Tech Terms: Citizen Developers

Low-Code, High Impact: The Rise of Citizen Developers in Customer Experience

In today’s contact centers, innovation doesn’t have to start with your IT department. It can start with your frontline teams – the people closest to your customer experience (CX).

With the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions and low-code tools, coupled with the right enablement, your QA leads, supervisors, and CX managers can solve technology gaps in real time. They don’t need to be able to code. They just need to know the workflows.

Welcome to the rise of the Citizen Developer.

What Are Citizen Developers?

According to Gartner, a citizen developer is an employee who builds application capabilities without being a part of the IT department. It is as simple – and as complicated – as that.

They aren’t developers by title. They are business technologists – CX experts, not coders – using approved low-code tools to build and deploy real solutions, fast.

At NiCE ElevateAI, we see this every day in contact centers across every industry.

Citizen developers are the ones creating call workflows, automating CX tasks, and customizing dashboards – and all from within the business unit.

Why Citizen Developers Matter in the Contact Center

Traditional CX innovation often hits a resourcing bottleneck: the engineering backlog. Every small automation, dashboard change, or routing tweak goes through ticketing and timeline prioritizations.

While tools like ElevateAI’s Explore widget-based dashboards can help eliminate a source of friction, so can citizen developers.

Using low-code CX tools, citizen developers can:

• Build call workflows tailored to team needs
• Trigger alerts, insights, or escalations in real time
• Customize dashboards for QA, performance, or compliance

And they can do it without waiting on dev cycles, product prioritizations, or IT approval loops.

Citizen Development = Speed + Scale in Real-World CX

Low-code doesn’t mean low value. In fact, it is quite the opposite!

When business users can build their own tools, the impact is often immediate, leading to:

• Faster problem solving: Fix workflow gaps the moment they appear
• More relevant solutions: Built by people who know their customer’s journey
• Lower operational costs: No developer overhead for every day optimizations
• Better CX outcomes: Custom automations that match how teams actually work

With NiCE ElevateAI, we empower citizen developers to unlock their potential – safely, quickly, and at scale.

Build for the People Closest to the CX

Your contact center agents, supervisors, and QA leads understand what makes a great customer experience. With NiCE ElevateAI, they don’t just report problems – you are equipping them to solve them.

That’s the power of the citizen developer.

Start Building Today

• Access the LinkedIn Tuesday Terms post or the ElevateAI Glossary
• Explore the ElevateAI Documentation
• Dig into the Developer Hub Resources
• Get started today

Photo Source // Unsplash: Martin Sanchez