The first time I tried to video chat with my grandparents, they had to install an application on their device and then create an account. My grandparents were good at many things but installing clunky software to host a family video call wasn’t one of them. It took three painful phone calls to finally get the video chat working. As exciting as it was to spend 30 minutes learning my grandmother’s top five password and username combinations, we never had the chance to genuinely catch up on each other’s lives.

I doubt our experience was unusual. What should have been a relatively simple process, wasn’t. But it was very telling: The adoption of the platform itself was more of the story than our goal. All we wanted to do was see each other, but the tool got in the way.

It’s a common issue for businesses today, but with revenue attached to outcomes, it’s even more painful. Spending too much time and effort configuring new projects takes away from capitalizing on outcomes that the technology should enable.

How Citizen Developers Speed AI Outcomes

Many businesses engage with service providers to develop solutions that deliver defined business outcomes. Creating applications, such as chatbots, through external teams can create complications, budget-busting expenses and prevent development resources from focusing on other high-value tasks. Most importantly, the final result might not solve the problem identified by the business teams.

Think about group projects you worked on in school. Everyone was excited about a specific part — and only wanted to do those parts. It’s the same at work. We all have core competencies in areas where we want to be involved. In addition, feeling valued for these tasks contributes to employee job satisfaction.

Citizen developers, as Gartner defines them, are business users who create applications outside of traditional IT channels. While they might not understand artificial intelligence (AI) or the nuances of machine learning, they fully understand their business goals. Using low- or no-code solutions, citizen developers alleviate pressure on development teams. They also unshackle business teams to move at lightning speed toward strategic business outcomes.

When both business users and developers are involved, you’ll have a better, actionable deliverable, such as a chatbot that solves a specific problem — and fewer headaches. But this requires tools.

Cut Down on Unnecessary Frustration

Genesys Intelligent Automation and Designer are visual editing tools that let users, or citizen developers, include their input and even build the flow of interactions, so the application does what’s intended. Without that direct input, user requirements can get lost in translation — and you end up with frustrated customers.

At Genesys, we’ve assisted our customers using these tools to cut down on frustration and engage with customers at the right moment. Part of this is understanding exactly when and why customers become frustrated. Usually, it’s apparent in the way they navigate through your website. For example, when it looks chaotic, that’s probably what they’re experiencing.

Genesys predictive technology uses machine learning to identify, in real time, those patterns of frustration, as well as their source. These tools let your teams focus on the outcome of engaging with the customers at the right time, instead of wasting resources just trying to get started.

Chatbots Are AI Tools, Not the Goal

Teaching my grandparents how to use video chat cost a lot of time and frustration. My experience was as part of a forgiving family; in business, that might not fly.

If your goal is to create a great customer experience using chatbots, getting those chatbots up and running and getting everyone to work with the IT team — who then has to build all these integrations – shouldn’t be the main story. In other words, the chatbot is not the goal.

Once you deploy your chatbot, make sure it’s delivering the value and outcomes intended. And a big part of that is internal adoption. Genesys not only gets you up and running with your chatbots, we also make it easy to for you to get it right when you engage citizen developers and build on their core competencies.

Take the next step in your AI strategy. Build your own chatbot or voicebot, with your business in mind, in just half a day.