Integrated CMS as the cornerstone for a seamless customer journey

How to achieve a coherent customer journey across all channels

We all know the situation: On our way to work we are scrolling through some email messages or social media apps and ending up on a website, blog or e-commerce platform. We expect this experience to be seamless. But to be honest: In the majority of times this is not the case. This, nowadays, pretty ordinary situation, underpins the importance of a well organized and integrated CMS along the whole customer journey.

Around half of the buyers view a handful of pieces of content before they contact and engage with your company. Over the years, consequently growth of website traffic is emerging. Around two thirds of potential customers prefer to learn about products through digital content rather than a traditional individual in person consultation.

So, in practice this looks like the example customer journey, which will be quite familiar for all of us. As a consumer we expect to be supported along this digital purchasing decision process by e.g. one harmonized language across different channels of communication according to preferences.

Mobile Working

So in practice this looks like the example of the Customer Journey, which will be quite familiar to us all. As consumers, we expect to be supported along this digital purchase decision process, for example, by a harmonized language via different communication channels according to preferences.

To be frank, a majority of companies struggle to deliver a harmonized journey to their customers. But what is hindering companies to come up with a seamless customer experience?

  • Content is stuck in department silos. Several people in business produce content the way they like it most and CI is not always taken into account – no alignment across departments. There is no clear responsibility or approval process across departments & systems.
  • Content is cluttered all over the place – CMS, CRM, Marketing Automation Tool or even on hard drives.
  • Marketing becomes out of control for the continuously growing number of communication channels. Marketing has long ceased to be only email messaging. But marketing is struggling to make usage of the variety of touchpoints.

 

Only the right message at the right time through the right channel, ideally personalized, makes communication with the customer effective. Thus, customer interaction data is key for replaying messages. Consequently two worlds, the CMS world and the data world, need to be integrated with each other to one world!

Meaningful content is a team effort because it’s all about creativity and finding powerful, influential words. CI needs to be considered at every touchpoint to speak one harmonized language. This can only be assured with an automated approval process for which content needs to be at one “golden place of truth”. In order to be scalable and react quickly to customer interactions, content needs to be integrated with all the communication channels. Consequently department silos need to be broken.

And this not only sounds good in theory, there are already solutions to this challenge. You are curious how your future buyer journey could look like – also in action? We are keen to deepdive into this topic with you in a personal meeting!

Dana und Ben
Your contact persons for Salesforce Content Management System: Dana Birkholz and Benedikt Vogel.