More than half of organizations already support at least 12 distinct customer touchpoints, according to a recent Forrester thought leadership paper commissioned by hybris. But delivering a consistent experience across this expanding set of touchpoints is a challenge.
Forrester surveyed more than 150 people who are responsible for delivering brand experience online (in North America and the UK). Its findings uncovered a number of roadblocks to digital brand consistency:
- An over-reliance on IT. Marketers want to move fast to ensure they are delivering timely and relevant content to their customers across their multiple touchpoints. But many are still reliant on IT departments to make the most basic, day-to-day changes.
Nearly half (47%) of respondents aim to reduce their dependency on IT to make online content changes within the next year; this is now a top three content management priority.
- A ‘two-site’ customer experience. Organizational walls continue to hamper attempts to deliver unified experiences across the brand website and the online store or main e-commerce platform. Often, the marketing and e-commerce teams in charge of these touchpoints use different technologies – and in turn, create a jarring lack of consistency for the customer.
61% of respondents reported efforts to unify fragmented brand marketing and commerce sites, although these teams often rely on different tools and technologies to manage their touchpoints.
- Patchy customer insights. Many organizations continue to use traditional metrics to understand their customers’ behavior and to measure success – but do these paint the most useful or accurate picture of customer engagement?
While 84% of organizations use revenue as their primary KPI, only 52% currently measure the lifetime value of the customer.
- Content quantity over quality. Now that content has become so central to digital marketing techniques, many organizations are simply drowning in it – from product information through to advertising and marketing. Decision makers now recognise the need for consistency and quality over quantity, and the value of reusing content in a relevant way across various channels.
Improving content quality (65%) and increasing its consistency and reuse (56%) are the top online content priorities for the next year.
- Product complexity. High-quality product data is a crucial element of a consistent digital experience for customers, and needs to be used by both marketing and ecommerce functions. Yet product assortments are becoming more complex and international growth is putting pressure on digital experience providers to deliver more localized and relevant content.
