How the Knack Live App Drives Value for Your Customers

Knack is a powerful and simple-to-use tool that allows businesses to build applications which drive value to your customers. Whether it’s a simple online form or a search function, these applications can be quick and easy to make with Knack, and they require no coding knowledge or experience.

At the core of Knack is an accessible online database in which you can store all your data. This is combined with a set of powerful features that can create an accessible front end for all your users. Knack is one of the only platforms to combine the power of an easy online database with innovative tools that can be used to create quick yet powerful applications.

Knack’s Builder provides the Live App Design section, where you customize the look and feel of your app with global settings like layout, color, font, and logo. The Live App functions like a website for your users to access and interact with the data you make available.

What is a Live App?

Live App is one of the most powerful capabilities within the Knack platform. Think of the Live App as the front end or presentation layer of your application, similar to a web page, where you can organize the information you wish to present to customers, partners, vendors, or even internal team members. It provides easy-to-use tools that allow you to share, analyze, and manage business data. You can think of it as a website that your customers and clients use to access the data that you want to share with them.

How powerful is Live App?

Live App is simple-to-use but contains many features for power users as well. For instance, you can easily add or change fields to better present your data to users. The data that you want to show can be prioritized, and you can choose which fields to show on each page.

For advanced users, you can add custom Javascript and CSS snippets to change your Live App page. This allows you to fill in user experience gaps and tailors the end-user experience to your exact preferences. Live App also offers many different security features, such as the ability to protect pages with passwords to differentiate public-facing pages from pages  designed for your staff members or clients.

How does Knack Live App drive customer value?

One of the most popular ways to drive customer value with Live App is building simple yet informative customer portals.

Many websites these days use customer portals to share information with their customers and clients. This may include past orders, current orders, order status, inventory management, and so on. A lot of this information is stored in databases that are only accessible to the business in question, but it can easily be presented to customers by using Live App.

For example, an online store might allow users to log in to their accounts and access data that is unique to them: past orders, stock checks, active subscription services, and invoices. Using Knack’s powerful database tools, you can quickly build customer portal pages that will let customers input and manage data.

It’s even possible to create self-registration forms. Customers register with your Live App page and immediately access their relevant information. This automates certain workflows when dealing with customers, and it can also save you a lot of money and labor.

To summarize, here’s why Knack is preferred for your customer portals:

• Give your customers a quick and simple way to access their data or register for an upcoming event or program.
• Speeds up digital workflows, such as updating databases with manual requests.
• Spend less time providing customer service for data requests.
• Automate tasks such as sending alerts and notifications based on your customer’s data.
• Integrated payment processing support means you can accept payments directly through your customer portal.

There are countless ways to use Knack’s Live App feature to drive customer value. Creating a simple-to-use customer portal is arguably one of the most popular ways to use Live App, and it’s able to provide excellent customer value with minimal investment on your part.

No Code Tools Pricing Models

Knack’s pricing model is optimized to use the Live App features for creating dynamic customer portals. This all starts with an unlimited user model, to help you scale Live App to as many users as you need. It’s important to know that note that vendors take different approaches to how they price out Live App functionality, if they have it available. There are three basic patterns in the market, so it’s important to analyze them and pick the one that best meets your use cases and portal needs. The three patterns are 1. Seat based pricing 2. Pure storage/data based pricing, and a hybrid of both seats and data. The QuickBase pricing model is an example of a seat based approach, which can be very effective for internal teams based applications, that doesn’t necessarily need to scale to many thousands of customers or members, which is where the model breaks down. Knack fits into the pure storage/data model, which is closest to a utility model approach. 3. Finally, the Airtable pricing model, would fit into the hybrid model of users and data.This model can scale effectively apps that require a low amount of users, but increasing data over time, but doesn’t work well for most portal applications. Airtable also requires adding an additional 3rd party tool to offer user logins and different access controls to display data and interact (create, edit) with the data. Whether you’re a business with a dozen clients or a large-scale corporation with hundreds and thousands of customers, Knack scales to your needs for maximum flexibility.

In addition, Knack doesn’t meter data pages, views, or apps. This makes it easy to expand the way you use Knack with predictable costs.

Case study: Project Lifelong

Project Lifelong is a nonprofit organization in Sacramento, California that empowers youth through experiential-based programming. It offers a skatepark experience and leadership program to middle and high school students, as well as outdoor adventure trips to reward their volunteer contributions. As its membership base expanded, Project Lifelong needed a way to manage and scale its membership community, which they achieved by using Knack to eliminate hours of data entry.

Project Lifelong faced many operational challenges due to their existing Microsoft Access member database. It could only be accessed from one location and by one user at a time, leading to hours of manual data entry. There was also no way to assign role-based access. Every Microsoft update also caused the database to break, resulting in downtime. To solve these issues, Project Lifelong needed a robust and scalable solution with a rich set of tools and capabilities.

Michael Saigeon, founder of Project Lifelong, considered several cloud-based solutions before choosing Knack as the clear winner for its robust builder and toolset, intuitive no-code solution, and role-based data security. Using Knack to create a membership database, Michael and his app builder, Dave Parrish, were able to customize the solution to fit their needs. The new solution eliminated paper documents and manual data entry, allowing staff and volunteers to access the database from any location.

Project Lifelong has built a robust member database with the help of Knack’s end-to-end support. This has enabled them to create a set of interconnected apps that share core membership data, streamlining the process of adding new functionality. They have also used Knack’s API and a third-party integration SaaS platform called Make.com to automate SMS workflows and create a dynamic filtering system. This combination of capabilities has enabled them to provide personalized two-way communication with parents, social workers, mental health professionals, and law enforcement.

Project Lifelong is committed to providing a positive customer experience and is using the tools provided by Knack to optimize their forms and member portal. They have built a secure, scalable solution with Knack to manage member data, streamline processes, and improve communication to fulfill their mission.