Even if you have the investment and funding needed for a team of developers, that doesn’t guarantee you’ll get new applications out at the speed you need to remain competitive.

It also doesn’t guarantee you’ll get the best possible applications for your wants and needs. After all, with traditional app development, you’re relying only on developers to understand input from various teams within the organization and turn them into a viable product. If your business is still in its early phases and people are still getting used to working with each other, that’s not always a given.

With low-code platforms, employees are better equipped to execute their day-to-day tasks while also solving their own specialized difficulties and driving extra value from their current tool set without putting the organization or its security at risk.

Fortunately, thanks to the rise of low-code platforms, this is increasingly feasible.

Understanding low code

Low code platforms can be used by civilians and professional developers. Basic low-code platforms allow business users with little coding experience to build their own apps to suit their business needs.

The potential benefits of this might be obvious but in case they aren’t, here’s a short breakdown of the benefits of using low-code platforms.

For the average startup developer team, it can eliminate a lot of heavy lifting. Since low-code platforms provide standard components such as forms, report templates, and ready-to-use code snippets, they immediately eliminate many of the repetitive tasks that make up the bulk of application development.

The most progressive low-code development platforms have a full heap of capacities expected for making enterprise applications.

Additionally, they can help eliminate errors, further taking time out of the development process. When utilized properly, they can help organizations build applications months faster than they would otherwise be able to.

Professional developers can also use low-code platforms that support developer-centric features, such as a full-fledged developer environment to hard code features to write functions that extend beyond low-code capabilities.

Low-code platforms with additional capabilities allow users to build and scale complex business applications, too.

This allows speedier delivery of custom solutions and better synergy between the business and the IT teams. With those benefits, it should hardly be surprising that, according to Statista, low-code development platforms will be worth US$65 billion by 2027.

Enabling and empowering

Knowing what the potential low-code platforms offer is one thing, but using them to enable and empower people across the organization to build applications is another thing. In order to get to the ideal position with low-code platforms, you should start with knowing what to look for in a low-code platform.

As well as the visual modelling and drag-and-drop interfaces which make low-code platforms easier to use, the platform should be secure. It should offer features to make your apps safer. No matter how appealing an app is, users are unlikely to embrace it if they feel unsafe using it.

Having built-in security is even more important if sensitive data is involved at any step in the process. The last thing any business wants is to risk using a tool which potentially opens up a gateway to hackers.

Low-code platforms should additionally allow for multi-device deployment (meaning that an app only has to be created once for it to be accessible on any device) and facilitate scalability. More specifically, any applications created by an organization should allow it to add more users as the organization grows.

This is especially critical for startup organizations, which have the chance to grow silo free and foster a habit of cross-organizational collaboration from the start.

It’s in this kind of environment that people feel free to experiment and try things, regardless of whether or not they have any development experience. Most low-code platforms provide end-to-end application lifecycle management as well, so application quality is never compromised.

Accelerating serendipity

For startups especially, quick turnarounds can only be a good thing. At the very least, it means the startup will achieve its goals quicker than it would otherwise have done. It might also accelerate the kind of serendipitous developments that allow startups to pivot and achieve bigger and better things than if they’d stayed on their original paths.

The history of startups is littered with these developments. Flickr and Slack, for example, both started out as internal tools for a massively multiplayer online game. If multiple people across the organization are building tools that have the potential to be useful internally, there’s a much better chance that one of them will be useful for other people too.

A trusted companion to traditional development

Ultimately, every organization should want its employees to be as empowered as possible. The best way to ensure that is to get it right from the start. Low-code platforms can be an incredibly powerful way of ensuring this is the case. While it will not replace traditional development, it can be a trusted companion; helping to reduce the load on professional developers and improving the efficiency of custom apps. As such, it can be a differentiator for businesses wanting to stand out in a competitive environment.

The business scene in Nigeria is faced with many challenges and the survival of any business in this market is dependent on the adoption of successful strategies.

One successful strategy for businesses entering the Nigerian market is localisation. A strong long-term localisation strategy will help in establishing a presence among locals, earning their trust and eventually building brand loyalty.

