5 Advantages of Creating a Customer Support Tool With a Low-Code Platform

Providing a high-level and high-speed customer support service is a must if you don’t want to get replaced by more responsive competitors. Keeping the current clients satisfied is anyway cheaper and easier than trying to get the new ones and earn their loyalty and trust.

The question is: whose responsibility is to provide customer support service? Should your development team or dedicated support specialists do it?

A few cases when you can involve developers in customer support

It’s a bad idea to transform your software engineers into “part-time front-line support”. Developers should only deal with the most critical and complex customer queries. However, it’s helpful sometimes to make them responsible both for developing a product and ensuring its support. There are several particular cases when you could consider doing it:

■ Your business is small and still growing. There’s no practical sense in allocating a team specifically for customer support.

■ You’re expanding your development team with new software engineers. The best way for them to figure out how your product works and what users expect from it is to let them lean into customer support. In this way, they will become emotionally interested in the product improvement.

■ The issues your customers face are too complicated to solve for your support team. Not to lose time on to-and-fro’s, you’d better pass the most tech-related troubles directly to developers.

■ Your software engineering team is big and they have been working on your product development for too long already. They might have fallen victim to the “development in a vacuum” phenomenon due to silo working. Thus, everyone works on the feature set they’re responsible for only. They’ve most probably lost the vision of the big picture. The responsibility to address support tickets can help them get back the understanding of how customers interact with the product. 

5 main benefits of having a customer support tool instead

Except for the cases listed above, it’s better to have a team ensuring customer support via a support app. Below are the key benefits of creating your own support tool instead of involving developers in support.

1. Satisfied growing user needs

Your product will develop over time. In case of its success, the number of its users and their expectations from the product will grow. A custom support app will help gather and distribute users’ queries, notify them of the implemented features they were waiting for. With a support tool at hand, your development team can fully focus on their core work, and avoid delays in delivering product improvements. They won’t need to puzzle out the incoming support tickets.

2. Minimized first response time (FRT)

Juggling between development and customer support is not what your software engineers are initially intended to do. Not only it affect the project deadlines but also increases FRT. With low-code, you can build a customized support app in a few days or weeks. It’ll allow developers & support specialists to stay focused on their work, be it coding or investigating support tickets. You can minimize support response time from several days to hours or even minutes, depending on the issue’s importance and complexity.

3. Developer morale kept high

Everyone should do what they were trained for. Communication with clients and addressing support tickets require specific communication and soft skills. A separate support app helps to keep developers satisfied, interested in what they’re doing, willing to develop the product. 

4. Keep development rhythm stable

Development’s based on estimates, deadlines, and strictly defined milestones. Customer support is always chaotic due to its nature: you can’t “plan” the tickets you’ll receive from your users. Making one person responsible for both processes may lead to serious interruptions in them. That’s why it’s better to free developers from customer support so that they could stay in their working rhythm. That’s why a custom support solution built with low-code can become a key to maintaining the momentum in your product development.

5. More capable and expert customer support

More power = more responsibility. Lodging your support team with the power to deal with support tickets on their own increases their sense of responsibility. They gain more support experience when solving the arising issues without developers’ help. And an all-in-one helpdesk solution allows all the team members to stay on the same page. They gather all the tickets in one place, access the support history including all the communication with the customers.

Why build a support tool with low-code

There’s a huge number of out-of-the-box support tools available on the market today. Among them are HubSpot CRM, Zendesk, FreshDesk, etc. 

However, there’s little value in using any of them in isolation. As a rule, companies combine several tools aimed at performing specific functions. You can get tickets in HubSpot, answer customers’ emails in HelpScout, communicate with them in the Crisp live chat. In this case, your support team has to continuously switch between several systems to deliver the solution to the client.

To simplify the support process and reduce response time and effort, you can combine all these tools into one. Such low-code platforms as UI Bakery allows you to gather all the support systems and services you use into an all-in-one application. You’ll be able to ensure multi-channel support without sacrificing the response speed and time.

Low-code applications provide a range of features allowing you to build a support tool fast such as:

■ Ready-made templates and UI components.

■ Deployment to a custom domain.

■ App branding capabilities.

■ Third-party integration with Google Sheets, Airtable, HubSpot, MySQL, Slack, Trello, and others.

■ Vibrant low-code platform support, etc.

A separate support tool built with a low-code development platform allows you to:

■ Distribute user queries within the proper parties or specialists.

■ Have quick access to the customer communication history. 

■ Track the achievement of the customer support KPIs.

■ Generate reports for your teams, investors, stakeholders automatically.

■ Check customers’ behavior to find the best solutions.

Summing up

If your business is small and you don’t have extra funds for customer support service, you could do without a separate team equipped with a support tool. If your business is small and you don’t have extra funds for customer support service, you could do without a separate team equipped with an enterprise communication support tool.

However, scaling together with the development of your product is inevitable if you want to stay afloat with your business. 

A strong customer support team and a convenient support application allow you to keep the most sophisticated customers satisfied. To achieve and keep a high satisfaction level, you can combine all the support apps under the hood of one app built with a low-code platform.

Tickets and time management systems, email support service, live chat – you can integrate all of them together. Without any developers’ help.

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