Article

Developing a technology strategy to support multichannel content

The Internet is now "the new staging ground for personalized marketing."

April 4, 2011

Operating in a multichannel world is not new, but engaging customers in that world is becoming increasingly complex. Today’s consumers demand user-centric, any time, anywhere information. They expect their experience to be interchangeable and on their terms, whether it’s on a mobile device, online or in-store.

This means both merchandisers and technical teams must consistently manage content and data across multiple channels, brands, sites and geographies to guide and influence customers during the research process. Finding new and more effective ways to engage customers in this multichannel world keeps most eBusiness professionals up at night.

More than any other factor, the customer experience has the greatest impact in converting browsers to loyal customers. Yet today, customer experience management is more challenging than ever with multiple touchpoints that must be managed holistically. At every interaction, at every touchpoint, the customer experience affects future company revenue and profit. But as many businesses still struggle to meet customer expectations for a content-rich, personalized user experience, innovation and market transformation continues to flourish. As such, eBusiness professionals must modernize how they market, serve and manage the changing customer experience.

Biggest challenge in the market
On the surface, it seems pretty simple. Customers want the confidence that they are making the right purchase decision – whether they are making that decision online, on their mobile phone or in your store. On their path to that final decision — to purchase or not — they want to be able to take the path that matters to them and want to have all the most relevant data and content presented to them, always in context. Marketers want to help customers quickly get to that conclusion and make the purchase.

But even the leaders in online retail find this a hard experience to deliver. Why? Because of increasing quantities of product content and data across rapidly expanding channels — from mobile to Google to in-store experiences to whatever the next biggest thing turns out to be. Meeting these demanding marketing and customer requirements with an agile, flexible technology ecosystem keeps IT leaders today busy and wondering which “nice to have” from yesterday will be tomorrow's “can’t live without.”

With all the different technologies available, ranging from e-commerce platform systems to user generated content platforms to web analytics capabilities, managing an engaging and differentiated customer experience for each and every customer with limited operational complexity lies at the heart of the next big challenge for all online businesses.

Changes in customer product requirements or priorities
To date, e-commerce investments — from web content management systems (WCMS) and product information management (PIM) systems, to e-commerce platforms and recommendations engines – have solved the problem of how to create and store great content, but not how to allow customers to interact with this content in any way they want. As a result, the true value of these investments remains untapped and left out of the customer experience. Many merchants try to solve the problem by dictating shoppers’ paths through the site via categories, thinking better category pages will get customers to their goals faster. But shoppers want to be able to find the right product in their own way because every shopper’s needs are different, and every shopper requires different information to make them comfortable purchasing.

Clearly the new frontier for retailers is to figure out how to integrate data and content dynamically into the site experience, and move past the realm of thinking of search, navigation and merchandising as just leveraging product data from their e-commerce platforms. This comes with recognizing that in the world of online retailing, the content that customers value has evolved rapidly in the past few years.

Though important, online content is no longer just about product catalog data such as features, pricing and special offers. Compared to even a year ago, consumers now demand much richer types of interactive and social content — user reviews, articles, buying guides and video content. Shoppers want all of this data at their fingertips to determine that they’ve found the best product.

Increasingly we are finding that leading retailers are looking for a solution to incorporate all the rich content they’re developing into the user experience in a contextual and dynamic manner so customers begin to realize the benefit. Marketing professionals have long acknowledged the Internet as the new staging ground for personalized marketing, where they can increase sales by presenting exactly the right products and information in context with the right offer, at the right time and place, to the right person. In the world of e-commerce, where technology continues to redefine the realm of what is possible, this type of customer experience is the new Holy Grail.

Katrina Gosek is Product Marketing Lead for eBusiness at Endeca Technologies, a provider of customer experience applications used by 44 of the top 100 online retailers and online media companies. (Photo by Keith Williamson.)