Workplace Service 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: Copyright © 2015 Aragon Research Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Aragon Research and the Aragon Research Globe are trademarks of Aragon Research Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. This publication may not be distributed in any form without Aragon Research’s prior written permission. The information contained in this publication has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Nevertheless, Aragon Research provides this publication and the information contained in it "AS IS," without warranty of any kind. To the maximum extent allowed by law, Aragon Research expressly disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information and shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in such information. This publication consists of the opinions of Aragon Research and Advisory Services organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. Although Aragon Research may include a discussion of related legal issues, Aragon Research does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Aragon Research is a private company and its clients may include firms or financial institutions that have financial interests in entities covered by Aragon Research. Further information about the objectivity of Aragon Research can be found at aragonresearch.com Workplace Service 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 __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ © 2014 Aragon Research Inc. and or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Page 2 Workplace Service 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 __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ © 2014 Aragon Research Inc. and or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Page 3 Workplace Service 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. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ © 2014 Aragon Research Inc. and or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Page 4 Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE Number: 2015-10 March 27, 2015 Aragon Advisory • 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. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ © 2014 Aragon Research Inc. and or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Page 5
© Copyright 2024