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RESEARCH NOTE
Author: David Mario Smith
Create Better Digital Experiences –
Or Risk Losing Your Customers
Number: 2015-10
March 27, 2015
Topic: Digital Business
Issue: How can enterprises migrate to a digital
business to gain a competitive advantage?
Summary: Creating a better digital experience involves mixing
technology with awareness and a people-first business approach
to customer engagement.
One major effect of the digital business transformation is a
renewed focus on the user experience. This is why we’ve moved
from static content on conventional web sites to holistic digital
experiences across multiple channels. Web content management
systems are morphing into digital experience management (DXM)
platforms that can connect, engage and target content to create
personalized experiences. In this research note, we explore the
importance of creating better digital experiences for customers.
The Importance of Content In Context
For prospects and customers, digital experiences encompass all
interactions in the social, mobile enterprise environment. The
Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is the primary manager of the
customer experience, and because business strategies are so
deeply affected by customer and prospect engagement, the role
of the CMO has increased in significance and influence. CMOs
and marketing professionals tell us how crucial providing the right
digital experience is.
They also tell us how vital a role content plays as a central part of
the strategic synergy between sales and marketing professionals
and everyone who interacts with the enterprise online – not only
with the company web site but through every social and mobile
channel as well.
To enhance a digital experience, content has to be relevant in the
context of who the user is, where they are coming from (in both
the literal and metaphorical senses) and what they are doing. This
goes beyond ordinary click-track personalization to encompass
the user’s status, role (prospect, customer, renewal candidate,
upsell candidate, etc.) as well as their history. For example:
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RESEARCH NOTE
Number: 2015-10
March 27, 2015
•
Have they had good or bad customer service interactions in
the past?
•
Have they increased or decreased their investment in your
products?
•
What are their affiliations and how influential are they within
their industry?
•
If the user is a named, known individual, have they recently
changed jobs or companies?
•
What attitudes have they expressed on social media or in
previous interactions with you?
Compiling such a deep visitor profile means integrating with many
enterprise systems, including CRM, sales engagement, social
media monitoring and business intelligence, to the limit of what
your company’s investment in “big data” permits. The most
important question in any given interaction is, “Why are you here,
and how should we respond to you right now?” To provide great
digital experiences, businesses have to read a user’s “digital body
language” in real time or near-real time.
How To Read Digital Body Language
On the Internet of Things (IoT), everything that can be connected
will be connected. This means that information and content will be
shared in real time between connected things. But behind the IoT
is an “Internet of People,” the “soul” of the IoT. Only people,
among all these “things,” have purposes, goals and intentions. It
is human goals that establish a context for all activity: “Why are
we doing this?” The context or purpose of an interaction can
come only from the people involved in it.
So, how can users be sure they have the right content? A lot of
human overhead goes into making sure that they do. With few
exceptions, content is “dumb.” It doesn’t know its purpose or
what process it is part of. It doesn’t know when it’s wrong or out
of date. We spend countless hours tagging, tracking, revising and
curating it so we can put the right document or information in the
right hands at the right time to make a business process end in
success. The stakes are high: Bad content can make you lose a
deal, hire the wrong person or pay the wrong price. The need for
good content, and the high cost of bad content, is a bottom-line
issue across all industries and organizations.
The more contextually aware content is, the more predictive it can
be. This awareness can be embedded in metadata and links to
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RESEARCH NOTE
Number: 2015-10
March 27, 2015
collaborators, process maps and other content, such as customer
profiles, but some of it has to come from human judgment on the
part of those who are using the content. Performers say, “You
have to read the house” to know your audience, which means
understanding their body language. Today, in a social-networked
world, we need to understand digital body language.
One of the main reasons consumers opt out of content marketing
campaigns is that marketers don’t understand their context, their
needs or their expectations — their digital body language. The
presentation is intrusive or out of context, or has the wrong tone
or the wrong language, or it's delivered at the wrong time. For
whatever reason, it doesn’t produce a good customer experience.
