How can a CMS improve customer experience?
As digital brands feverishly compete for a morsel of every customer’s (diminishing) attention, providing an unbeatable customer experience (CX) has never been more important. Find out how to improve your CX in this article.
In fact, research by Gartner has found that 89% of companies view customer experience as their primary basis for competition – it’s a key differentiator for brands.
Your average customer has much higher expectations than before, and demands ever more from the brands they engage with. What’s more, they’re fickle – it’s in their interest to be. With countless alternatives to your brand a few clicks or taps away, if they find their experience on your site unsatisfying, they’ll have no qualms with voting with their feet and moving on to your competitor.
Providing great customer experience is your best defence against this. But what does it have to do with the content management system (CMS)?
Simply put, a CMS is an application that lets you create and manage digital content. If you have one, you’re probably already using it to collect data related to the content you publish, which makes it a key tool in your customer experience efforts. How so, and what capabilities does a CMS have that can help digital marketers improve the customer experiences they provide?
Getting to know your customer
The key to great CX is understanding your customer.
Customer data collected from a range of digital touchpoints tells you how users are engaging with your brand, and can give you an idea of their preferences, which you can adapt to.
Sitecore says that digital marketers see the CMS as part of a larger customer experience management capability. A CMS geared towards improving the customer experience should unify channels, campaigns, visitor information and performance measurement into one integrated toolset, Sitecore continues, allowing digital marketers to deliver on centralised customer intelligence.
Ensuring brand consistency
Maintaining brand consistency is crucial for fostering trust in your business, and trust is the bedrock of loyalty. Your brand is also another key differentiator that allows customers to easily identify you and the products and services you provide.
However, maintaining brand consistency has become increasingly difficult due to the complexity of the customer journey, which alights on many different channels, on different devices and at different times of the day. How can businesses ensure their messaging hits the right note at each of these touchpoints?
A CMS that integrates your organisation’s suite of different systems makes it possible to speak to customers in the same voice every time they engage by creating consistent experiences across all channels and devices.
Delivering personalised experiences
Customers – and retail customers in particular – are coming to expect a degree of personalisation in their digital experiences. The right CMS makes it possible to collect and use data about individual customers so that you can personalise their experience of your site.
The more data is available to the CMS, the richer the profile it can build of the customer, so ensure the CMS is integrated into other systems and can reach intelligence from other systems to create these experiences.
Real-time personalisation and targeting, enabled by the CMS, deliver the most relevant content to the customer and, crucially, at the right time.
Before you begin…
Your entire team should be involved in trying to reach the goal of delivering great customer experiences. Gartner also recommends that direct, indirect and inferred insights should be fed back to stakeholders in the organisation who can take action.
Furthermore, Gartner suggests overcoming any disjointed customer experience efforts by creating an integrated, cross-functional leadership team, which will improve collaboration inside and outside of marketing, and steer customer experience improvement initiatives.
Download our CMS Vendor Selection Pack for more information about how to select the best web CMS for your business.