Uma Ganesh | October 18, 2021 | 
Blending content and analytics for a delightful customer experience
In the initial days of digital adoption, websites were the key sources of information and were updated from time to time to inform customers and other stakeholders about products and their offerings. To facilitate this need, enterprise-wide content management became part of the IT function’s responsibility.
Enterprise content management systems facilitates collaboration and version control for iterative or reusable content. However, since the speed of action required to cope with business needs became an important factor and understanding of the dynamic elements related to content generation and consumption processes started getting to be complex, content management became part of the portfolio of marketing managers with IT department continuing to support on the technology front. Marketing managers who started building the digital marketing stack comprising email campaigns, social media, lead generation through websites and other such means, soon started realising that these efforts were not integrated and a whole lot of data that got generated through multiple channels could not be put to proper use, and therefore were not able to get the most returns for their investments in digital.
This realisation has led to the recognition that it is important to focus on outcomes from the overall spend and mix of activities and deliver superior customer experience. The significant advantage of digital experience platform lies in its ability to reorganise or modify content to suit different profiles of customers and other stakeholders in a dynamic manner to stay relevant in the market. With multiple channels being used by the customers for access to information, content being delivered requires to be adapted to the specific channels. Although digital platform and tools have been getting more and more sophisticated, content management continues to be an important foundation for meaningful digital engagement. The focus now is on presenting content that is customised, predicting customer behaviour based on past patterns with the help of analytics and repurposing content to suit different needs. Such a blended approach to engaging with the customer brings in relevance, measurability and value for the customers.
Presenting delightful customer experience is centred around the ability to get across every digital touchpoint with relevant content assets. In addition to getting the customer interested in learning about the product initially, the continued success will come through with the ability to build on customer satisfaction and customer retention. Often, user interface content keeps undergoing dynamic changes keeping pace with changing business and customer needs. However, the content available elsewhere on the website or other digital properties may be different thus making the experience suboptimal for the customer.
Therefore, it is important to consider how to make interface content get connected to the wider body of content and move away from pre-determined pathways to allow for more agility and flexibility in the construct and ease of access across multiple devices and channels. What is required is a flexible architecture that is capable of adding on or switching off tools or apps in a dynamic fashion thus facilitating experience as a service to the marketing managers.
With prudent planning of digital customer experience platforms, it would be possible to reuse the content in several ways. Thus, IT, marketing and analytics functions need to come together to redefine the enterprise content management system and develop the ability to be more intuitive so as to deliver superior customer experience.
Originally appeared in Financial Express
