Why Is It So Hard To Deliver A Holistic Customer Experience?

Some prac­ti­cal steps you can fol­low to increase your chances of suc­cess when rolling out holis­tic, mul­ti-chan­nel cus­tomer-cen­tric expe­ri­ence.

Doug Heise By Doug Heise from CoreMedia. Join the discussion » 1 comment

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?

Doug Heise

Written by Doug Heise

Global Director of Product Marketing, CoreMedia

Doug Heise serves as Global Director of Product Marketing for CoreMedia. Doug has over 17 years of experience as a digital media strategist and marketing specialist. Doug began his career as a co-founder and Senior Analyst with The Content Group, a San Francisco-based consulting and professional services firm that was one of the first companies to focus exclusively on the field of digital media management. Doug holds a Bachelor of Arts from Stanford University and a Master of Philosophy degree from the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

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