It is equally critical, however, for businesses to understand that localisation entails more than just providing pricing in local currencies. Instead, it has to be a holistic approach that involves customers, employees, and other relevant stakeholders. 

Understanding localisation

Before digging into why localisation is so important and how to undertake it successfully, let’s discuss what it actually means. Localisation refers to the adaptation of a product or a marketing strategy to meet the needs of a specific locale through language, culture, or other relevant factors. 

Localisation can be achieved in a number of ways. For example, a product company can offer a local language user experience (UX) and provide vernacular customer support. However, if a company simply uses a translation tool that doesn’t take into account local nuances, such a localisation attempt will create a negative brand perception. 

On the other hand, a holistic approach can have major benefits for a business, including easier entry into new markets, increased customer satisfaction and brand loyalty, and ultimately improved revenue.

Beyond translation

Making your product or service available in the local language and providing support are the first few steps towards localisation. There are other considerations you should make too.    

For example, if you have an online offering, when you localise it to right-to-left (RTL) languages such as Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic, you should also enable a right-to-left oriented UX layout for better user experience. 

Even something as simple as automatically detecting which date format to use in a specific territory (dd/mm/yyyy vs mm/dd/yyyy, for example), or using a comma or dot when writing a large number, can go a long way in building brand affinity.

Local pricing is also important as it allows customers to avoid currency fluctuations. Furthermore, you can integrate your product with local payment gateways and other locally-popular third-party apps in order to increase adoption.  

A culture of localisation

Real localisation, however, goes beyond localised offerings. It should be inculcated into your

business’s culture. That means taking local cultures and ways of working into consideration

when you enter new territories. 

At Zoho, we have adopted an approach called “transnational localism”. It brings together the best features of global connectivity with local knowledge and insights. We hire locally in the new territories and train the new employees so that they intimately understand our various offerings and brand values. They, in turn, bring with them a deep understanding of the local markets, and help adapt the offerings.  

Ultimately, if your employees buy into this attitude, they’re also more likely to feel empowered to cater to the needs of local customers. This will enable smoother entry into new markets. 

Taking advantage of the moment

It’s also worth pointing out that there’s never been a better time to take this kind of holistic approach to localisation. The past two years have accelerated digital transformation, and customers are more willing to adopt new products and offerings.

Thanks to the rise of remote work, meanwhile, there are a whole host of workers who are ideally suited to working for global businesses and who can offer their expertise when it comes to localisation. 

The businesses that take advantage of this unique set of circumstances to build fully localised offerings and an open culture of localisation will put themselves in the best possible position to succeed in their expansion plans. 

It has been proven that personalisation increases sales, customer loyalty, and client lifetime value.

Amazon’s quarterly sales increased by 29% after implementing targeted recommendations, and 80% of customers are more inclined to make a purchase when provided with a personalised experience.

But how can brands balance the benefits of personalisation with the privacy concerns of their customers? The most effective strategies employ zero-party data to drive marketing and sales, give customers power over how their data is used, and incorporate transparency and privacy into every department’s processes. Zero-party data is the data a customer provides voluntarily.

By relying solely on zero-party data, you can avoid public relations disasters and increase the trust clients have in your brand. What’s more, businesses that practice ethical and transparent data collection often collect more—and better quality—data. When customers feel their data is managed ethically and responsibly, they are more willing to provide useful information.

Customisation: the optimal solution

Companies can demonstrate a commitment to privacy by outlining the ways consumer information is collected and used, and by allowing consumers to manage their own advertising settings. Giving consumers more control over their data often results in more effective targeted advertising.

Customised advertising creates a space where customer and company interests intersect. When brands empower customers to create their own experiences, they are more equipped to anticipate and address their demands. Perhaps this is why customised solutions are preferred by 36% of consumers, and one in every five is willing to pay at least a 20% markup for them.

Creating a company culture that values privacy

Apart from providing role-based security and privacy training, some businesses have developed positions for business information security and privacy officers (BISPOs). BISPOs ensure that security is taken seriously by ensuring employees remain aware of security and privacy practices.

To provide a safe and comfortable user experience, some companies have established a “creep board.” This is an internal team tasked with regularly evaluating the company’s policies and processes regarding the use of personal data.

