There is a certain mis-match between the idea that Millenials want differentiated experiences, are not interested in old-fashioned ideas of materialistic ownership and the rampant acquisition of drop-shipped, mass-market stuff flooding cloned pop-up Shopify Ecommerce sites around the world.
But because of this idea – that experience is the point of difference, the word has been co-opted by all kinds of software vendors who provide touch-points throughout the customer journey. From email service providers to rebranded ‘Digital Experience Platforms’ to confusingly named Experience Management Systems.
Digital Experience is a Growing Part of CX
But it is not all of it…. not all user experiences are digital! but almost all customer journeys are omnichannel – a combination of digital and analog experiences. The experience of watching Netflix might be impacted by how comfortable your couch is, or whether you have access to noise-cancelling headphones.
A few years ago, when Content Management Systems (CMS) were being re-named as Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) – the idea was to combine customer data from a wide range of sources with the goal of personalisation. However – this goal is really difficult to achieve.
But a good first step is to connect a customer’s search and browsing history with information about products in the basket, or previous orders. Connect that to your email and display advertising systems and you can begin to do some re-targeting.
This is one of the reasons that Salesforce, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool acquired Demandware and why Adobe bought Magento – so that the view of the digital experience was more joined up.
Experience Management Systems
Is a term that covers a wide variety of tools, mainly used for customer interactions like support or monitoring and measuring KPIs and OKRs like NPS and CSAT through programs like Voice of the Customer (VOC).
Some definitions say that: “The process usually involves constantly gathering customer feedback, maintaining a single profile or source of data on each customer, and delivering a personalized experience in each channel based on that data.” – Sounds a bit like a Marketing Cloud or CRM doesn’t it?
At their most simplistic, they are forms for surveys. Some surveys are simple – like an NPS score from 1-10. Some are more complicated based on products purchased, or stages in a funnel. Some tools might support pop-up boxes that help to calculate Customer Effort Score (CES) or allow different experiences to be tested using A-B or Multivariate testing.
Some of these Experience Management Systems might also include Chat-bots, support through tickets and cases and integrations with social media.
Types of Experience Management Systems
- A/B Testing and Personalisation
- In-page Web Analytics including HeatMaps etc.
- Content Management (CMS)
- Help Desk / Self-Service including Chat-Bots, Live Chat etc.
- Survey & Form Building incuding pop-ups
And then what?
Most of these systems can only automate the capture of data about the digital experience – things like page load speed or abandoned carts. Through ‘Voice of the Customer’ surveys, they can capture some qualitative data and perhaps through technology such as sentiment analysis, the emotions of customers can be tracked.
Experience Management Systems are a bit like KPIs. For the most part, they don’t do anything. They can provide a lot of data, but that data needs to be turned into information and insight.
The marketing for these systems says things like – “Your company can then automate actions across business functions to drive improvement in customer, employee, product, and brand experiences.”
The Future of Experience Management Systems
Connecting Ecommerce with CMS and CRM so that behaviour during one part of the journey and other parts of the journey can be used to personalise the experience is still relatively new and like most marketing technology – requires a certain talent-pool to make the most of the features.
The next evolution will be collecting analog or offline data from IoT sources. It’s already happening to a certain extent. GPS location from phones is being used to see where customers spend time and in some cases, like Disney theme parks, IoT can monitor things like queue length and waiting time.
Again, monitoring is not enough. The promised automated actions need to change behaviour patterns as well as emotions. The use of personalised incentives that maximise customer satisfaction and company business goals.
But there are not many companies that advanced.
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