The future of the Web and next-generation digital experiences

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The digital economy has transformed the way customers evaluate goods and services, make purchases and communicate with businesses. It’s all about the all-encompassing digital experience.

It is as much about the consumer buying into a long-term relationship and less about the one-off purchase.  Businesses need to address the notion of a customer lifetime value and the impact of the end-to-end customer journey. Your digital experience is a critical factor in how this relationship pans out.

Consumers expect the experience of dealing with a business – online and off – to be positive and engaging from first contact to last. If their expectations are not met, they have few qualms about switching to another brand. Because they can. Easily.

Every customer experience begins with a person who has a need, problem, or desire to resolve. Whether or not they are able to solve their need is their ultimate measure of success. Whether or not you help them solve that need is your brand’s measure of success.

That’s where your focus should be. From product design to marketing, from operations to staffing decisions – everything you do should be about solving your customers’ needs better than anyone else and the web experience is a cornerstone for the modern consumer.

Making the right technical decisions is even more critical and involves deep collaboration between IT, digital and marketing departments. While the number of options available for managing a single site now exceeds 600 different CMS products, there are a lot less options available for properly managing multiple sites, and the choices shrink even further when the number of sites, channels and languages grow exponentially.

“As marketers pursue the holy grail of an omnichannel digital experience across the full customer journey, their needs are expanding.” Said Dom Nicastro, CMSwire.

Anyone trying to manage a company’s digital footprint knows it can be quite challenging. The proliferation of channels and the associated content explosion yield quite some pressure on both marketing and IT folks these days.

“At one time, the internet appeared to offer all organizations a simple proposition: email connectivity and a clickable presence in the form of a website. Today, multiple messaging options have blossomed in addition to the universal acceptance of email, and web presence has rapidly evolved with interactive content and the ability to deliver transactional experiences – or e-commerce.” Said Richard Bamforth, Computer Weekly.

The average enterprise nowadays manages 268 mobile and web properties. That can be a daunting task if you are trying to do a global rebrand, launch a campaign across multiple geographies or just updating a series of pages across multiple languages and so the future must be about reducing the complexity of managing this ecosystem and to deliver a better digital web experience for the end user (And those that use the systems to build these compelling moments too!).

Image: Salford University

Republished with author's permission from original post.

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