Customer Communications Blog

The coolest thing about smart content is that we can finally quantify its impact. We already know that making headway with customer experience (CX) indicators offers a greater return on investment (ROI). In fact, Forrester research has found that for the average direct brokerage, a 1-point improvement in the CX Index score could yield a $6 billion asset improvement.

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance in sophistication and acceptance, robots and technology are taking on more human characteristics and responsibilities in daily life. So ubiquitous has AI become that one Danish study even wonders if robots could be considered our “friends” in the future. Though making connections with machine sounds extremely futuristic, one customer experience (CX) technology available today has improved our ability to get to know our customers on a more intimate basis. Modern digital experience (DX) technologies are changing the game when it comes to making a personal connection.

What’s so intelligent about smart content?

We’ve been delving into enterprise content management (ECM) technologies as prelude for discussing how we treat “content” in INTOUCH®, our new customer communications management (CCM) software. Software vendors and enterprise leaders need to understand that ECM is evolving rapidly (we’ve written several posts on this topic), and that technology choices made now will impact how smoothly organizations will be able to adapt their content management and digital experience delivery systems to the new way of doing things.

With the explosion of marketing technologies (martech) in recent years and more and more of the responsibility for customer experience (CX) management falling under the marketing umbrella, marketing leaders find themselves increasingly involved in the technology purchasing process. Some CMOs are working more closely with CTOs and CIOs. Others are morphing into CMTOs (chief marketing technology officers) because tech has become such a central piece of modern enterprise marketing. For this reason, understanding how customer experience delivery software is designed and deployed is going to be a pretty big deal moving forward. It’s not just IT leaders’ responsibility anymore.

We’ve been taking a look at Gartner’s strategy planning guide for IT leaders responsible for defining content strategies and selecting tools for customer experience management and delivery, “Content Management for the Digital Era: Rethinking Strategies Beyond 2016.” Analysts Karen M. Shegda, Karen A. Hobert and Hanns Koehler-Kruener make several recommendations in this report.