To prevent this kind of disconnect, technology and business
strategies need to be people-centric and people-aware. The
people who engage with customers need to be intuitive and
perceptive about how their audience is responding right now.
Whether you’re a marketer conducting a campaign or a manager
engaging workers, you have to “read the house,” and understand
the context of the interaction.
This awareness goes beyond user location or device. It’s about
observing people’s behavior and understanding their needs so
you can provide the right flow of relevant messages that will really
help them. Do you understand your customers or employees?
How smart are your employee and customer engagement
strategies? Do you constantly monitor behavior to perceive
relevant contextual cues in order to respond in a relevant and
contextual way? Are you reading the house?
And, when you do, are you agile enough to change your strategy
in real time, and ad lib instead of sticking to a bad script? When
an interaction starts to veer away from its intended outcome, can
you drop the script, take control, start reading the customer in
front of you, and play out the scenario that actually exists instead
of the one you had planned on? If not, you’ll pay a price for bad
content or bad planning. If so, you’ll fulfill your responsibility as the
human in the mix – the one element that can be truly creative.
Here is a story about a group of customer service people who did
just that. Their proactive response led to a positive outcome for
themselves and their customer — me. Recently, I suffered a long
delay on a flight from New York to San Francisco, which would
cause me to miss a connection. I decided to tweet my displeasure
at the airline. To my surprise, I got an apologetic tweet from them
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within minutes, and a few tweets later they had booked me on the
next connecting flight. I tweeted my thanks and my professional
appreciation of their efforts, and the situation was resolved.
Here, my behavior revealed my needs and allowed quick-thinking
customer service workers to improvise a response through a
proactive engagement. My “digital body language” on Twitter was
loud and clear. By analyzing it correctly, they responded with
relevant messages (the “right content”) in the context of my need
(“at the right time”) to meet that need (“for the right outcome”).
And, of course, with the action to carry out their promise: it helped
that the airline could revise my itinerary so quickly and effectively.
But that just means that the necessary flexibility and agility should
be characteristic of the entire enterprise, not just the customerfacing units. Strategically, providing a good customer experience
is everybody’s Job One.
RESEARCH NOTE
Number: 2015-10
March 27, 2015
Note 1: DXM Platforms
Digital experience management draws on
several disciplines, including web content
management, CRM, marketing analytics and
personalization. Vendors that deliver parts or
all of this include:
• Acquia
• Adobe
• CrownPeak
• Ektron
• EMC
• EpiServer
• Hippo
• HP
• HubSpot
• IBM
• OpenText
• Oracle
• Salesforce
Digital Experience Management Platforms
• SiteCore
The technical framework for enabling better digital experiences is
a Digital Experience Management (DXM) platform (see Note 1).
Many web content management providers are making that
transition, but others are stuck in the old “layout and library”
paradigm. Business leaders should look at the roadmaps for all
offerings and ensure that they support the predictive analytics to
enable more automated and data-driven delivery of relevant
content in context, across multiple channels and devices.
Successful platforms will have to offer a good user experience as
well as be able to access and deliver content at the speed of
need. This is all about the customer experience and the customer
journey, so firms will need a game plan and playbook for aligning
business investments and strategies with insights about customer
needs. This has to be people-centric based on analytics and
insights into customer behaviors.
Customers typically know brands through a history of interactions
and experiences that create a perception of the brand. The
challenge is that people now have greater control in how they
interact with firms. Successfully managing this complexity and
providing better digital experiences requires a customer-centric
approach for all digital touch points.
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RESEARCH NOTE
Number: 2015-10
March 27, 2015
Aragon Advisory
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Focus on creating better digital experiences via a mix of
technology and customer focused business strategies.
•
Evaluate digital experience platforms based on support for
cross-channel customer touch points.
•
Include mobile support and provide access to information
anywhere and on any device.
Bottom Line
The customer journey involves a set of experiences that will define
their perception of your company or brand. Enterprises have to
use the new digital tools at their disposal to create experiences
that feel relevant, personal and engaging.
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