Bringing Content and Commerce Together

Bringing Content and Commerce

Together

2

PUTTING THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AT RISK

According to Walker’s Customers 2020 Report: “The customer of 2020 will be more informed and in charge of the experience they receive, and will expect companies to know their individual needs and personalize the experience.”1 Forrester Research analyst Kate Leggett echoes this emphasis on consumer pre-eminence, suggesting that “in the age of the customer, executives don’t decide how customer-centric their companies are — customers do.”2

There’s no doubt that engaged customers are more loyal and potentially more profitable, and can prove far more effective brand advocates for companies. Given their importance,

it’s perhaps surprising then that the responsibility for driving overall engagement levels is entrusted to a loose coalition of customer service, sales and marketing operations. Gartner has noted3 _{that this shared responsibility can place the success of customer}

experience initiatives at risk. Customer engagement initiatives can easily stall as firms

still seek to lower their costs in key sales, marketing and service areas.

For many businesses there is still an inherent disconnect between corporate aspirations

to offer a truly joined-up digital customer experience, and the many people, process and

technology elements that need to be brought together to achieve this. Potential barriers

include inconsistent cross-channel experiences thanks to siloed systems, inflexible technology that can lead to one-size-fits-all customer engagement processes, and an

inability to respond quickly enough online to customer expectations.

Nobody sets out to have a disjointed Web presence, but the fact that so many are is

often the result of organizations whose marketing and e-Commerce groups operate independently of each other. It’s clearly time to bring sales, marketing and customer service together, and nowhere is that more important than online, where many organizations operate a digital presence that is too fragmented to address the needs of today’s customers.

How people actually buy today

In its 2013 Industry Report4 into the impact of Millennials — those people born between 1980 and 2000 — Accenture reported on how this fi rst true digital generation is providing a useful insight into evolving online shopping habits. Accenture’s research found that 68% demanded an integrated, seamless experience regardless of the channel. That requires being able to transition eff ortlessly from smartphone to personal computer to physical store in their quest for the best products and services.

People clearly want to feel good about their online purchasing decisions, so it’s important for businesses to provide richer and more personalized shopping experiences that leave their customers feeling valued. Brands that are able to support their propositions with greater depth and substance will also be able to craft a more compelling explanation of why they are relevant to customers.

The success of home retailers such as IKEA confi rms the marketing maxim that people don’t buy products; they buy better versions of themselves. Customers don’t necessarily set out to buy a chair or a rug — they’re actually looking for a more immersive experience where they can see how products combine to suit their own particular lifestyle or situation. This is the level of functionality that customers now want online, and that’s why retailers now need to deliver more depth to these off erings and provide better explanations of why their products or services deserve to be part of their customers’ lives.

68% of Millenials

demand an

integrated,

seamless online

experience,

regardless of the

channel.

Accenture Industry Report, 2013.

A brand’s siloed interaction with customers creates confusion, disrupts the customer experience and oftentimes encourages customers to abandon the brand sites entirely.

A brand’s siloed interaction with customers creates confusion,

Customer Service Online Store Brand Site Social Mobile

A Unified Customer Experience with CoreMedia LiveContext

With CoreMedia LiveContext, customers get a unifi ed customer experience that delights, inspires and informs.

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Jason Fried, the author of “Rework,” tweeted last year: “’Here’s what our product can do’ and ‘Here’s what you can do with our product’ sound similar, but they are completely different approaches.”5 _{That’s why supporting online engagement with open, relevant} and ongoing communication is essential for companies, providing their customers with a continuous backstory to their browsing and purchasing experience.

Providing this kind of content is a delicate balancing act. Adding the right content can demonstrate stronger value to the customer, while related tools such as list-building, activity planning and sharing capabilities can encourage social interactions and build stronger loyalty. However, it’s also possible to get the content mix wrong, with Millennials particularly reacting against brands that sell too hard.

Those brands that succeed in offering the right levels of social media integration, providing an accessible and friendly browsing experience, and engaging their customers with relevant and fresh content will have the best chance of positively impacting online purchasing decisions — particularly among the critical Millennial demographic.

