Why the future of enterprise front-end development belongs to no-code platforms

Just because you can build something yourself – doesn’t mean that you should.

Once upon a time, the tiniest change on any corporate asset – be it a website, an email platform, or a CRM depended entirely on software engineers. Engineers spent every second of every day juggling multiple projects and trying to achieve the ever-illusive zero-ticket goal.

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Recently, enterprise-grade no-code solutions have been gaining popularity. As these “no-code” tools advance, it no longer makes any business sense to lose the agility and cost-saving advantages by still doing things “the old way.”

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Why the future of enterprise front-end development belongs to no-code platforms

The no-code revolution is here, and it means that the time and cost of building enterprise-grade apps will soon drop by a factor of ten. Today, low-code and no-code platform users see significant gains across various KPIs and crucial business metrics. Here are some 2019 numbers from The New Stack to help put things into perspective:

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• "37% of low-code using respondents say “business” is satisfied with the frequency of software releases, which is 11 percentage points higher than non-users."
• "64% of low-code using companies are delivering mobile applications in four or fewer months, which compares to 49% of non-low code companies."
• "46% of low-code users said their organization’s backlog of web and mobile development projects has improved, which is 12 percentage points higher than organizations that don’t use a low-code platform."
• Using a no-code platform saves enterprises on average $1.7M annually perform in operational costs alone.

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Theoretically, it is still possible to code your entire enterprise digital footprint. However, this task’s amount of time and resources would demand from your IT department simply doesn’t make sense. Businesses see tremendous advantages in turning to no-code platforms to solve specific challenges:

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Of course, your internal IT and engineering team CAN build anything – a fully functioning CRM, email automation software, or data collection forms. But it doesn’t mean that they should.

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Some things can only be solved with code. This will never change. However, when a mature platform for solving a specific business pain with no-code exists, developers can let the citizen developers take over and focus on the following “code frontier.”

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While no-code tools come with their own set of tradeoffs, more no-code products will inevitably be adopted by enterprises – the agility and efficiency gains are simply too good to pass by. The increasing adoption of no-code tools, including by programmers who CAN code, speaks for itself.

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Thanks to no-code platforms, the silos between IT and the Business are diminishing. Developers are now free to focus on more complex and fundamental technological issues and problems facing the enterprise instead of catching up with the changing business demands.

In the past, you had to code your CRM, CMS, and marketing automation. Today you rely on tools. Why would forms be any different?

Why enterprise-grade eForms are the next no-code frontier

Enterprises today spend a ridiculous amount of resources on coding, developing, and maintaining digital front-ends, including forms for collecting user data required for core business processes, including customer onboarding, support, payment processing, and legal and compliance workflows.

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The problem is that customer data collection is still often done in archaic and highly inefficient ways. This is especially apparent in insurance. To a large extent, insurance carriers rely on paper and primitive digital tools, such as PDFs, to collect data from customers. This has a negative effect on customer experience insurance.

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Enterprises are scrambling for ways to use technology to accelerate and streamline data collection at scale in a way that doesn’t negatively impact customer experience. And, until now, the best way to address this is by coding custom-made fully digital front-ends.

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One. By. One.

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Some companies scale all their processes with code.  But this comes with a tremendous cost. Over-reliance on code ends up in expensive multi-year core transformation programs that don’t deliver agility and innovation but only introduce new legacy and maintenance challenges.

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At the enterprise scale, coding forms are a formidable challenge

Coding one form – a piece of cake. Coding and maintaining multiple forms at the enterprise-scale - a challenge that most IT departments are still failing to resolve.

Forms are one of those things that only sounds easy in theory. However, in an enterprise environment, digital transformation projects often get stuck in the mud faced with the complexity of enterprise-grade data collection.

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Forms are so much more than just fields and checkboxes – the complexity of enterprise-grade forms is immense. The forms need to support complex multi-role and multi-language workflows, connect to your internal systems and third-party tools while being fully responsive and user-friendly. eForms must be connected with the backend systems, including CRM and any relevant legacy systems and core banking systems, 3rd party apps for authentication, KYC, and compliance.  And probably the most important of all, eForms must be built following the highest usability standards and be maintained and optimized on an ongoing basis.

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The orchestration of all these moving parts requires a tremendous effort and a sizeable budget. Or a no-code platform that was built for this purpose and provided a centralized dashboard for creation, monitoring, maintenance, and optimization of eForms across the enterprise.

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Lack of agility

“I can’t build applications fast enough, and by the time I build them, the specs have changed.” Rob Koplowitz, VP and principal analyst at Forrester.

Add to it the requirement that both support and marketing departments need to be automatically looped in at relevant touchpoints, having the ability to make changes at the drop of a hat to achieve business goals.

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Cutting Time to Market from months to days with EasySend

To demonstrate the impact of a no-code platform on an organization, here is a story of how a global insurer developed a fully digital end-to-end onboarding process with EasySend’s no-code platform in a matter of days.

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Like many of our enterprise customers, at first, this global insurer tried to handle all forms in-house. Before switching to EasySend’s enterprise-grade builder, the average release cycle for a digital process was between 10 to 16 months long, cost over $165K, and introduced complex maintenance and operational issues.

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They started looking for a new solution after their IT department estimated that building a fully digital onboarding process will cost over $300K and take over eight months. Moreover, some of the business requirements, such as complete data visibility and ongoing optimization, were not possible to implement at all at this stage.

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With EasySend, this global insurer built and released into production a complex digital on-boarding process in under a week. In just seven days, a fully functional process that incorporated all business requirements was launched. Time to onboard a customer has reduced from 23 days to just a couple of hours – all paperwork included. They currently work with EasySend’s no-code platform to orchestrate multiple processes, including onboarding, renewals, and claims processes.

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Needless to say that this is not a single case. We see this story playing out across the board. We work with over forty global enterprises. Our customers manage dozens of no-code processes from a single dashboard, with agility allowing changes to be made as simple as Drag & Drop or a configuration to receive and push third-party data services and internal systems.

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Trust us; you won’t miss building eForms with code.

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