Connected Experiences: Driving Change in CEM

Businesses that fail to deliver personalized and connected technology-driven experiences will soon be irrelevant.

No, we aren’t exaggerating.

80% of consumers already consider their experience with a brand as valuable as its products or services. And the customer experience management (CEM) market is growing accordingly; it’s predicted to increase from just shy of $17 billion in 2023 to over $50 billion by 2030.

That said, about half of businesses admit their experiences aren’t meeting consumer expectations and only 31.5% feel they’re exceeding those expectations.

What’s driving change in customer experience management?

The way customers interact with brands has undergone a radical transformation. Consumers’ native comfort with technology, the proliferation of mobile devices and the stay-at-home economy are driving a shift to connected experiences.

Delivering a connected engagement and effortless experience across multiple digital touchpoints through web and mobile apps is crucial for brands to create trust and empathy.

What Are Connected Experiences?

Imagine you’re planning a vacation. When you opt for travel services from multiple providers, you’ll have to manually enter your data each time to book flights, hotels, rentals, ground transportation, tours, etc. Connected experiences will transform this into a seamless activity by integrating disparate travel applications into a single platform. Vacation planners can use data pulled from different sources (such as social media accounts, loyalty programs, news feeds, weather reports and maps) to provide personalized recommendations for travel, hotels and leisure activities.

Users will receive customized itineraries that adapt in real-time to political disruptions, weather conditions or travel regulations. The customer doesn’t have to provide the context each time. Instead, technology will play a key role in delivering personalized connected experiences that are integrated, seamless and interoperable.

Another example might be watching video content on one device and effortlessly connecting to another device while changing your location – or ordering your dinner pickup and then changing it to delivery for when your circumstance changes.

Using data gathered from automated processes and self-learning software, businesses can create convenience and build meaningful relationships with customers across every channel. These are connected experiences.

How to Build Holistic Experiences

The new customer is always connected. Mobile apps, AI, automation, big data, analytics and machine learning allow them to get what they want when they want it. To be a part of their connected experience, your business needs to create a holistic view of your customers.

Create an integrated, 360-degree view of your customer

Customer data comes from a lot of sources – emails, calls, texts, website forms, social media, reviews, chats and so on. Your customer might interact with multiple departments of your business to learn about your products, make purchases or seek support. If you lack the technology to integrate this disparate data, your customer is forced to repeat queries, duplicate form entries or repeat themselves to different units or agents. Organizational silos hurt both customer experiences and employee productivity. This is why it’s important to build a single view of your customer.

Identify and unify data sources for better resolution

Enterprises use a lot of tools in their day-to-day operations – CRMs, ERPs, accounting software, HRMs, email marketing tools, etc. Each of these captures data differently. Some need to be integrated with third-party tools for data validation or aggregation. Adopting a unified data management (UDM) framework lets you aggregate, unify and store data from different sources in a common repository within a data warehouse. UDM uses data integration tools to automatically fetch and update data from different business applications, as well as identify duplicates and improve data accuracy.

Unified organizational data reveals insights and fosters interdepartmental collaboration. Identifying and combining incongruent data sources contribute to the success of data-driven initiatives, such as improved compliance and governance, business intelligence, customer relationship management and more.

Identity resolution platforms

Customers’ journeys involve personal identifiers like email and physical addresses, locations, device IDs, mobile numbers, customer IDs, account names and more. Identity resolution is a data management technique that enables marketers to correlate these identifiers with individuals as they interact with different channels, devices and platforms.

Most identity resolution software uses a proprietary database called an identity graph that maps all the recognized identifiers associated with individuals. The software connects to multiple data sources that house different types of personal information records. While searching an individual’s record, it applies a string of algorithms and probability scoring to detect the relevant entity. If there are multiple individuals with the same name, identity resolution evaluates other key distinguishing attributes such as contact number, social security number, address, national identifier, etc., to recognize the individual or the entity.

By eschewing disconnected, duplicate and inaccurate customer data, identity resolution helps build a unified, omnichannel customer view.

AI and ML-powered predictive analytics enhances customer experience

AI-driven insights can help businesses understand a user’s current stage in the buyer’s journey and identify which competitors they’re following. This allows them to adapt their marketing to differentiate themselves from those competitors.

One of the most powerful applications of AI in business is predictive analytics technology. Predictive analytics leverages data, user behavior and machine learning to sketch out the next steps a customer or lead might take. The insights gained can be used to create tailored content, ad messages and emails. AI and machine learning help build data-driven user profiles that allow businesses to prioritize customer needs and offer personalized promotions such as discounts, freebies and upsells.

How to Improve Omnichannel Journeys

Omnichannel journeys seamlessly engage consumers across all devices and touchpoints – and they’ve become the expectation. Building a siloed desktop or mobile experience is now unthinkable. While making those experiences fully seamless and friction-free still poses a challenge to some businesses, there are two primary ways to improve customer journeys and make them fully omnichannel.

1.      Improve communication through content-as-a-service (CaaS)

Smart devices and widespread connectivity have changed users’ content search and content consumption habits. Alexa notifies you of an upcoming appointment and your Apple Smartwatch reminds you about your workout schedule. Voice, video, text, design, automated messages, alerts – content delivery is inescapable. But you can’t use the same content format for both a website and a smartwatch app. This is where content-as-a-service (CaaS) or managed-content-as-a-service (MCaaS) helps.

CaaS platforms distinguish formatting and programming to deliver appropriate content via REST APIs or GraphQL-based APIs. Unlike traditional content management systems, CaaS platforms enable you to personalize and optimize content to cater to diverse content delivery channels. Following the “write once, publish anywhere” principle, CaaS allows content to be created once and stored in a central repository, from where it can be pushed to multiple content delivery channels.

The rise of headless CMS – or CMS platforms that decouple content repositories from presentation layers – has expedited the adoption of CaaS content infrastructure. A headless content management system, like Drupal, can enable even non-developers to push structured content, regardless of the front-end layers used. Acquia Content Cloud is a popular no-code CaaS solution that powers multi-channel digital experiences.

2.      Integrate interaction and delivery channels through APIs

Developing an API strategy makes it easier to deliver seamless, connected customer experiences.

According to APItoolkit, More than 80% of businesses currently use APIs; enterprises that use APIs are 24% more likely to be profitable and can expect cost reductions of 15%.

Put simply, APIs enable businesses to integrate and communicate across the different delivery channels and customer touchpoints. They connect disparate systems and data to allow content and information to be shared quickly to the right audience at the right time, through the right channel.

A common example of an API-first approach can be seen when users log in to their social accounts by authenticating with identity providers such as Google, Facebook or Apple. The API silently performs the interaction between the login screen and the identity provider that authenticates the user.

Improve Experiences with Connected CEM + Material

The goal of customer experience management (CEM) is to effectively manage customer interactions across all physical and digital touchpoints to deliver personalized, user-centric experiences and boost demand, brand loyalty and revenue.

Want to learn more about connected, tech-driven CEM? Material has unrivaled technical expertise and a proven record of building connected consumer journeys. We can help you level up your customer experiences, boost engagement and drive growth. Reach out today to start the conversation.