How to Provide the Best Digital Experience to Your Customers

Creating the best customer journey is critical to your company’s success, yet developing a strategy and deploying technology to establish a superior customer journey is challenging. Michael Gerard, chief marketing officer at e-Spirit, outlines questions marketers need to ask when examining CMS technologies that will help establish a superior digital experience.

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With so much attention and resources being paid to improving the customer journey, it’s fair to ask how marketers are doing at achieving this objective. The hype and attention appear to be bigger than the actual impact it’s having on businesses. According to Gartner analyst, Kasey Panetta, “Eighty-two percent of organizations have created a customer journey map, but only 47% are using those maps effectively.” A quick look at Forrester Research’s customer journey page lists six analysts who cover the space and five reports that have been written in just the past few months. This tells me that the customer journey continues to be a key area of interest for many companies.

Today’s customer journey is fraught with a variety of challenges including highly fragmented digital ecosystems that are more complex than ever. Other challenges – omnichannel management, incorporating new technologies, managing sensitive customer data and increasing pressure from competitors – make it very difficult to manage content at scale. Considering the variety of channels that are available to reach customers, and the technologies that help manage all of that valuable content, how can marketers create better digital experiences to improve the customer journey?

Learn More: Improving E-Commerce Conversion Rates: How to Automatically Merchandise Your Content

A Multi-Faceted Approach Makes Every Customer Happy

In order to create a superior digital experience, marketers must find the right content management solution as part of a digital technology ecosystem. How important is it? The July 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management states in the first sentence that “Web content management is a foundational technology for every digital business.” Similarly, the Q4 2018 Forrester Wave: Web Content Management Systems, stresses the importance of Web CMS technology stating, “The web CMS market is growing because more digital professionals see web CMS as a way to address their top challenges. This market growth is largely due to the fact that digital pros increasingly trust web CMS providers to act as strategic partners, advising them on top CMS decisions.”

3 Ways to Provide the Best Digital Experience to Customers

When determining the best way to reach your customer and provide the best digital experience as possible, focus on these three key areas. 

1. Agility reduces time-to-value
 

There are many terms when it comes to enterprise-class content management solutions: on-premises, headless, cloud-based and hybrid. Critical to success is to identify a technology solution that makes it easy to create, manage and accelerate the delivery of personalized content to any channel to create immersive digital experiences for customers. Unlike traditional monolithic, all-in-one suites, having a hybrid CMS gives users the ultimate flexibility which makes it easy to share targeted, personalized content with customers.

Let’s take a look at an example of a company that focused on the importance of having agile digital experience technology.

Brose, the fourth largest family-owned automotive supplier in the world, recently launched a campaign by its human resources department to help drive its "Relaunch brose.com" program to aid recruiting efforts for its IT staff. The key for Brose was that the marketing department examined its current processes and identified specific needs for the new CMS that would meet both the HR department’s and the overall company’s needs:

• Support for multiple languages
• Easy access to content that had been approved by corporate headquarters
• Powerful analytics capabilities to deliver specific content targeted to each individual

By recognizing the importance of having an agile solution that addressed these three issues, Brose was able to increase IT applicants by 100% and reduce the time to finding talented employees.

2. Empowering marketers enhances creativity
 

One universal source of frustration for marketers is that they often need help from IT to make basic changes to content in real time. When evaluating CMS technology and outlining your needs, be sure to examine how easy the technology is to use for business users and that the need for IT support is minimal. Empowering marketers to quickly share personalized content with customers can easily mean the difference between making or losing a sale.

One example of a marketer being able to create an engaging digital experience came from GROHE, a leading provider of luxury fittings for bathrooms and kitchens. The company has more than 60 websites spread throughout 80 countries and that created problems for marketers who needed to access customer data from multiple silos of information and support multiple channels.

In order to streamline its omnichannel marketing programs, GROHE implemented a CMS that consolidated all of the information from the 60 websites into one interface that gave digital marketers throughout the world the ability to use different images, share messages and create promotions based on the complete picture of each customer.

3. Personalization closes the sale
 

Look in most technology, retail or marketing publications and you’ll probably find an article about personalization. It’s everywhere, and smart marketing executives are finding ways to deploy technology that helps deliver personalized content based on customer preferences and buying patterns. In Gartner’s The CIO’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence, analyst Kasey Panetta highlighted the importance of outlining what your company hopes to accomplish when creating a strategy to tap into the power of artificial intelligence. In many ways, AI-based personalization is nirvana for marketers. Delivering the right content to the right customer via the right channel can be the difference between making the sale or letting your competitor in the door. Let’s take a look at how one retailer leveraged the power of personalization.

Learn More:  10 Best Content Management Systems (CMS) Software in 2020

ASOS is a UK-based retailer that has grown substantially in the past few years. As discussed in Footwear News, the retailer had invested more than $100 million on technology, a large portion of which went to an experiment with AI. The company tested a virtual assistant that was designed to offer customers tailored suggestions based on sizes, preferences and other data. Within six months the company saw a dramatic increase in sales and profits.

Based on the initial experiments and investments, ASOS has now launched a voice app and virtual assistant named Enki. Nikki Gilliland at Econsultancy stated that the chatbot sets the bar for other retailers in the digital sphere. According to Essential Retail, “Shoppers have been using the AI-driven solution to search the e-Commerce site using images from the web or taken on their smartphones, while Enki also recommends brands and provides style matches.”

Superior Customer Experience

Creating a superior customer experience is more critical now than ever before based on an increasingly crowded competitive landscape. For marketers to easily connect with their customers, they must use CMS technology that is agile enough to create enticing online experiences, easy enough to use without the help of the IT team, and powerful enough to deliver personalized content to customers based on their own unique interests.