They make certain that nothing the company does is overly “creepy.” These teams exist for a reason: over 40% of consumers will stop doing business with a brand if they believe its personalisation is obtrusive.

Understand the distinction

Consumers are collectively defining the line between desirable and undesirable personalisation. Crossing the line can be detrimental to the brand-consumer relationship, but successful businesses know how to anticipate consumer reactions and work within them.

More often than not, all of these tools include reporting module that displays department-specific data records and statements.

However, stand-alone data like sales figures, lead numbers, email open rates, and the like, can only tell you so much about customer behaviour.

As businesses continue to go digital and become increasingly data-driven, it’s imperative for them to include a holistic business intelligence (BI) programme in their technology strategy.

A comprehensive BI programme helps combine various data points from multiple sources, perform cross-functional analysis, and bring out intuitive insights like inspirations behind seasonal customer trends, reasons for supply-chain gaps, sales funnel pain points gathered from customer feedback, productivity drops due to employee attrition, future trend predictions, and whatnot.

Powerful information like this can enable organisations to adopt a culture of smart, evidence-based decision-making and gain a true competitive edge.

Getting started with a business analytics and intelligence program

Provided that your organisation has the necessary funding and resources to implement a central BI programme, the first natural step is to identify the key business metrics you want to compute and track.

As pointed out here, once you have identified the goals, the next step is defining a data strategy. You need to go about defining your data strategy for key focus areas and then identify and align its data sources with that strategy. From there, it should be relatively simple for the organisation to build a data pipeline and prepare the data for analysis.

Building a robust, unified data pipeline from disparate sources

Prepping the data pipeline is one of the biggest challenges organisations face while implementing their BI programme. Using a mixed toolset offered by different vendors translates to disparate data sets that need to first be integrated, blended, and unified to enable a(n) smoother as well as accurate analysis procedure.

In fact, it’s been noted that 80% of analysis time is spent on data preparation as poor quality data often results in untrustworthy business insights.

This is where BI tools that include data preparation provisions come in handy. Be it a custom-built BI program or a bespoke tool, it’s important that your option incorporates data-prepping and blending capabilities, i.e., ability to connect to different sources (legacy or cloud app) and port data in different formats, clean and remove duplicates, blend the data into a single data warehouse, and improve the overall data quality. This helps ensure robust, error-free data pipelines, in turn assuring reliable business intel.

Updating your privacy practices and official policy 

With a BI programme, your obligation as a company to protect customer data becomes greater. Some privacy practices to keep in mind include,

(1) masking critical user data, i.e., removing personally identifiable information from all data sets using anonymization methods, before feeding them into the BI data pipeline,

(2) collecting explicit consent from the data subjects (customers and employees) to use their anonymized data for BI analysis,

(3) ensuring that your data sources are also subject to stringent privacy standards, and finally,

 (4) updating your organisation’s customer privacy policy straight away to include required details about your BI programme.

Integrating your BI program with internal collaboration platforms

Despite setting up a cost-intensive, comprehensive BI programme, many organisations struggle to drive adoption among their teams and prompt necessary action or decision-making. One way to solve this is to integrate the BI system widely and deeply across internal communication and collaboration platforms used by employees such as email, chat, intranet forums, project management avenues, etc.

The BI dashboards must allow executives to blend and visually analyse data for cross-functional insights, fashion the insights into easily understandable and interactive reports, decide the next course of action, and subsequently share the information with the teams or individuals concerned in real time.

Staying future-ready – leave room for innovation

As you implement modern technologies and boost your operational efficiencies, running a future-ready business also includes being constantly on the lookout for innovation, and ensuring that the business systems and processes are elastic enough to absorb the change.

Similarly, your BI programme should have enough legroom to experiment and capitalise on emerging opportunities like AI-powered voice analytics and RPA/business analytics integration.

For instance, current AI trends have made it possible for users to hold conversations with AI assistants to generate automated BI insights with a single click, predict future trends, conduct as well as visualise cognitive and what-if analyses, and much more.

If the events of the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that things can change incredibly quickly and it’s vital to be flexible.

Cloud-based BI tools enable business owners to look at real-time data from across departments. to make quick decisions. This helps businesses stay nimble during unprecedented times.