The customer-experience mandate: Build lasting engagement with better websites

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. The changing dynamics of digital marketing
  3. Accelerating technology requirements
  4. Architectural options
  5. Fulfilling your requirements
  6. Selecting the right partners
  7. Key takeaways
  8. About Paul Burns
  9. About Rackspace

1. Summary

Today, customers expect more than ever from the digital engagements they conduct with their favorite brands. Which means simple, functionally basic websites are no longer enough.

While digital customers still need a fast and easy way to find information about available product lines, business hours, and addresses, they want much more: video testimonials of products in action, real-time inventory and shipping times, and assurances that their internet purchases are safe and secure. They also crave less-tangible features. They want engagement. They want to do business with companies and brands that understand them and cater to their unique needs. In return, they reward these businesses with loyalty, referrals, and increased spending.

Businesses that want to build lasting relationships between brands and customers must offer immersive, seamless web experiences that attract and engage users. CIOs need to understand the new standard and new expectations for digital marketing, and IT leaders need to provide updated platforms for web content management, ecommerce, social media, analytics, and rich content. They also need these platforms to run on flexible, high-performance IT infrastructure so that customers can get lost in the experience — even when traffic explodes without warning.

This report will help CIOs, IT leaders, and senior technologists understand how to deliver on this new mandate and enable customer-experience management.

Key findings from this report include:

  • Experience commerce — the growing need to deliver a fusion of the best interactive customer experience with seamless online commerce — is quickly becoming the competitive differentiator for online customer engagement.
  • Enabling marketing to own and drive customer-experience management is now a core IT responsibility.
  • IT leaders must provide updated web platforms and support them with flexible, high-performance IT infrastructure.
  • Delivering on the experience commerce mandate means IT leaders must utilize updated web-content management platforms, use big data analytics, integrate ecommerce with engaging digital experiences, choose the right partners, and reliably assess architectural requirements.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Sergey Nivens/iStock.

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