Why the Best Digital Transformation Tools are Customized for Your Business

If you search for the “best digital transformation tools”, you’ll find pages of results that suggest everything from project management tools and cloud storage to digital workplace suites and human capital management platforms.

In general, these tools are designed to fit the widest range of customers possible, which means they are often clunky, over-featured, and a poor fit for your business's unique needs. Luckily, technology is quickly evolving. Businesses now have the ability to build their own workflows and software solutions tailored precisely to their specific needs. 

With custom software, you get digital transformation tools designed for every single process that needs them. 

No code technology is what makes this possible. Without the need for custom code, your team doesn’t need to rely on engineers. That means you can quickly create your own software without getting bogged down in a lengthy and expensive development process.

Glide is a no code platform that is specifically designed on top of business data to create internal tools and customer-facing apps. With it, you can create interfaces for the other disconnected software your team uses, unify and visualize your data with dashboards, and build more efficient workflows across your business.

Custom digital transformation tools help you create a modern digital workplace faster and more affordably, with flexible tools you can apply everywhere in your business. Add automations and AI to your custom tools, and you can create smarter workflows and streamline processes without complicating things.

Let’s look at how you can improve key business processes using custom digital transformation tools and how different teams can benefit.

What are digital transformation tools?

Digital transformation tools are the technologies and software that help your business improve its efficiency, productivity, and customer experience.

When businesses build a digital transformation strategy, they audit their systems, tools, and processes to identify inefficiencies. They then begin to transform their systems by streamlining their operations and strategically rolling out software that better serves their needs. These are digital transformation tools.

The benefits of digital transformation will be felt all over your business. Your teams will be less stressed and more efficient since they'll have the tools they need, you'll be able to serve customers better, and your business can grow.

Traditionally, businesses' digitalization tools relied on purchasing pre-built software, which can be expensive and clunky and requires your team to adapt to the software—not the other way around. Custom-built solutions coded by IT teams or outside developers can be more tailored, but development is incredibly slow and expensive, making this approach inaccessible to most businesses.

No code tools like Glide allow businesses to get custom-created solutions quickly and cost-effectively and can empower even non-technical teams to build custom apps and workflows that connect to your company’s data and fit their exact needs without writing any code. 

1. Workflow management

You can streamline entire workflows—from approvals to resource allocation—with custom apps that centralize all your business's tasks and communications.

Managing workflows across departments can quickly become chaotic when tasks are scattered, communication lags, and priorities aren’t clear. Teams often waste time manually updating spreadsheets, sending endless follow-up emails, and trying to track down who’s responsible for what. This results in delays, missed deadlines, and an overall lack of coordination.

Real-time data in a custom app keeps your team updated, centralized internal communication tools improve collaboration, and automations trigger the next step in the process without manual intervention. Tools like Glide AI can speed up workflows by extracting text from images, transcribing voice notes, and performing calculations, among other things.

This shift turns disjointed processes into efficient systems where employees focus less on manual or repetitive tasks and more on what really matters.

How workflow management tools can benefit different teams

Human resources (HR) teams can streamline onboarding workflows, using custom apps to ensure each step in the process—from document submissions to training—is completed on time. Automations can send reminders to new hires and your HR team to keep things moving, reducing delays and creating a smooth experience for everyone.

Field teams can use custom apps to receive and complete assignments, with updates sent back to headquarters as tasks are finished. This real-time coordination eliminates the need for back-and-forth communication, streamlining task management.

2. Data collection and analysis

Custom digital tools can help you bring data from different sources together in a centralized platform so your team is working from the same information.

Off-the-shelf software is often designed for specific functions rather than a business as a whole. As a result, your sales team might keep data in one software, finance team in another, account managers in a third, and so on, leading to data silos, poor data quality, and inefficiencies across the business.

By pulling everything into one place, your teams can make data-driven decisions based on organized, up-to-date information. You can: 

• Add forms to your app so employees can easily update data

• Incorporate SQL GUI to make working with complex databases easier, even for those who don’t have SQL expertise

• Create multiple real-time dashboards that update with this incoming information in real-time

• Automate notifications for key stakeholders when important data changes or thresholds are reached

AI can analyze all of this data in real-time, helping you make sense of it faster.

How centralized data tools can benefit different teams

Customer service teams can centralize data from multiple touchpoints—such as support tickets, feedback forms, and chat interactions—into one app. AI can analyze patterns and flag recurring issues or bottlenecks for faster resolution.

