code 101 webinar ‘spotlight on low-code’.
Richard also regularly features on our life in low-code podcast. Available in our resources centre.
References/Sources:
1 EY.com, 2019 ‘Are your operations adapting as fast as your markets are changing?’
