The following is a guest article by Greg Ness, Exec Director of Marketing at SmartStory.
We’re clearly at the cusp of a new digital experience era, caught between digital hubs built for email in the late 1990s and shifting customer/patient tastes for mobile and personal engagement. That’s why I’m convinced the way forward will be led by a new generation of purpose-built mobile experience platforms.
Layers of Complex Integrations Are Slowing Us Down
Many of today’s platforms/hubs were built pre-mobile for email and static web engagement. They’re complex, support-heavy, and cumbersome. Campaigns can take weeks or even months to set up, and often depend upon IT or external vendor support teams. Personalization at scale is cost-prohibitive for many engagement teams.
Customer tastes have shifted to mobile and want more personalization. Every marketer I’ve spoken with who does mobile sees much higher engagement rates than email. Yet there is an even bigger story: the widening gap behind the promise of digital transformation and the actual capabilities of “transformed” legacy hubs.
Let’s look at three graphs expressing the relationships between user experience and (breadth of) automation within the context of today’s demand for personalization at digital scale and the breadth of automation needed to… scale.
The Promise of Digital Engagement: Personalization at Scale
Digital engagement is about a shift from manual, brick and mortar, labor intensive engagement to the power of network effects, where thousands of views, clicks, purchases, etc can be carried out at the same time, anytime. This is enabled by gains in user experience scale and process automation. The experience is personal and gets more personal as your journey unfolds.
Over the last ten years we’ve seen a massive shift in economic momentum from legacy brick and mortar companies to those that master the power of network effects. This shift is now spreading into other industries and changing the competitive landscape, altering the fundamental chemistry of success and valuation. Industries and services, from health care to shipping are about to be disrupted.
The Reality: Slow and Cumbersome Journey Building
The reality: most legacy digital engagement platforms and multichannel hubs are cumbersome, require extensive specialized skills and are often deployed more like developer SDKs, versus complete solutions that can be powered by drag and drop. Static personalization capabilities are common, as they were designed to simply drive clicks to static one size fits all web pages.
The webpages use links to other pages to “personalize” the journey, but it’s still up to the customer to find the right path on a large and often cumbersome website. For mobile users this isn’t ideal.
These legacy platforms have added integrations and modules to be relevant for mobile, but the complexity of configuring customer journeys can be very high. This drives the escalating need for more external support, from IT or consultants.
Got digital transformation stall? Maybe it’s the solutions you’re trying to transform.
Organizations with “moon shot” budgets can live with these new integrations and their costs and delays. But for those who cannot, there is a high probability of project failure or cost overruns, not to mention the ceding of engagement gains to more agile competitors.
Next Gen Digital Engagement Platforms
The digital revolution refers to a shift from legacy complexity and static digital experiences to platforms purpose-built for mobile (texting and email) and new levels of dynamic, personal engagement at unprecedented levels of scale.
This is where digital engagement is headed, versus increased investments in (technical debt-ridden) outdated architectures. These new platforms should be easily integrated with existing digital stack via APIs, allowing teams to create personalized, scalable campaigns in a fraction of the time and effort required and with little need for external vendor support.
The Next Gen Stack
Where does the revolution take us? To a new stack interconnected with APIs that is purpose-built for a dynamic mobile experience that can be deployed with a new breadth of automation.
A stack that delivers on the promise of digital without the legacy integration headaches and delays of email platforms requiring high levels of specialization cobbled with awkward mobile integrations. Highly personalized campaigns built quickly for competitive advantage instead of digitally transformed legacy kluge.
About SmartStory
SmartStory automates and personalizes customer communications. Personalized SmartPages are built dynamically with rich media delivering information to audience when they need it, the way they want it. Trigger events engage customers with omni-channel communications via voice, email, SMS, secure messaging and/or video chat on any device. Rich content (such as including videos, images, text and documents) is delivered from an approved library. Webforms collect relevant data with ease, replacing antiquated paper forms.