Unfortunately, the reality is that most online businesses aren’t performing at this level. While best practice e-Commerce websites succeed in creating a clear and guided online experience that drives demand for their products and actively encourages customers to add products to their carts, most online stores don’t even begin to match this kind of experience.

When Accenture evaluated more than 60 global retailers to understand how seamlessly they deliver the customer experience, it found that most of them still had big holes in their approach towards providing a consistent yet memorable customer experience. One commentator summed up the issue, saying: “once they get to the checkout, something just doesn’t feel right. There’s a break in the experience from cart to checkout — and that causes a disconnect for the customer.”6 _{At an individual customer level, that’s disappointing —} extrapolate that forward across a broader customer base, however, and that’s a lot of potentially abandoned online shopping carts.

Moving toward a more unified Digital Customer

Experience?

Offering a great digital experience, according to Forrester, is: “no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a make-or-break point for your business as we more fully enter the digital age.”7 According to the 2013 IBM® _{C-Suite study}8 _{“Designing rewarding customer experiences and}

capitalizing on new technologies to deliver those experiences efficiently” are among the key C-level priorities for success in the digital world. Targeting customers as individuals — rather than as a category or a market segment — is a main focus for over half of C-suite executives, with digital technologies now at the forefront of boosting engagement, creating 1-to-1 dialogues and providing a superior experience.

However, successfully delivering a high-quality digital customer experience can be much more challenging than these executives might hope — particularly as the critical marketing and e-Commerce functions needed to deliver such a cohesive approach typically function independently and with different technologies. That’s why, according to Forrester’s recent “Commerce and Content” report,9 the end result is often “a fragmented and poorly integrated digital presence that confuses the customer, is difficult to manage, and — ultimately — leaves revenue on the table.”

This disconnect is creating a barrier to the provision of a truly unified customer experience, with the discovery and exploration phases of engagement divorced from actual purchasing. And because today’s increasingly sophisticated omni-channel marketing strategies depend on the in-depth personalization and contextualization of content, businesses are finding it frustrating that they’re not able to leverage all their core brand and product stories at the final e-Commerce-enabled point of purchase.

“A fragmented and

poorly integrated

digital presence

that confuses the

customer, is difficult

to manage, and,

ultimately, leaves

revenue on the table.”

Peter Sheldon and Stephen Powers “Content and Commerce: The Odd Couple or The Power Couple.” November 2013.

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Turning content-driven insights into real business

results

Ideally these content and commerce platforms would have already converged. However, too many brands still stuff er from what Forrester refers to as “two-site syndrome,” with a .com site that’s owned by corporate marketing, and an e-Commerce store run by a separate eBusiness team. Both contribute to the same overall customer experience, but each has separate goals — with marketing focused on branding and eBusiness targeting revenue. Resolving this twin-track approach is proving a headache for many operations, particularly those still relying on previous generation content engines that are limited in their depth and real-time e-Commerce capabilities. With e-Commerce product-related information generally restricted to either Home or Category pages, customers are fi nding their overall experience confusing, with early stage engagement characterized by a high level of brand level messaging that simply drops away as they move towards the checkout stage. This is immensely frustrating — for both marketers who are keen to provide an end-to-end experience, as well as for e-Commerce teams who can see the bottom line impact of incomplete customer journeys and abandoned shopping carts.

Despite their focus on core functions that support the buying process (such as catalog browsing, checkout and customer self-service), many companies have had to overload their existing e-Commerce solutions with over-extended catalogs, the addition of content where it’s not really meant to be, and sub-divisions to support further geographies, microsites or new brands. At the same time, Marketing teams have also added to their core .com presence, integrating additional channels, supporting social marketing campaigns and optimizing content for search.

What’s needed is a strategy that allows businesses to unite both functions, retaining the robust commerce capabilities that they need to manage large, complex product catalogs while also adding a Web Content Management (WCM) platform to improve the delivery of their online digital experience.

