According to Salesforce, 63% of shoppers do not think retailers know them, while 55% of shoppers feel that the customer experiences are disconnected across channels. There’s a huge gap between what customers expect and what companies are able to deliver.
Customer experience, as Forrester puts it, is “how customers perceive their interactions with your company.” It’s the key element that companies compete on in the 21st century. To keep up with the ever-evolving landscape, businesses are forced to redefine customer experience, across marketing, sales and service.
Strong foundation
The starting point for any enterprise wishing to create a great customer experience is to truly understand the customer. The idea is to use all the available customer data (collected from a range of digital and physical touchpoints) to comprehend customer preferences and brand engagement.
The most effective way for enterprises to meet – and even exceed – these customer experience expectations is to invest in a sound Content Management System. CMS is nothing but a software application that lets you create and manage digital content.
Gartner Definition of CMS: A set of templates, procedures and standard format software that enables marketers and their proxies (e.g., webmasters) to produce and manage text, graphics, pictures, audio and video for use in Web landing pages, blogs, document repositories, campaigns or any marketing activity requiring single or multimedia content.
Typically, a CMS has two components: Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Web Content Management (WCM). While the ECM is an internal tool that facilitates in-house collaboration on content, WCM allows the content to be published on the World Wide Web. With the right CMS in place, digital marketers can up their customer experience game, significantly.
Here’s looking at four ways in which CMS can help create a consistent and unified experience across channels:
Personal touch
According to Gartner’s 2018 Marketing Data and Analytics Survey, only one-third of marketers are able to unify customer data at the person-level and apply it to personalization practices. The biggest challenge for enterprises is to create a single view of customer information, so that they can offer an individual-based personalization across all channels and devices.
With the right CMS, experts concur that companies can effortlessly collect and effectively use data about individual customers to personalize customer experience. However, to deliver the most relevant content to the customer, at the right time, companies need to put in as much customer data as possible into the CMS to build a single unified customer profile. This, in turn, can augment real-time personalization efforts across the customer journey.
Seamless move
Customers today have the choice to interact with brands across multiple platforms. Often, they are disappointed to find that the move from one platform to another (say, the website to app) is not as smooth or connected as expected.
A CMS that has the ability to integrate with other business technologies, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), marketing automation, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools, is the key to providing a seamless customer experience. Unifying the customer experience across touchpoint silos calls for investing in a CMS system that brings all content onto a single platform, with a single unified login, simplifying search and discovery, as well as managing the customer experience in context.
Read more: All you need to know about Customer Experience strategy
Adopting a flexible API-based (application programming interface) approach helps address the gaps in the digital customer experience, by putting the customer at the centre of every business communication. And that’s the way to cutting-edge customer journeys.
Dynamic opportunities
Enterprises today are looking to create more dynamic opportunities to tie into retargeting networks by way of creative placements within content. For instance, travel ads as part of social media experiences are fine examples of intelligent content provided in the right context.
With the right CMS, businesses can efficiently use valuable content as part of their retargeting network. It’s basically about understanding the mind of the customer. And a smart CMS helps find the right opportunity to offer the right content to cater to that mind, thereby enhancing the overall customer experience.
Future ready
It’s not really surprising that for 37% of the marketing teams who participated in Gartner’s 2018 Marketing Data and Analytics Survey, demonstrating the value of analytics was one of the top three impediments to success. Justifying increased data and analytics budgets is a touch task for marketing leaders across the globe.
While the returns are seldom instant, there’s no denying the long-term benefits for enterprises willing to invest in a sound analytics system. It’s not just about choosing an SEO-friendly (search engine optimization) CMS, but also about investing in a system that understands and supports analytics for a superior customer experience. The roadmap may be long, but with the right CMS, it’s worth the time, effort and money.
In the final analysis
CMS holds the promise of wow customer experience, provided the choice of technology and its implementation is right. To deliver a seamless, consistent and personalized digital experience to all customers, enterprises need to invest in the right CMS, because it’s about time that businesses bridge the gap between what customers want and what they get. Are you ready to drive the change? Talk to our experts to know more.