As cus­tomers, we inter­act with brands from a bewil­der­ing array of devices and via an ever-grow­ing range of chan­nels. Yet we still want to accom­plish our goals as quick­ly, effi­cient­ly, and plea­sur­ably as pos­si­ble. But this is only pos­si­ble, when all of these dif­fer­ent chan­nels and devices con­verge to pro­duce a sin­gle, mean­ing­ful, and use­ful cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. The idea of a “holis­tic” cus­tomer expe­ri­ence across all chan­nels is the holy grail for mar­keters. But it can be incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to accom­plish. What are the bar­ri­ers that inhib­it uni­fied expe­ri­ences and what can you do to over­come them?

The Best Experiences are Contextual and Orchestrated

Most of us instinc­tive­ly rec­og­nize the qual­i­ties that con­tribute to a great con­sumer expe­ri­ence. Great expe­ri­ences are those that respond intu­itive­ly to our needs and present us with exact­ly the right con­tent to sat­is­fy our desires – regard­less of where this con­tent is locat­ed. In oth­er words, these expe­ri­ences are:

• Con­tex­tu­al, mean­ing that they are appro­pri­ate to our imme­di­ate cir­cum­stances.
• Orches­trat­ed, mean­ing that they seam­less­ly com­bine ele­ments from dif­fer­ent sources.

A good exam­ple of this would be a trav­el app that rec­og­nizes when I’m approach­ing a hotel at which I have a reser­va­tion and:

• Offers to check me in auto­mat­i­cal­ly.
• Noti­fies me of spe­cial dis­counts on addi­tion­al hotel ser­vices.
• Rec­om­mends near­by attrac­tions I might like based on infor­ma­tion from my social feed.

An expe­ri­ence like this is both help­ful and rel­e­vant. Bet­ter still, I can respond to this infor­ma­tion imme­di­ate­ly, because it’s pre­sent­ed as a sin­gle orches­trat­ed expe­ri­ence in a sin­gle app.

If we can all rec­og­nize the val­ue of this kind of expe­ri­ence, why doesn’t it hap­pen more often? Why aren’t more online mar­keters pre­pared to deliv­er dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences that are tru­ly holis­tic and respon­sive?

The Challenge: One Company, Many Voices

The pri­ma­ry rea­son is that com­pa­nies and their mar­ket­ing teams are sad­dled with orga­ni­za­tion­al struc­tures and tech­nol­o­gy plat­forms that were designed for a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent online ecosys­tem.

In the ear­ly days of the web and mobile deliv­ery, peo­ple assumed that online media would oper­ate much like exist­ing, tra­di­tion­al media chan­nels – lin­ear, dis­crete, and large­ly non-inter­ac­tive. They also assumed that con­sumers would hap­pi­ly restrict their inter­ac­tions to a sin­gle chan­nel at a time. After all, no one has ever lis­tened to a radio ad for a store and then got angry at the sales asso­ciate for not rec­og­niz­ing them when they showed up to buy some­thing.

But old habits die hard.

By the time com­pa­nies had begun to rec­og­nize just how dif­fer­ent online media is, they had already invest­ed con­sid­er­able time and resources into build­ing sep­a­rate tech­nol­o­gy silos for things like dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing, ecom­merce, and online cus­tomer sup­port. And they com­pound­ed the prob­lem by hir­ing teams of peo­ple to run these appli­ca­tions who have entire­ly dif­fer­ent busi­ness objec­tives and rarely speak to each oth­er.

Giv­en all of this, it’s no sur­prise that most brands can’t talk to their cus­tomers with a sin­gle voice.

It is pos­si­ble to over­come these chal­lenges but it isn’t some­thing that can be tack­led overnight. How­ev­er, there are some things that you can start doing today.

Map Customer Journeys

You can’t sat­is­fy your cus­tomers’ needs and desires until you under­stand how they want to inter­act with your orga­ni­za­tion.

Too many com­pa­nies start by mak­ing assump­tions about cus­tomer behav­ior with­out actu­al­ly doing the hard work of com­par­ing these assump­tions to real-world behav­ior. Those that do are often sur­prised by what they dis­cov­er.

Smart brands take the time to doc­u­ment the most impor­tant cus­tomer per­sonas and under­stand their crit­i­cal “user sto­ries,” “pain points” and “moments of truth”.

This kind of cus­tomer jour­ney map­ping can serve many pur­pos­es – from near-term tac­ti­cal prob­lem solv­ing to long-term strate­gic busi­ness plan­ning – but it all begins from the same place: a dili­gent, bot­tom-up analy­sis of what your cus­tomers want and how they attempt to achieve their goals. The out­come of this process is a series of use­ful insights and assump­tions that must then be test­ed, val­i­dat­ed, and put into prac­tice.

