Over the past year or so, we’ve shared our research and explored CCM’s place in organizations’ larger digital experience (DX) delivery architecture. We’ve been listening particularly closely to the needs of business users, the primary users of our software.

Late last month, CMSWiRE published an article by Dom Nicastro titled, "Discussion Point: What Frustrates You About Your Web CMS?" In it, Nicastro asks three different digital agencies what frustrates people about their web content management system? The answers sounded all too familiar to us.

In a recent webinar entitled Who Won the Digital Experience Race? Hint: It’s Not Over Yet, Forrester analysts Mark Grannan and Ted Schadler discuss why you need a digital experience platform, who’s winning the platform war, and how to go about choosing the best platform(s) for your organization. We highly recommend this webinar for anyone trying to consolidate their customer experience technology portfolio in order to deliver a more cohesive end-to-end customer experience.

For effective customer experience management (CXM) that spans the entire customer life cycle, organizations need powerful digital experience (DX) technology platforms that help wrangle content, data and other core services across the marketing, commerce and customer service functions of an organization. That’s asking a LOT of any single vendor or solution. In fact, as it turns out, it’s asking too much.

We’ve been writing a lot about sharing content and integrating data lately. The reason we keep harping on those ideas is because they are what feeds brand consistency. And brand consistency is vital to building recognition, trust and value in the eyes of consumers. The consistency of your brand goes far beyond making sure the company’s logo and colors are right in marketing materials. It pertains to the entirety of how people perceive your company and its products and services. This consistency is built over time, a cumulative image made of all the impressions and interactions customers have with the company. In that sense, it’s a big part of the overall customer experience.

What Is ETL? ETL stands for Extract, Transform and Load. It refers to a database usage process that pulls data from one or more data sources; transforms the data, or changes it to a format or structure that is accessible for queries and suitable for analysis; and loads it into the final target database, data warehouse or application. Typically, since data extraction can take some time – particularly when it’s consolidating large amounts of information from different sources – the transformation and loading steps may begin before extraction is complete. This means that while data is being pulled, a transformation process can execute, preparing the data for loading; data loading may then begin without waiting for the completion of the other phases.