November 25th, 2020
The no-code approach is becoming trendy in several software categories related to B2C interactions/communication. We are progressively watching the market shift towards reducing the technical skills to use and even customize digital products. There are very popular no-code website builders such as
Wix, mobile app builders like
AppMachine, conversational creation tools such as
Landbot (chatbots) or
Voiceflow (voice assistants/apps). Visual design, forms and flow composers are making it feasible to create mobile, web or voice experiences without coding a line.
The low-code approach has been actively embraced by other B2B software categories as in CRM, Marketing Hubs, ERPs. Until now, the deployment of a CRM, ERP etc. in a big or medium corporation was a large project involving not only expensive licenses of the CRM or ERP chosen but a large amount of customization of professional services, usually implemented “with a lot of coding” by the IT integrator, requiring long setup times and large teams. Agile did not yet arrived to our lives :-) The cloud and SaaS paradigms are forcing us to increase the flexibility of corporate software categories to be fully customizable with low-code, reducing the time to go live to the production environment of a given solution. This low-code approach is creating a win-win-win scenario.
● The corporations reduce the initial investment (non-perpetual licenses as an up-front fee and less initial integration/customization costs).
● The solution vendor reduces the “versioning” nightmare, creates a simpler way to trigger the “try” that could be converted to “buy” and facilitate conquering lower tier companies in every level where its solutions could apply and deliver value.
● The IT integrator or integration partner of the solution vendor initially reduces the amount of services for a given integration, but on the other hand increases the number of opportunities to serve more customers in tiers where the budgets are not as big as the big corporates budgets. The customer base can be extended.
In the emerging space of CDPs (customer data platforms) with analytical, actionable or automatic new data generation the point is to decide where No-Code applies and where Low-Code applies.
At Whenwhyhow we are eager to offer a very interactive product which can also be heavily used by the new key roles coming from Liberal Arts backgrounds. Cognitive, AI, Analytics, Prediction, design experiments are progressively led by humanistic profiles that could be the best “understanding & modeling data”, thinking of new ways of testing behaviors, but not tech savvy. We want to offer a hands-on non-techie approach to extend the range of potential users of the CDP in the areas of customer marketing, business analysts, service designers, interaction planners, etc. without needing the “technical translator”.
Our approach is:
● No-Code for the data model design. The segments and its values, the digital channels and its potential metrics, the customer actions attributes that could be recorded and the external events that could be impacting the end-customers may be designed visually using forms. The flexibility of the NoSQL “key:value” paradigm allows to create very different data-model for different companies even in a multitenant/SaaS platform.