November 30, 2021

Accelerate your Digital Experience Platform Journey with Low-Code

Forrester finds that, in 2020, over 27% of organizations improved their customer experience (CX) index scores, a big number compared to the few who were making progress in the years before.

“To emerge successfully from this global crisis, brands must build experiences that help them engage with their customers at an emotional level,” wrote Forrester SVP, Sharyn Leaver.

So, how do enterprises engage customers at an emotional level when the predominant
channel of interaction is now digital?

By delivering insights-driven, personalized, contextual, end-to-end digital customer experiences anytime, anywhere, across channels and devices.

To achieve this, at accelerated time-to-value and scale, enterprises need a springboard: A Digital Experience Platform.

Gartner defines a Digital Experience Platform (DXP), as an integrated set of technologies, based on a common platform, that provides a broad range of audiences with consistent, secure, and personalized access to information and applications across many digital touchpoints.

At WaveMaker, we visualize it in three layers:

  • Foundational Business Engine
  • Digital Engagement Hub, which brings together APIs from the business engine
  • Customer Experience Suite, which is the UX layer, made up of apps

Most enterprises have the business engine and the digital engagement hub, even if some of them might be legacy software. However, the digital customer experience layer needs to respond to rapidly evolving needs, offering opportunities for experimentation and rapid implementation. It is here that low-code can help. Here’s how.

Transforming applications to a customer-oriented approach

In most industries, IT is designed around the organizational structure, not customer needs. For instance, the technology architecture of a retail organization is driven by the supply chain — divided into inventory, point of sale, customer relationship management, e-commerce, etc. So, if a customer wants to check on the company’s website whether a product is available in their nearby store, it would be next to impossible because the e-commerce engine doesn’t speak to the inventory management system.

A digital experience platform can enable enterprises to address such use cases without elaborate investments in product development. When the business engine is built on customer-oriented architecture, deploying applications as microservices, loosely coupled, and API-driven with functional encapsulation, the low-code customer experience suite empowers you to drag and drop any combination of features and functionalities to create a new app. It effortlessly abstracts the various business engines to create apps with little manual programming.

Leveraging data for personalized digital experience

No customer wants to search and scroll endlessly on their shopping app to find the product they want. Nor do they want to manually drag and drop features into their interface to personalize it themselves. They want personalized experiences that are meaningful, engaging, and, most importantly, efficient.

A digital experience platform can leverage advanced analytics to deliver that. The low-code customer experience suite can form the abstraction over the analytics engine to bring together user, interaction, and business data to create a 360-degree view of the customer. It can enable dynamic user experiences, ensuring continuity of customer relationships, displaying cross-sell/up-sell opportunities contextually.

Delivering omnichannel engagement

In the era of ‘hand-off’ between devices, customers demand a smooth omnichannel experience from enterprises. For instance, an e-commerce customer today wants to add items to their cart from any device, anywhere, anytime, and purchase them all together when they’re ready.

Digital experience platforms are built to enable this seamlessly. By integrating various digital business engines, the low-code customer experience suite allows you to build omnichannel customer journeys — effortlessly moving from one channel to another, ensuring continuity of engagement across devices.

Enabling dynamic content delivery

Traditional applications are optimized for short-term transactions, while digital experience platforms are built to create long-term customer value. For instance, an e-commerce application is typically built around capabilities like search and checkout, focussing on the efficiency of shopping. But customers today are seeking more engagement. Perhaps why social commerce — blending of social media like Instagram and shopping — is gaining popularity, as it stresses the ‘experience' of shopping.

The digital customer experience suite enables enterprises, especially in industries like banking, media, retail, or fashion to design websites, portals, apps, etc. to deliver personalized, contextual, relevant, and timely content to improve stickiness and loyalty.

Ensuring end-to-end digital service

Today, saying “you need to come to the store to get this done” is a sure-shot way of losing a customer, especially given that the cost of switching to a new provider is the lowest it has ever been. However, traditional shelf-ware is heavily restrictive in the functionalities they can offer.

Digital experience platforms enable you to deliver end-to-end digital service. With the customer engagement suite, enterprises can:

  • Build and deploy new applications quickly for customers
  • Enable dashboards with predictive analytics for employees
  • Create chatbots to automate answers to common concerns
  • Automate data collection in the form of feedback through email, SMS, or app notifications
  • Streamline product and business innovation based on customer behavior and preferences

In 2018, PwC found 32% of customers say they would stop doing business with a brand after one bad experience, even if they had loved it before. On the other hand, customers are willing to pay a 7-16% price premium for a good experience. This becomes even more telling in the post-pandemic era.

Today, just offering a digital avenue isn’t enough. The digital channel(s) is the storefront, relationship manager, customer service, marketing, sales, product catalog — all rolled into one. The true success of a digital channel is in dynamically adapting to customer needs. A digital experience platform helps you achieve that.

With a robust low-code customer experience suite built with WaveMaker, you can accelerate your digital experience platform journey significantly. Its ability to provide features such as a composable architecture, scalability, cloud-native capabilities, customizability, repeatability and security strengths enable your application teams to create differentiated experiences at a fraction of the time and cost.

To see how low-code can accelerate your digital platform journey, try a demo of WaveMaker today.