Coordinate Your Teams – Orchestrate Your Content

Defin­ing cus­tomer jour­ney maps is only the first step. In order to deliv­er great expe­ri­ences across chan­nels busi­ness users must be able to lever­age this knowl­edge to deliv­er expe­ri­ences that com­bine and deliv­er con­tent from dif­fer­ent enter­prise sys­tems and repos­i­to­ries.

One of the great things about the cus­tomer jour­ney process is that it can reveal exact­ly how, when, and where dif­fer­ent teams, depart­ments, and tech­nolo­gies must inter­act in order to deliv­er the desired expe­ri­ences. But just know­ing now how these dif­fer­ent com­po­nents must work togeth­er doesn’t mean that the inte­gra­tion will be easy.

To achieve the goal of holis­tic end-to-end expe­ri­ences, you must be able to break down both orga­ni­za­tion­al and tech­ni­cal silos:

• Busi­ness side: You need to estab­lish process­es and incen­tives that active­ly unite teams that might not be used to work­ing togeth­er. These unit­ed teams are then respon­si­ble for design­ing the expe­ri­ences that cor­re­spond to the iden­ti­fied needs or your most impor­tant cus­tomer per­sonas.
• Tech­ni­cal side: You must be able to acti­vate this expe­ri­ence at the appro­pri­ate point in time by automat­ing the deliv­ery of rel­e­vant expe­ri­ences based on con­tex­tu­al data and com­prised of con­tent assem­bled from mul­ti­ple sources.

This doesn’t mean, how­ev­er, that you should dupli­cate all rel­e­vant con­tent items and asso­ci­at­ed infor­ma­tion (e.g. brand assets, prod­uct list­ings, social con­tent, cus­tomer ser­vice records) into a sin­gle, cen­tral­ly-man­aged repos­i­to­ry. Copied assets require more stor­age infra­struc­ture and must be con­stant­ly syn­chro­nized with the orig­i­nal con­tent to ensure that it’s kept up to date. A bet­ter approach is to store and man­age dynam­ic links to the orig­i­nal assets, which allows you to store them in the spe­cial­ized sys­tems for which they were designed.

More Integration, Less ‘One-Size-Fits-All’ Hype

Once you have doc­u­ment­ed your cus­tomers’ jour­neys and iden­ti­fied the team and sys­tems that must be coor­di­nat­ed, how do you go about putting togeth­er an inte­grat­ed solu­tion to deliv­er these orches­trat­ed expe­ri­ences?

Many soft­ware ven­dors have decid­ed that the best way to mit­i­gate the ever-present prob­lem of inte­gra­tion is to pro­vide an all-in-one enter­prise soft­ware suite. At first glance, many of these suites seem to pro­vide a broad range of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing or ecom­merce capa­bil­i­ties, but a more thor­ough eval­u­a­tion typ­i­cal­ly reveals that the whole is some­what less impres­sive than its indi­vid­ual parts.

The promised “sim­ple” solu­tion that solves all inte­gra­tion chal­lenges often force cus­tomers to pur­chase expen­sive add-on mod­ules that repli­cate the proven and mature func­tion­al­i­ty of exist­ing tech­nol­o­gy invest­ments. Such an approach typ­i­cal­ly rewards the ven­dor more than the cus­tomer. To make mat­ters worse, busi­ness users then have to nav­i­gate through pieced-togeth­er user inter­faces that are no bet­ter than the orig­i­nal dis­con­nect­ed approach.

Choose The Right Tools To Empower Your Business Users, Streamline Your Processes

Although automa­tion can play an impor­tant role in deliv­er­ing the kind of real-time expe­ri­ences that online cus­tomers increas­ing­ly expect, the best cus­tomer expe­ri­ences demand a human touch and must be designed by experts who tru­ly under­stand both the cus­tomer and the brand.

Too many dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and ecom­merce sys­tems seem to have been designed strict­ly for tech­ni­cal users. When line of busi­ness experts or cus­tomer advo­cates are pre­vent­ed from direct­ly access­ing a company’s online sys­tems due to tech­ni­cal com­plex­i­ty, the out­come is rarely pos­i­tive. In order to inno­vate and respond quick­ly to chang­ing cus­tomer demands, busi­ness users need to have their hands on the con­trols.

