Delivering Engaging Multichannel Customer Experiences
The explosion of mobile devices and availability of ubiquitous connectivity has led today's consumers to demand a new type of online digital experience, one that's cohesive and omni-channel. Increasingly, the quality of digital experiences can have an impact in a company's success. Leading enterprises recognize this, and are striving to produce rich and dynamic online experiences for optimal customer engagement. For successful customer experience management (CXM), organizations must leverage modern Web CMS tools that enable managing and optimizing of the site visitor experience across various channels—Web, mobile apps, social networks and more—to meet the escalating expectations of consumers today.
Driving Trends for Multichannel CXM
Over the last few years, the Internet has undergone a tremendous amount of fundamental change in its landscape—social, personal and mobile.
Social. The Web is becoming increasingly more social and much less anonymous. Today's digital experience is all about connecting and collaborating with others.
Personal. While the Internet is continuously expanding, individual user experiences have become much more localized, personalized and relevant.
Mobile. The explosion of mobile computing has resulted in ubiquitous content consumption, where digital content, information and experiences must be accessible anytime and anywhere.
There's a new type of customer experience. The availability of ubiquitous connectivity means that people are online all the time, everywhere they go. And as the number of touchpoints increase, so do the expectations of consumers, who are now consumers of digital experiences. To stay in the game, enterprises must strive to create online experiences optimized for these different channels and usage contexts.
Smart phones and tablets have unique capabilities—GPS, onboard camera, video and audio capture, speech recognition, accelerometers and more—to make a major impact on the user and the customer experience. Organizations are taking advantage of these capabilities combined with ubiquitous connectivity to create innovative ways of delivering rich content and services.
In addition, organizations are utilizing mobile devices to improve customer experiences by providing the workforce with accessible information and services that can be shared with customers on demand. Retail stores are already utilizing smart phones and tablets to create improved experiences for their consumers, and—looking forward—wearable technology (e.g. Google Glass) will provide yet another, even deeper level, of immersive experience. Forward-thinking organizations need to evaluate how these changes are going to impact their customers and what accommodations need to be made to serve them in this new era.
Taking a Mobile-First Approach
As mobile devices continue to proliferate, it's essential to take a "mobile-first" approach to CXM. Take the time to understand your audience behaviors and recognize the limitations of mobile devices to optimize for those experiences. More often than not, users on mobile devices are acting, not browsing, and with smaller form factors and less real estate to work with, optimization means removing everything non-essential and keeping the experience actionable with speed and performance in mind.
Mobile also represents an entirely new user profile. They're on the move, use the Internet constantly but in tiny bursts, and are interacting with one or two fingers—all of which need to be considered when designing the user experience. And since mobile is a completely new platform—one with new constraints and capabilities—it's imperative to create an entirely new mobile-specific experience. However, while some organizations may be tempted to provide a subset of content and functionality, it's important to still provide a full experience, but within the mobile context.
With the addition of new mobile touchpoints and the need to create new experiences, it's important to keep in mind that content still remains at the center of it all. The key is to make smarter usage of that content through strategy and implementation of the right tools to get the job done. Web CMS software plays a critical role in CXM, with content creation, management and distribution lying at the core of producing these experiences.
Modern Web CMS software provides us with the toolset to optimally engage with customers through support of different experiences across multiple channels. These capabilities allow you to create, manage and deliver dynamic, targeted and consistent content across various online channels including your website, social media, marketing campaign sites, mobile applications and more.
By adopting a mobile-first approach toward customer experience management, and coupling it with implementations based on proven open platforms, leading organizations can now create engaging experiences that provide the agility needed to meet the demands of today's customers.
Rivet Logic is an award-winning consulting and systems integration firm that helps organizations better engage with customers, improve collaboration and streamline business operations. Through a full suite of solutions for content management, collaboration and community, Rivet Logic enables organizations to fully leverage the power of industry-leading open source software. With deep expertise in Alfresco, Liferay, Crafter, Solr and MongoDB, Rivet Logic crafts content-rich solutions that power next-generation Web properties, social business applications and collaborative communities.