Too many brands

suff er from

“two-site syndrome,“

with a .com site

and an e-Commerce

site owned and

operated by two

separate teams.

Identifying the right integration approach

In order to address this challenge, customer experience teams are busy investigating the best way to bring their traditional e-Commerce and content worlds together.

Traditionally, companies have been reluctant to move away from their core e-Commerce engines, as the bulk of their business was still primarily transaction-based consumption. However as eBusiness has maintained its shift from single through multiple to omni-channel, the quest to integrate a range of commerce channels has driven the need for a digital engagement infrastructure that support’s today’s more experiential consumption demands.

However, navigating the e-Commerce technology landscape can be complicated, with multiple integration approaches available. Organizations are seeking solutions, yet are faced with a confusing landscape of solutions and approaches. Should they opt for a Web Content Management (WCM) led approach, with the e-Commerce platform feeding into WCM? Would an e-Commerce led approach be more appropriate, with the WCM element simply serving as an engine for content creation and rich media management? Or would a more integrated, hybrid strategy be more applicable — with the WCM solution handling the initial phases of engagement, and e-Commerce supporting the shopping cart and checkout process?

There can be no standard answer to these questions. Major retailers, for example, may be too dependent on their e-Commerce systems, while other companies might require a more WCM-focused approach to help create, manage and measure the development of targeted, personalized and interactive brand experiences. When speaking to companies facing this challenge, Forrester found that many organizations expect Web Content Management platforms to eventually drive their end-to-end provision of a joined-up customer experience. However the analyst fi rm also noted that many fi rms “simply couldn’t aff ord the time and/or budget required to build this integration from the ground up.”10 Choosing a fl exible architecture facilitates deployment of new services and integration with

existing enterprise systems.

MULTI-TOUCHPOINT DELIVERY AND DIALOG DIVERSE CONTENT ECOSYSTEM

Experience

Context

Digital

Experience

Hub

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Key components for an integrated e-Commerce/

content strategy

For companies now looking to overcome their siloed content and commerce processes, the challenge is to find a solution that will allow them to both differentiate their store and optimize their existing transactional processes while also engaging today’s new breed of experiential shoppers.

In exploring such an approach, there are nine key solution elements that businesses should be considering:

J

J Intuitive, Web-based editorial interfaces – with the ability to create, preview and publish sophisticated pages and microsites that seamlessly blend brand content such as editorial, social, personalized and rich media content with e-Commerce requirements including product data, packages and promotions

J

J Flexible content layouts for enhanced creativity – companies need to avoid tools that restrict marketers and e-Commerce professionals. Instead the focus needs to be on solutions that give these users complete control over the look and feel of their branded content — right out of the box

J

J Enhance products with appealing, branded content – WCM solutions that create dynamic content at runtime rather than simply copying static elements ensure that online branded information is always up-to-date. Look for tools that allow business users to access up-to-the-minute product data (including price, description, and availability) and blend it with brand and editorial content to improve the overall shopping experience J

J Support for rich media, including image maps and videos – the native integration of rich media can help increase the relevance and impact of online stores. Whether it’s editing images, creating image maps and galleries, integrating videos or generally managing content — engagement levels improve with the application of attractive and immersive content

J

J Comprehensive support and provision of social media tools – Social networking plays an increasing role in product discovery, purchase and ongoing customer loyalty. Solutions should have pre-built social capabilities, with deeply integrated tools for social interactions, user-contributed content and social moderation

J

J Orchestrate digital content from multiple sources – Being able to access a wider set of information and services from both new and legacy software systems supports the delivery of contextual e-Commerce functionality. Business users need to be able to access this kind of content and incorporate it into the broader e-Commerce experience

J

J Delivering personalized content to shoppers – a key goal should be the ability to deliver personalized content to shoppers based on their user profile, cart contents, past purchases and social activity. Best practice e-Commerce and content integration solutions must deliver this to prevent their online stores becoming a static, one-size-fits-all experience

