The Rise of No-Code, Self-Service Platforms
Companies spend a lot of time, and money, buying in technologies and service solutions that claim to do it all. But with a lot of development taking place today that is geared towards self-service, more firms are realising that there are better ways of working and delivering the results they want.
Self-service platforms are doing just that; allowing firms to get control over their processes so that they can get results faster, cheaper, and with fewer middlemen. This push, with products like Intercom, Landbot, Zapier, MailChimp, and Claims Gate, is now hitting the legal sector.
Technology is Working, Isn’t it?
In a lot of organisations, the technology ecosystem tends to be one of many different solutions being put to work. Sometimes, they work as standalone services, at other times, they could be working in harmony through integration. There may well be instances of services that just work, so leave them be. That is certainly the case for software that aligns with your processes cleanly. Especially those processes that rarely or never change.
But what if you want to go off-piste with your process? Configure it a little differently? Perhaps look to gain some sort of advantage? Or maybe reduce costs and optimise further? There could be many reasons for wanting to do something differently. And that’s when you start to ask the question of the vendors about how to take care of something not in the standard packaging. Go to the extremes and get yourself a custom development? You get what you need today but future upgrades may come at an even greater cost.
Software services that cannot be configured to your way of working can leave you in a quandary. You are subjected to being at the mercy of others to deliver against your requirements. And if these services are part of your core value proposition you are going to be constantly working at risk. What if they can’t deliver the right change, at the right time for the right cost? Even if they can, you may still have limited in-house expertise and if you need to switch providers, you could easily find yourself locked in.
One obvious way forward is to challenge this directly and look to do your own in-house development. But what if you have neither the budget nor the desire to open another cottage industry within your organisation?
Self Service Is Here
Self-service has already been active on the customer-facing side of businesses for years. From automated phone services to chatbots, the effects have been felt where these technologies have helped to improve company operations. These technologies have forced companies to really look at how they function and figure out exactly what business rules they use or need.
With the newer platforms, firms can go further than just the customer interaction layer and look to improve their internal operations as well. These platforms can expose data and processes in ways that allow you to either configure them the way you need or use integration tools to build your own workflows.
Delivering Services Your Way
Take an example from the realms of marketing. Here you may find that you are focused on building out processes such as onboarding experiences and want to put together numerous variations of similar pathways. You would like alternatives in the flow like overseas addresses, or data subject access requests or sensitive information capture, or even a procedural step-change, then how do you do it?
Platforms like Claims Gate, especially those being delivered that expose their inner workings through APIs, will cater for you to be able to plug into a wider world of integration. Think of it like the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store where you can download millions of apps depending upon what you need. Your mobile device gives you the set of core competencies that you need but the apps then let you create a mobile that is unique to the way you want it to be.
Self-service platforms with APIs allow the same thing to happen with them. The ability to build the service and capture data are already there. But they then pass the control back to you for how you want to interact with those building blocks and that data, through the APIs. This opens up a world of possibilities limited only by what you choose to do. It is this ability that ultimately gives you control of how to build out your processes or services.
Reaping the Rewards of Taking Control
As self-service platforms become better understood and more mature in their uptake, firms will start to realize more and more of the benefits they bring.
1. Increased visibility
No longer beholden to the service provider, you can get maximum accessibility and insight into what you need to know. You can get full, real-time access to conversion analytics, the way you want to see them.
2. Reduced Costs
Limiting the need for going back to the software provider for requests and support, will usually present a cost-saving. A good platform is fast, intuitive, and easy to use. It gives employees the answers they need without help from an external agent. Platforms also provide help resources which in turn reduce the need for third-party human interaction. If you can run the platform without intervention, it’s possible to reduce service costs.
3. Less errors
Self-service leads to a more systemic approach in dealing with data. It can minimise manual entry, avoid re-keying, limit open exports, and more. These platforms can be set up so that data can be validated in one place, exchanged through tight integration, and only allow for human intervention if specified that way.
4. Better employee engagement
Self-service platforms allow your employees to take on their own accountability. Often, they know what they want and need, and sometimes they just need to have the right tools. Law firms, for example, often exhibit a disconnect between the world of technology and lawyers. The emergence of products like Zapier, which allows you to integrate web applications, are built in such a way that you don’t need to be a programmer to make it work. It certainly helps though and accelerates matters when you have some resources of a technical persuasion but it’s not essential. With any competent level of resource and with this sort of empowerment, you reduce the distance between the lawyer, the decision-maker, and the technical implementation, allowing your employees to become more productive and help to deliver better results.
5. Leverage learnings for optimisation
Seeing the bigger picture in detail, allows you to understand what is working and what needs attention. Has one onboarding flow been working better than another one? Can you see why that might be? Are there differences in the drop-off points and the subsequent conversion metrics? If you can see the data points behind these questions, you can answer them and devise a plan for change. Over time, these insights will give you the power to be able to address your pain points, modify channels to be fully optimised and allow you to be able to try out and assess new or different approaches.
For all of these improvements, the real benefit of these platforms ultimately lies in the control. Having the power to be responsible for how you are set up, how to deploy a service and how you maximise it, all comes back to you. This may even seem like a scary position but for firms that are willing to be responsible for what they want to achieve, this is another step to eliminating excuses.
If you want to take your first steps then come and talk to Claims Gate about how to take back control.
