Delivering Digital Experience: 4 Platform Essentials

You can't escape discussions about digital transformation and customer experience these days. As the chatter intensifies — and both topics integrate more tightly in analyst trend lines and reports — so does the inevitable attempt to converge these trends into digital experience (DX). *Glenn Johnson In simple terms, digital transformation can be understood as the changes brought on by the use of digital technology in all aspects of business. Customer experience (CX) is all about the "sum-totality of how customers engage with your company and brand," author, photographer and speaker Adam Richardson wrote in the Harvard Business Review. The Dawn of DX The logical intersection of these two megatrends can be thought of as digital experience: the automation and interactions of your brand platform with the customer. The digital experience is more than marketing automation. It is the convergence of all enterprise systems in service to the customer and their needs. But how can a business cope with the needed technology to transform customer experiences into digital experience? An enterprise seeking to deliver digital experience in a way that delights customers, fosters loyalty and raises Net-Promoter Scores (NPS) will need to make sure they are prepared for the following requirements: Select a CRM Platform with an effective API Since CRM alone is never enough to accommodate all the requirements of delivering exceptional customer experiences, your CRM platform needs to offer an effective API so that you can interface all the other needed technologies in your enterprise for a total Digital Experience for your customers. Choose a Multichannel Enterprise Mobility Platform Select a mobile platform that provides the flexibility needed to develop integrated apps across multiple channels. App development tools that serve only one mobile device community or that are not paired well with back-end integration solutions will prove to be very difficult to implement. A well-integrated mobile platform that allows you to develop once and deploy to iOS, Android, Windows, web and closed network environments will significantly reduce the complexity of app development and the skillsets required to build the apps used by your customers and employees. Select Marketing Automation Tools Appropriate for Marketing Users The classical marketing employee would typically be described as culturally and intellectually different from the typical computer programmer. Marketing automation tools that feel like programming are counter-intuitive to most marketers. The ideal solutions provide the power needed for highly personalized Digital Experience marketing while at the same time not requiring time-consuming and complex programming. Marketing campaign roll-outs simply do not have time for a six-month development project. The tools used by marketers need to make sense to marketers. Provide IT with the Integration Tools Needed to Support the Digital Experience The introduction of web, mobile, CRM and marketing automation tools in the enterprise creates a big requirement for integration. Point-to-point integration fails when systems change or are updated and they are increasingly difficult to maintain. A proper integration platform provides a basis for event-driven business process integration that spans enterprise software systems to create truly coherent customer experiences and interactions that provide a 360-degree view of the customer to your employees and a 360-degree view of your business to the customer. The Cultural Component To be sure, these platforms will not invoke the cultural change needed to transform a product-centric culture into a customer-centric culture. But having the right IT platforms in place will make it possible to support the changes in culture brought on by the increasing focus on customer experience and digital transformation. In a transformed customer-centric culture, digital experience is an inevitable heir to the customer experience and digital transformation trends. Originally posted at CMS Wire About the Author Glenn Johnson is SVP of Magic Software Enterprises Americas. He is the author of "Integrate My JDE" on ittoolbox.com and a contributor to the Business Week Guide to Multimedia Presentations (Osborne-McGraw Hill). ar9 http://blog.magicsoftware.com/feeds/posts/default