J

J Improved SEO and deeper engagement – businesses also need to make sure that their e-Commerce stores are attractive to search engines. The ability to build SEO-compatible links between e-Commerce and content sites will strengthen a company’s presence across search engines and earned media

J

J Incremental innovation – Although companies face enormous pressure to transform their online properties to deliver improved customer experiences across any platform, companies need to manage their level of risk by taking an evolutionary approach that lays a sustainable foundation for future growth. Too many large-scale IT projects run over budget, and more than half provide less functionality than expected. Even though bringing e-Commerce and content together is complex, companies need to look for technology partners that can provide a “grow-as-you-go” implementation approach — as well as a fixed-price, fixed-scope deployment offering that is aligned with tangible business value.

CoreMedia and IBM — helping businesses take

control of the customer experience

With more than 18 years’ experience in delivering online platforms for leading enterprise brands, CoreMedia provides a web content solution that integrates with e-Commerce solutions and enables businesses to take control of their customer experience.

As part of the IBM Smarter Commerce partner ecosystem with its CoreMedia LiveContext for IBM WebSphere® _{Commerce solution, CoreMedia works with retailers to help them}

deliver exceptional customer experiences that infuse every aspect of their online experience with visually engaging and immersive content.Working together, CoreMedia and IBM provide a dynamic e-Commerce experience management solution to drive brand building and enrich the product catalog, with tools that ensure maximum flexibility of design and layout.

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Combining CoreMedia’s innovative experience management capabilities and IBM’s advanced commerce platform brings the brand and shopping experience together into a single cohesive experience. Product information, pricing, personalization, and marketing capabilities are integrated in real time to create dynamic online brand experiences. Like any good relationship, the result is greater than the sum of its parts. The seamless blending of brand, content, community and e-Commerce results in increased visitor traffic and engagement, greater brand awareness, improved SEO, higher sales and improved customer loyalty.

The CoreMedia LiveContext for IBM WebSphere Commerce solution is a digital engagement application that enables users of IBM WebSphere Commerce to transform their online stores with visually engaging experiences and immersive content. By leveraging pre-built integration with CoreMedia LiveContext, IBM WebSphere Commerce e-Commerce and marketing teams can gain direct in-depth control of customer experiences — increasing the impact of digital content, helping to secure improved engagement levels, and translating improved loyalty into higher online sales through a greater emphasis on context provision at the point of purchase.

Link to Resources

www.coremedia.com/livecontext

1 Customers 2002 – B-to-B Customer Experience study – www.walkerinfo.com/customers2020. 2 Forrester Research – Navigate the Future of Customer Service in 2014 report.

3 Gartner News Release – Gartner highlights four key attributes of customer engagement – March 25, 2014. 4 Accenture – Who are the Millennial shoppers? – June 2013 report -

http://www.accenture.com/us-en/out-look/Pages/outlook-journal-2013-who-are-millennial-shoppers-what-do-they-really-want-retail.aspx. 5 Jason Fried – @jasonfried.

6 “Why most online shoppers don’t make it past the first step of checkout” – KISSmetrics blog – https:// blog.kissmetrics.com/first-step-of-checkout/

7 Forbes.com – Forrester: Top Technology Trends for 2014 and Beyond – http://www.forbes.com/pictures/ fldi45elf/2-digital-experience-delivery-makes-or-breaks-firms/

8 IBM 2013 C-Suite study – http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/c-suite/csuitestudy2013/cmo-info-graphic.html

9 Forrester Research – Commerce and Content: The Perfect Couple or a Tumultuous Affair? – http://www. forrester.com/Commerce+And+Content+The+Perfect+Couple+Or+A+Tumultuous+Affair/fulltext/-/E-RES105521?intcmp=blog:forrlink

10 Forrester Research – Commerce and Content: The Perfect Couple or a Tumultuous Affair? – http://www. forrester.com/Commerce+And+Content+The+Perfect+Couple+Or+A+Tumultuous+Affair/fulltext/-/E-RES105521?intcmp=blog:forrlink

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