Finance teams can consolidate data from different sources and manage expenses, monitor budgets, and forecast financial performance all from a single platform. Using charts to visualize the data makes it easy to see how the business is performing at a glance. Each department can also create a custom dashboard to gain clear visibility into their financial metrics, helping them manage their budgets and spending efficiently. 

3. Reporting

Digitalization simplifies how employees update and access data, making it easier to generate reports that contain accurate information.

Manual reporting can be time-consuming and error-prone when employees have to compile data from multiple sources. It often leads to delays in delivering insights to decision-makers and, if the data is incomplete, can even lead to inaccurate reporting.

A custom digital tool automates this process, pulling in the necessary information and generating comprehensive reports for you. You can automate report generation when a milestone is hit and even give employees the flexibility to trigger reports on demand with a “generate report” button.

AI can analyze the data and create an executive summary, putting the most critical information upfront.

How custom reporting tools benefit different teams

HR teams can use automated reports to optimize the recruitment process through an applicant tracking app. Reports that highlight the number of candidates, interview progress, and time taken to fill positions can help you identify bottlenecks like delays in scheduling interviews or moving candidates to the next stage.

Sales teams can automate deal progress reports, pulling in data from customer relationship management (CRM) tools to track performance against sales goals. Managers get real-time insights without the need for constant manual updates from the team.

4. Resource and inventory management

A centralized digital tool can help you track inventory levels, equipment availability, and resource allocation in real-time.

Managing resources—such as equipment, office supplies, vehicles, software licenses, or employee availability—and inventory can be challenging when stock levels aren’t regularly monitored. Your teams are left guessing about what’s available, what’s already been ordered, and what you still need. 

With incomplete information, you risk running into shortages, over-ordering, or delays in fulfilling orders or operational needs.

You can build a custom inventory management app to automate stock tracking and allocate resources, ensuring your teams have exactly the supplies they need at all times. You can set automations for reordering supplies when quantities are low, while AI can take the guesswork out of inventory management and predict future demands based on historical usage patterns.

How resource and inventory tools benefit different teams

IT teams can build a custom IT Helpdesk app where employees submit support tickets when they need tech assistance. Managers can easily track requests and assign cases to team members based on their workload, schedules, and location. You can also set up an AI chatbot for employees to resolve simpler issues on their own, leading to faster resolution times and reducing the burden on the IT team.

Operations teams can use a custom equipment management app to track equipment availability and maintenance schedules. Real-time visibility helps ensure all equipment is ready when needed and avoids unexpected downtime. AI can offer insights into usage patterns, helping teams allocate resources more effectively and improve overall efficiency without the need for constant manual tracking.

5. Customer interactions

Centralizing all customer interactions in one app gives your team access to full customer history, streamlines communication, and simplifies the way you manage customer relationships.

Managing customer interactions can get messy across multiple communication tools—emails, phone calls, WhatsApp, chat support—leaving your team without a full picture of each customer's relationship with your business. This fragmented approach can lead to miscommunication and confusion, frustrating customers, and damaging relationships.

A digital tool brings all this fragmented customer information and communication into one place. AI can generate overviews of interaction history, saving your team from digging through potentially hundreds of messages. It can also help identify key issues or prioritize messages, which can then be automated to ensure important requests get immediate attention.

You can even build customer-facing apps to streamline customer inquiries, such as: 

• a customer portal with personalized dashboards for customers to track orders, see project progress, and communicate with your team

• a work order management app to simplify the process of raising requests and checking status for customers

• an event management app for attendees to register easily and access tickets, schedules, venue maps, and exclusive content

“Clients really like to be able to log in and see what's happening on their campaigns and their leads. A lot of companies that are our size or even larger just don't have dashboards like we do. It helps differentiate our business.” — Jack Foley, Director of Strategic Initiatives

How customer portals can benefit different teams

Account managers can automate update generation on project milestones or at specific intervals using AI to draft clear, concise reports. Customers can receive push notifications on customer-facing apps when the report is ready, so they can view it in the app itself. When updates are generated on internal tools, account managers can email the reports directly to customers from the app.

Sales and support teams can use a custom CRM app to pull customer-related data from every software and interaction your company uses. They can easily collaborate to handoff between the teams when leads convert to customers, keep employees aligned on customer relationships, and allow for personalized communication.

How to build custom digital tools using Glide

No code app builders are transforming the way businesses achieve digitalization, making it possible to quickly and cost-effectively build custom apps without having an engineering team or getting bogged down by a slow development process.

