In customer experience management, there’s little dispute that the customer comes first. Everything you do should serve the customer’s needs and improve his or her experience with your brand, products and services in some way. Why? Because satisfied customers are loyal customers who buy again and spread positive word of mouth about your brand, which is the most valuable kind of marketing in our modern connected marketplace. Those of us who make tools to connect you with your customers must keep ourselves focused on this philosophy as well – but in our case, the customer is you, the enterprise software user. At Topdown, our development strategy is built around the idea of putting the business user first. Here’s what we mean by that.

For the past couple of decades, the most common way for enterprise software to be developed and sold was as monolithic packaged applications and even larger platforms – all fully built and integrated in a big chunk. More recently, due in large part to the growth of cloud computing, agile development processes, and the need for lightweight, virtualized applications and enterprise architecture flexibility, the movement has been toward microservices and containerization.

Over the past year or so, we’ve shared our research and explored CCM’s place in organizations’ larger digital experience (DX) delivery architecture. We’ve been listening particularly closely to the needs of business users, the primary users of our software.

Late last month, CMSWiRE published an article by Dom Nicastro titled, "Discussion Point: What Frustrates You About Your Web CMS?" In it, Nicastro asks three different digital agencies what frustrates people about their web content management system? The answers sounded all too familiar to us.

In a recent webinar entitled Who Won the Digital Experience Race? Hint: It’s Not Over Yet, Forrester analysts Mark Grannan and Ted Schadler discuss why you need a digital experience platform, who’s winning the platform war, and how to go about choosing the best platform(s) for your organization. We highly recommend this webinar for anyone trying to consolidate their customer experience technology portfolio in order to deliver a more cohesive end-to-end customer experience.

For effective customer experience management (CXM) that spans the entire customer life cycle, organizations need powerful digital experience (DX) technology platforms that help wrangle content, data and other core services across the marketing, commerce and customer service functions of an organization. That’s asking a LOT of any single vendor or solution. In fact, as it turns out, it’s asking too much.