Technology moves fast. And the correlation between web success and business success has created a heightened urgency amongst organizations of all kinds, as they question whether or not their website is built to support changing business needs.
Digital Clarity Group is a consulting firm that helps business leaders navigate digital transformation in their organization. In its research report “Assessing and Improving Your Customer Engagement Maturity” DCG identifies two primary forces that shape engagement opportunities for organizations:
“1. Technology can now provide organizations with insight into more and more relevant information about their audiences. Powerful data about consumers—stated and implied preferences, shopping habits, social graphs, buying patterns, geographic and contextual information, support history—can be aggregated and considered in concert.
2. Opportunities for reaching customers have expanded beyond the web to include hundreds of channels and devices. Organizations now have the ability to deliver targeted content in context—and customers increasingly expect it.”
Both of these salient points about contemporary customer engagement can – and should – be achieved through your company’s website, both in its front-end and its back-end capabilities, specifically the
Content Management System powering your virtual home.
As a result, that web platform – at the foundation of your virtual home - can either help you hit your KPIs or introduce unforeseen threat. Any evaluations of new web platforms need to keep three key things in mind:
Future-Ready Architecture. Many web platforms are built to create web pages. That translates into a series of unstructured pieces of content that become meaningless outside the walls of that individual website. Modern web platforms have a clear focus on separating content from display – enabling marketers to distribute structured content not only to their website, but to the places we will digest content in the future: Our car, our glasses, our Xbox.
It’s Not Business, It’s Personal. Any customer interaction must center on a personalized journey. Your web platform needs to support this – from dynamic web content based on previous behavior to automated communication built to nurture a customer from prospect to advocate.
More Platforms=More Money. More is not always better in the case of web technology. Fully integrated solutions make the kind of personalized communication above seamless. The alternative is a collection of different pieces of functionality that require separate management and countless touch points. Any system degrades as more touch points are introduced – a fully integrated web platform eliminates much of this threat, keeping marketers focused on the message, not the method.
Ultimately, your virtual home and the web platform powering it can have a transformational impact on internal efficiencies, your customers’ experience and thereby, your bottom line.
To understand what questions you should be asking visit this guide: 10 questions you should be asking about your company’s website.