You can build custom Glide apps to fit your exact needs, integrating AI and automations and connecting data from different sources. You can build multiple apps—for different teams or processes, whether internal or customer-facing—to simplify the app-building process and customize each app’s functionality and capabilities. Different users may have different needs, and multiple apps let you focus on solving the problem for the specific user instead of trying to build an app that does too many things at once. What’s important is your data, and with Glide, you can build multiple apps from the same data, wherever it lives.

If you’re ready to reap the benefits of digital transformation with custom apps, here’s how you can get started with Glide.

Step 1: Decide what app you want to build first

Start by identifying the most urgent problem you need to solve. Take a close look at your current processes and see where inefficiencies are holding you back—where manual tasks are slowing things down the most, or where data is siloed and hard to access.

Focus on first simplifying the process that’s causing the most pain. Don’t worry about tackling everything at once—start with the biggest issue, and you can always come back to build more apps once the first one is up and running.

Step 2: Connect your data sources

Next, look at where your current data lives. It could be spread across different software platforms, spreadsheets, SQL databases, or even physical records like folders and paper receipts. 

If your data is physical, you’ll want to transfer to a cloud-based database or native Glide Tables. Once you’ve identified where your data lives, you’ll be able to connect your data to Glide and design a dashboard that your team can use as a unified interface for all that data. 

Using an interface means your data will remain consistent across all the apps you build so that your entire team is working from the same data, no matter what task they’re doing. 

Step 3: Select your app

When you’re ready to begin, sign up for a Glide account. Chances are you’ll find a template for the app you want to build in Glide’s template library. You can choose a template as a starting point and customize it to fit your needs or choose from other options:

• select ’Basic App’ to generate an app that contains a basic layout and data tables

• select ’Blank’ to build an app entirely from scratch, with a blank canvas for layout and data tables

• select ‘AI-Generated’ to use Glide’s AI app generator, which will build a fully customizable app based on what you ask it to build

If you need help learning more about Glide’s features, you’ll find several courses and tutorials in Glide University.

Step 4: Build and design your app

Now that you’ve selected the app you want to build, you need to connect your data sources from the Data Editor. Glide supports multiple data sources, including Google Sheets, Airtable, SQL databases, and Microsoft Excel or CSV files.

The Layout Editor is where you’ll customize your app’s appearance using components. You have a wide range of components to use, such as forms, buttons, images, links, maps, charts, rich and plain text, and barcode scanners. If there’s a component you need that Glide doesn’t yet support, you can create an AI custom component using prompts.

Don’t worry about designing separately for mobile and desktop apps. Glide apps use adaptive design, which means you design only once, and your app will automatically adapt to the device from which the user is accessing it.

Add advanced features like automations using Glide Actions or connecting tools like Make or Zapier, as well as AI tools like Glide AI, depending on what your process needs. You can also integrate your app with software your team already uses, like project management tools, CRMs, or knowledge management tools, to keep everything connected.

Finally, set access and user permissions to control who can view or edit specific parts of the app.

Step 5: Share your app

When you’re ready, publish your app and invite your employees—and customers, if needed—by sharing a link or QR code or inviting them directly through email.

To give customers access to your app, publish it using either a ‘public’ privacy setting with required sign-in or set it to ‘private’ and make sure they’re added to a specific table that has sign-in access.

Step 6: Iterate as needed

Collect feedback from the people who use it and refine your app’s interface or functionality to make improvements. A WYSIWYG editor's drag-and-drop capabilities make it easy to add or remove features and components as your business’s needs evolve, keeping your app relevant and helpful for users.

Step 7: Build your next custom digital tool

Now that you’ve streamlined one part of your business process think about the next challenge you want to tackle.

With each new app, you’re doing both, solving individual problems and building an interconnected system that makes your whole business more efficient and productive.

Create the best digital transformation tools for your business with the help of no code developers

While teams can help create a digital workplace by building and iterating on their own tools, that's not the only way that you can enlist no code in your digital transformation strategy. If you need a skilled partner to help you launch fast, you can hire a no code developer to help implement custom digital transformation tools for you.

Specialized no code development agencies and freelancers offer expertise, reduce development timelines, and the ability to create advanced functionality like APIs and AI. You and your team can focus on the business while a no code developer focuses on bringing digitalization tools to your business.

To hire a no code developer to work with you to build custom software on your Glide app, you can either:

• browse through the Glide Experts service marketplace and reach out to experts directly or get matched based on your needs

• get a made-to-order app in just weeks using Glide Solutions

Whichever path you take, you can be confident that, with a custom app, you’re getting the best digital transformation tools for your business. Instead of relying on a one-size-fits-all solution, your team will have the right tools to handle specific processes that matter to your business. These tools will fit into their workflow, making their work easier to manage and more efficient.