We have long been writing about the importance of building a seamless user experience into digital experience (DX) delivery solutions. In fact, seamlessness has become the dominant focus in the age of digital transformation.
A seamless customer experience requires a high degree of technology and process integration. The key to creating this optimal customer engagement is to plan for integration from the outset.
The centralized access and data sharing abilities of the cloud have broken down barriers built by on-premise software and geographic distance. Having realized these productivity and collaborative benefits the cloud provides employees and system users, innovative organizations know the importance of extending these same attributes to their customers. That’s why this conversation about the importance of integration eventually turns from marketing technology to customer communications management (CCM).
Let’s look at how integrating CCM with your digital experience stack achieves true seamlessness.
Weaving CCM into your DX architecture creates seamless customer engagements.
Digital Experience Platform (DXP) vs. DX Stack
Whereas a digital experience platform (DXP) refers to a set of internally integrated product capabilities, a DX stack goes further, encompassing the entire digital experience technology framework. A mature DX stack, or a “full stack”, is achieved by integrating the DXP, ERP, BPM—and all the other acronyms including CCM that describe a complete portfolio of business technologies used for customer engagement—into a cohesive architecture.
As a proof point, Gartner tells us that through 2021, a full 85% of cost and business efforts related to any DXP product will revolve around integrating internal product capabilities with those external solutions. Gartner clearly states that by building this digital stack, organizations will achieve a seamless digital experience for customers.
CCM in the DX Stack
The need to integrate CCM solutions into the DX stack varies between industries. Your business needs for CCM integration may fall anywhere along a wide spectrum.
On one hand, finance and healthcare have constant customer interaction across multiple channels: email, web, live chat, document distribution, mobile device, and more. On the other hand, some industries have more narrowly defined customer communication requirements, for example, retail and travel/hospitality have a much lower demand for customer correspondence.
Regardless of your needs as an organization, your customer engagement architecture should be “connected” on some level so that your processes serve the entire customer lifecycle.
Consider the Shift To Digital Business
We cannot ignore that digital transformation initiatives have magnified the need of companies and organizations to produce and deliver flexible content. Industries with even the most basic customer communications needs now have the opportunity to gain market share or increase customer loyalty by improving the personalization, timeliness and relevance of communications.
Disconnected systems are roadblocks for any industry. A more cohesive DX architecture has the potential to improve the customer experience in ways that we might not anticipate. Thankfully, the research is already pointing heavily to where these improvements may lie.
The reason that Topdown has been directing so much attention on developing integration-friendly products is that for the last 5 years analysts have put the business efficiency bull’s-eye on integration. In fact, by 2021 we should see an increase in reliance on digital experience strategies and a growth in the field of system integration. According to Gartner, a full 90% of organizations worldwide will rely on a system integrator (SI), agency or other partner whose responsibility is to design, build, and implement the integrated digital experience platform.
The DXP Market Evolution
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of software to integrate. The evolving scope of digital experience has created a boom in development. For example, the DXP vendor market doubled in size from 2018-2019. Instead of looking at individual solutions, take a step back and assess the entire DX stack for potential integrations (especially with CCM). This way, you can incorporate any new customer or regulatory requirement that comes along down the line.
To plan for your organizations technological future, download our free Customer Experience Metrics and KPIs E-Book and dig deeper into customer experience strategies from industry thought leaders at Topdown.
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