This is the second in a two-part series on digital customer experience (CX) best practices. In the first installment, we discussed four ways to optimize your digital CX strategy. In this second part, we’ll focus on the digital customer experience tools you need to successfully implement your CX strategy.
Table of contents:
- What Is a Digital Customer Experience Tool?
- CX Insights Are Great: The Ability to Respond Quickly Is Better
- How a Low-Code Platform Is the Lynchpin of Your Digital Customer Experience Toolset
- Future-Proof Your CX Investments
“By 2026, basic buying and selling experiences will be commoditized, and businesses will differentiate based on connected customer and employee experiences.”
Most organizations, however, are not currently prepared to deal with this shift in customer experience — which is why they need the right digital CX tools to help them achieve their goals.
What Is a Digital Customer Experience Tool?
Digital customer experience tools make it easier for companies to manage, analyze, and measure their customer experience efforts. High-quality digital CX is no easy task, which is why there are so many tools out there to help you do it better.
A digital CX toolset typically falls into one of four categories:
- Customer experience management: such as Hubspot or Qualtrics.
- Customer experience mapping: such as Lucidchart or Smaply
- Customer experience analysis: such as Hotjar or Gainsight
- Customer experience measurement: such as ChurnZero or Birdeye.
These are just a few examples of digital customer experience tools used by organizations to design and monitor digital CX along the customer journey.
But having the right digital CX stack in place is only one piece of the customer experience puzzle. The most strategic piece is one that you may not have considered — but it is precisely what makes the others worth having: a development platform to build engaging digital experiences for any touchpoint.
CX Insights Are Great: The Ability to Respond Quickly Is Better
Consider this: an organization wants to offer a seamless omnichannel experience through its web portal, mobile app, or kiosk. They use digital customer experience tools, like CX mapping to plan the type of interactions a user can perform and how the handoffs work.
But the actual software that customers will be using — the web app, the mobile app, or the kiosk interface — isn’t created or delivered by these tools. Those real pieces of software customers will interact with are created by developers.
The benefit of having great digital customer experience tools that provide real-time data and insights is that it should give organizations the ability to act quickly on that feedback.
By using some of these tools, your organization might discover that customers are dropping off during the onboarding process because the form is too long. Or, your social media monitoring tool might be collecting feedback on what customers are saying about your app experience.
That’s great insight, but the real value lies in the ability to fix that form or to fine-tune your app immediately. What’s the point of measuring something — knowing why and where you’re losing your customers — if you can’t act on that information in a timely manner?
No CX tool alone can help — and neither can traditional development.
How a Low-Code Platform Is the Lynchpin of Your Digital Customer Experience Toolset
The only development tool that enables organizations to be agile and react immediately is a high performance, low-code platform like OutSystems.
Simply put, traditional development can’t keep up with the speed at which businesses require apps to change and to meet customer needs. There’s a shortage of developers, and those with specialized skills are even harder to hire. But even with in-house expertise, it takes up to 10 times longer to build an app using traditional development versus using a low-code tool.
With the OutSystems platform, organizations can achieve the best of both worlds — unique and fully customized solutions that are fast to build with visual development, easy to change with one-click publishing, and without the risk of affecting other components thanks to dependency analysis and AI-powered architecture review.
Here are four ways a low-code platform underpins your digital CX strategy:
- Reusability of components: A superior digital customer experience strategy requires consistency across all touchpoints. Developer’s time is valuable and shouldn’t be spent rewriting code every time you need to build an app for a new touchpoint or to make a change. The OutSystems platform enables you to build once and deploy across touchpoints — a major time-saver for the development team and a reliable way to ensure a consistent UX/UI for your customers.
- Pixel-perfect experiences: Hiring experts to design high-quality UX/UI is expensive and time-consuming. With the OutSystems platform, you can start building your apps with screen templates created by UX experts and fully customize and extend them to meet your brand’s unique needs.
- A fully connected CX ecosystem: Create a 360-degree view for customers by easily connecting every system, automating processes, and harnessing data in real-time to enable consistent and personalized digital customer experiences across channels. Whether it’s a CRM, CMS, analytics or billing system, a legacy application, or a third-party service or API, the OutSystems platform is the glue that connects and integrates all your CX tools into a fully connected stack.
- Scalability and enterprise-grade performance: A 10-second wait for a page to load can make 50% of consumers give up, and a website begins losing traffic to competitors when it takes 250 milliseconds longer to load. That’s why it’s so important for customer-facing apps to load fast — whether you need to serve a million customers or 100 million. The OutSystems platform is based on a cloud-native architecture to ensure that it's reliable, highly performant, secure, and can scale seamlessly.
Future-Proof Your CX Investments
A high-performance, low-code platform like OutSystems is the foundational tool to build and maintain the actual software you need to create the frictionless experiences that keep customers loyal to your organization.
But there’s more. The OutSystems platform also brings other digital customer experience tools — such as mapping, analysis, and measurement — together to create a fully-connected CX ecosystem.
Having the right tech stack in place, from the foundation to the top layers, ensures your organization is ready to build, monitor, and adjust to market and customer needs in a timely manner and in the most cost-effective way.
High-quality digital CX is hard to achieve, but it is certainly easier if you have the right foundation to begin with. Digital customer experience tools may be nice-to-have, but a high-performance low-code platform is a must-have.
Discover how the OutSystems platform empowers your organization to create customer-facing apps that customers love in a fraction of the time.
