From the largest enterprises to the most nimble mid-market organizations, all customer experience relies on smart planning and sound technology platforms.
Empowered organizations from medium to large enterprises architect the future of Intelligent Customer Experiences with the help of [A] platform engineers.
[A]'s Platform Engineering teams assess the technology landscape holistically in close collaboration with IT and business stakeholders. The resulting plans move faster towards approval and implementation, and go farther after deployment, than organizations working without the benefit of [A] best practices support.
Bridge the gap between customer experience strategy and intelligent content systems implementation with [A].
Authoring Tools and Author Experience
Ensuring authoring experiences are user-friendly and that content teams understand how to use the tools is a crucial foundational step often overlooked by internal teams and system integrators.
[A] optimizes best-fit content acquisition solutions for individual authoring teams. These solutions sometimes involve multiple authoring paradigms to accommodate non-technical, design, VIP, and other contributors along with more technical content specialists and semantic annotation teams.
Content creation should not be hindered by our tools, but streamlined by them. Bad CX starts with bad authoring experiences; and, likewise, good CX starts with our contributors.
Architect for Intelligent Customer Experience
Needless to say, without the technology to power them, ICX initiatives must only remain in the realm of 'good ideas' or 'good intentions'. To become real, the overall systems architecture and toolsets must support dynamic experience assembly.
Contextual customer interactions are assembled from high-availability content and context stores exposed as services, and brought together with semantics. Connecting content technology isn't just an integration project, from system A to system B. Good content technology interactions happen through the careful application of architectural patterns.
Some of the brightest IT and martech enablement teams on earth, from some of the biggest software and technologies companies, have turned to [A] for architectural insight and guidance. So, too, have mid-market clients trusted [A] over the years to steer and manage upgrade and modernization cycles.
Assess and Understand, Then Fix and Streamline
It's a big and constantly changing landscape of content technology out there. Teams are faced with questions like:
-
How well do our current systems actually work today?
-
What platform improvements are needed to clean up our technology?
-
How do we get ahead of our technical debt at the system and content levels?
-
Do our content platforms roadmaps match the needs of our CX roadmap?
-
How do we integrate the systems that support intelligent customer experience?
[A] helps orient teams, perform health checks on existing systems, and design a roadmap for the architecture and technology selection process in order to support a practical ICX roadmap in phases.
Selection and Planning: Finding the Right Vein of Gold in Mountains of Martech Software
Marketing technology is a mess. We all know it. There are endless SaaS and installed apps to help the entire customer interaction lifecycle and to help collect and analyze data in minute detail. If only it all worked together. Almost every system carries content. Most carry tags and semantics. How do we stitch together a complete picture?
Organizations need clarifying principles to guide orchestration of customer experiences, rather than depending on a strategy that sounds something like, "buy first, figure out how it works together later". How do we identify and select new content technology?
[A] helps make sense of the environment. Assess what is best-fit not in theory, but in practical use, along with the rest of an ecosystem. Use an [A] methodology and set of guiding principles adapted for your enterprise to identify, select, and build the implementation requirements and plan that will reduce risks and increase chances of success with new technology.
Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) Content API Design
To move efficiently, structured content needs to become available to other systems via content API endpoints.
CaaS is not nearly as hard to accomplish as it used to be, when structured content practices were not native to most CMS platforms. There are lots of ways to expose a content API, including via headless or a hybrid CMS platform-native API, or using a Content Services Platform (CSP) native APIs. Or, the CaaS can be internally created and managed as API endpoints provided off of a content pool that has been custom-built.
When it comes time to work all that out, [A] can help sort out the details and weigh various scenarios for the health of the overall ecosystem and
content supply chain.
Customer Experience Testing for Dynamic Experiences
Functionality and usability are where the rubber meets the road with customer experience. [A] doesn't replace an agency's or marketing department's existing work in this area, but rather augments it with a focus on collecting and providing data on personalized variants and content asset performance.
Implementation and Integration
When it comes time to re-platform, [A] helps make sure the final solution works to support an overall ICX strategy. Whether as primary producer for the implementation, or as consulting engineers, [A] has the flexibility to add value where the enterprise needs gaps filled.
Rebuild. Re-architect. Plan migrations. Transform content. If it's hard content plumbing and wiring, [A] has done it. The secret is — no platform stands alone when it comes to customer experience, and no implementation should be done without close ties to
content strategy,
content engineering, and content operations.
DevOps and ContentOps Systems and Tools
Continuous integration and deployment have been the state-of-the-art for development for awhile. And yet, what about content?
Make sure CX is supported by both development practices that keep code flowing, and content practices that keep omnichannel experiences flowing. Useful for stretched teams, smaller teams, and emerging teams, [A] can help.
Analysis and Quality Assurance for Content and CX
Quality cannot be an afterthought. It has to be part of the software development lifecycle and the content lifecycle. There's a gate between a developer and customer that's natural and needed. The same function needs to exist for content and the metadata that brings it to life. There's a real impact to identifying clear requirements for customer experiences.
The [A] QA team can become part of and integrated into internal team development cycles. Analyze content impact and optimize accordingly. Manage quality during a project, or as part of an ongoing management routine. Ensure that what stakeholders and clients expect and describe matches what is actually delivered, across variants.
Ongoing Engineering Lifecycle Support
Systems and processes are living entities that evolve over time due to changing requirements and the hyper-fast changing technology landscape. [A] offers clients the peace of mind of ongoing support after deployment (if desirable).