Accelerated digital customer experience possible only through “intelligent content”

Today, markets around the globe are highly competitive. Price, quality, and brand alone will not be enough to survive in the Huge wave . It is “the experience” the customer gets out of your brand that touches his or her emotions and intelligence.

Most businesses today strive to improve their platforms to provide an overall better customer experience, face the competition, and stay up to date on customer expectations. Better customer experience will eventually reflect in business revenue and optimized run-through of the operations. We have seen around 45% immediate, year-on-year growth in major retail-, telco-, and education-based customers when they treat customer experience improvement as a base agenda during the overall digital transformation process. (source)

Excellent customer experience cannot be achieved if you do not think about “content” in the overall strategy – to be precise, “intelligent content.”

What is intelligent content?

Intelligent content is “content that is readable by both humans and machines. It is content with superpowers – content that can (with the help of technology) perform tasks automatically, freeing content creators to add value through innovation.” – Scott Abel

To me, intelligent content is simple content, delivered at speed and acting with intuition towards the customer. Content that is delivered at the right place in the right format to the right person at the right time adds value to the author as well to the receiver through intelligence.”

Intelligent content is not just bound to the content itself. Ideally, it is derived through the combination of various facets, such as origin (where it is ideated and created), display or design, profile (customer context), life span, and the managing/hosting platform (CMS and marketing platforms).

An enriched customer experience through intelligent content is attainable only when enterprises choose the right digital experience platforms, such as Sitecore, Adobe.Important characteristics to manage the intelligent content are:

Omnichannel delivery – Firstly, the experience platform should be able to deliver content across channels (web, mobile apps, social media, eCommerce, kiosks, personalized emails). Most importantly, the platform should be able to preserve and carry the context of the content between channels to provide a seamless experience to the customer. Content delivery through channels should not be limited to the web or apps. Today, personalized content is expected through AR & VR to provide a great experience, especially in the entertainment and sports, hospitality, automative, food retail, and education sectors. The platform should be able to aggregate the content from various channels, delivering the content is one aspect to consider and the another aspect is to aggregate & collect the content from various channels is important to generate “intelligent content’.

Unified content format – The experience platform should have a unified method to pull and push the content through any medium. Specifically, when we need a global context from larger organizations, the platform should be able to produce unified content that can be localized in multiple stances, such as region or languages. Creating or managing the unified content format through experience platforms directly relates to the “reusability and adaptability” principles in enterprises, which is technically achievable through atomic-components, JSON, or XML-based content, etc.

Track the untrack – Yes, you read that correctly. Close to 70% of digital customer experience implementations focus on content that is native to the platform or profile. But it tends to miss the fact that a considerable amount of content traction happens outside the actual enterprise experience platforms – for example, social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, WhatsApp, and several user-generated content platforms. Performing “content intelligence” across platforms will help us to analyze and segment it to provide intelligent content. The intelligent content platform should be able to relate and understand the content context outside the native platform and provide a seamless experience for both known profiles and anonymous customers.

Business advocacy – Over time, content managed by the experience platform should be able to help enterprises advocate for business decisions through futuristic learnings (AI or ML), analytics. Intelligent content is not meant to simply live in the CMS or web platform. Rather, it should accelerate the business model through future marketing.

Conclusion:

Promoting customer experience to “digital” is already gaining ground in business, but it is achievable only when you have the right experience platform, such as Sitecore, Adobe in the enterprise to manage and deliver intelligent content. Choosing the right platform to deliver simple, structured, adaptable, reusable, and findable content will accelerate your success in digital programs.

Karthick Purushothaman

Expert in Digital Strategy, Solutions Architecture

I am committed to delivering clients real business value from content & marketing ventures. A seasoned architect with nearly 15 plus years of experience in the software industry. I am specialized in architecture and drafting solutions with demanding requirements in Content & Marketing, Cloud & Collaboration platforms.
I built and nurtured the technology practices for service organizations and now leading the Sitecore Content & Marketing practices for Capgemini India Digital Customer Experience TLI with a team of around 200 people and managing Sitecore project executions across the globe from India, working closely with the Sitecore Alliance teams.