Great cus­tomer expe­ri­ences ulti­mate­ly depend upon three things:

1. Great busi­ness user expe­ri­ences.
2. Effi­cient automa­tion.
3. The oppor­tu­ni­ty to opti­mize the expe­ri­ence.

Busi­ness users must be empow­ered to orches­trate con­tent orig­i­nat­ing from a vari­ety of sources from a sin­gle user inter­face, rather than forc­ing them to learn – and switch between – sev­er­al dif­fer­ent UI con­cepts. A sin­gle, inte­grat­ed user inter­face enables them to pro­vide a supe­ri­or vis­i­tor expe­ri­ence and not be lim­it­ed by learn­ing a new prod­uct or user metaphor. In order to achieve this, the flow of infor­ma­tion across sys­tems is key, as is the abil­i­ty to re-use con­tent with­in new con­texts across var­i­ous online touch­points.

But once these expe­ri­ences have been cre­at­ed, com­pa­nies must be able to deliv­er them in real-time to any chan­nel or device based on some­times sub­tle shifts in cus­tomer behav­ior. This is not some­thing that can be accom­plished man­u­al­ly.

Even an army of empow­ered busi­ness users can’t deliv­er real-time expe­ri­ences for thou­sands of cus­tomers shop­ping for tens of thou­sands of prod­ucts. The right tool is one that can act as a cen­tral man­age­ment and deliv­er­ing hub, capa­ble of aggre­gat­ing con­tent from any source and auto­mat­i­cal­ly deliv­er­ing it to any chan­nel.

But we all know that things change. From hour to hour, day to day, and month to month, cus­tomer behav­ior shifts. New prod­ucts are intro­duced. New access tech­nolo­gies emerge. New com­peti­tors dom­i­nate. In order to remain effec­tive over the long run, smart tools must pro­vide action­able insights for evolv­ing and opti­miz­ing the expe­ri­ence.

3 Keys to Success

All of this may sound over­whelm­ing, but it doesn’t need to be. There are some prac­ti­cal steps that com­pa­nies can fol­low to increase their chance of suc­cess when rolling out holis­tic, mul­ti-chan­nel cus­tomer-cen­tric expe­ri­ence:

1. Assemble the Right Team

The only way to over­come the orga­ni­za­tion­al and tech­ni­cal bar­ri­ers to cre­at­ing and imple­ment­ing tru­ly holis­tic cus­tomer expe­ri­ences is to assem­ble an inter­nal team that rep­re­sents the crit­i­cal cus­tomer touch­points with your orga­ni­za­tion. This means includ­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tives from mar­ket­ing, ecom­merce, cus­tomer sup­port, and more.

It is equal­ly impor­tant for you to include mem­bers of the IT team will can help the team under­stand the key infor­ma­tion and con­tent sources and who will be able to take your cus­tomer jour­ney maps and turn them into prac­ti­cal plan for inte­gra­tion and devel­op­ment.

Final­ly, you need to get buy in from C‑level exec­u­tives, because if they don’t see this as a pri­or­i­ty there is no way that you will be able to bring all the nec­es­sary mov­ing parts into align­ment.

2. Identify Short-Term Wins

Online inter­ac­tions are often com­pli­cat­ed. Many com­pa­nies with thou­sands of prod­ucts and cus­tomers spread all over the globe. And many have imple­ment­ed numer­ous soft­ware sys­tems to man­age cus­tomer data and coor­di­nate the deliv­ery of online con­tent.

If you try to cap­ture all of this and inte­grate every­thing, you can eas­i­ly enter a state of “analy­sis paral­y­sis” and spi­ral­ing costs.

A bet­ter way to kick off the process is to put togeth­er a plan that allows for a short-term win. Start by ask­ing your­self these kinds of ques­tions:

• What are your cus­tomers’ biggest pain point?
• Where are the biggest achiev­able oppor­tu­ni­ties?
• Which depart­ments are most open to change?

3. Move Quickly – But Innovate Incrementally

Once you have a plan in place, you need to move quick­ly to cap­i­tal­ize on the oppor­tu­ni­ty. But this doesn’t mean that you need to do every­thing all at once.

Some will sug­gest that the only way for­ward is a com­plete “re-plat­form­ing” of your entire tech­ni­cal ecosys­tem. And in some sit­u­a­tions, this approach might be the only pos­si­bil­i­ty. But for most com­pa­nies, this kind of “rip-and-replace” strat­e­gy is unnec­es­sar­i­ly risky and expen­sive.

You can accel­er­ate your time to mar­ket and man­age your lev­el of risk by tak­ing an evo­lu­tion­ary approach that lays a sus­tain­able foun­da­tion for future growth. Com­pa­nies should con­sid­er a “grow-as-you-go” approach that starts with mak­ing enhance­ments to their exist­ing online prop­er­ties – while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly build­ing a foun­da­tion for a true inte­grat­ed plat­form that can deliv­er blend­ed brand expe­ri­ences across all of a company’s web prop­er­ties.

What are you doing, or have you done, to ensure you deliv­er uni­fied, holis­tic cus­tomer expe­ri­ences?