Mystery Solved: Experience Makers Digital Guide to Creating Stand-out Experiences

Customer experience is certainly not a new topic for readers of this blog. Its meaning has morphed and taken on a life of its own, into a kind of catch-all, catchy phrase. And now, with more quantifiable evidence of the material benefits, including reductions of 10-20 percent in cost to serve or 10-15 percent in revenue growth stemming from customer experience improvements, organizations see the value in efforts to measure and improve the experiences of their customers, partners, and employees.

In our research too we see that enterprises in the high-tech sector are focusing on ramping up digital engagement to thwart competitive threats and meet customer expectations. Our latest global high-tech research with Ovum surveyed more than 200 marketing directors, marketing managers, and digital marketing managers, and found that 76 percent of respondents indicated that improving the quality of customer experience was the most important digital capability.

We know great customer experiences when we experience them, and certainly take note when an experience doesn’t meet our expectations. But with multiple customer touchpoints across many channels, how does a company know what experiences are most meaningful to customers, and then replicate this to consistently deliver great customer experiences?

I decided to dig into this topic and share some best-practice examples and the path to bringing such experiences to life on a consistent basis. To do this, I worked with NorthPage to identify experience pitfalls and best practices. The following high-tech web and mobile pages provide concrete examples of what experiences are better and why. But understanding good, better, and best experiences is the first step. Critical is the ability to produce those great experiences efficiently across all your customer touchpoints. So I asked Kyle Chau, principal solution consultant at Adobe, to review a couple of common challenges depicted in these examples and then share his insights on how to create great customer experiences time and time again.

Key challenge: Call-to-action experience

Kyle, in the following examples, what recommendations do you have on how to improve the customer experience?

In many cases, we know that corporate websites are often created by teams of subject matter experts working in different departments, locations, and geographies, and externally (for example, agencies or consultants). These teams create and curate content that is being consumed by customers, and, more importantly, prospective customers through different touchpoints and channels. In the high-tech sector, this content can take many forms, from online pages and videos to white papers and reports.

Generally, there are three routes that guide a customer to content:

Site navigation,
Site search, and
A marketing landing page, typically targeted for lead generation.

The first two routes are typically created with guidance from the teams of subject matter experts, the customer’s experience to the target content is well scripted as a curated journey of discovery. Site navigation, for example, is crafted to take a visitor through a journey of discovery and refinement to reach the final content goal. Site search allows the visitor to quickly locate the content goal through metadata, and subject matter experts have tags on the content during the creation and curation process.

It’s with the third route mentioned that we usually face customer experience challenges. The teams that typically create marketing landing pages are usually not the subject matter experts and, therefore, are not familiar with the content goal. Instead, these landing pages are executed by a team of marketers following instructions from a campaign brief, commonly using basic landing page templates and manually filling in the details provided in the campaign brief, including the final link to the call to action.

So, it is up to the marketer creating the landing page to update the generic labels and captions in these templates, including the call-to-action submission button on the landing page. When this call-to-action label is not tailored to the experience, however, it leads to higher rates of abandonment. In the example below with the label of “Continue” versus “Download Gartner MQ Report,” the “Continue” label implies to the visitor that there are additional steps in the process before receiving the Gartner MQ Report.

With Adobe Experience Manager, marketers can create landing pages with intelligent page templates and components that are contextually appropriate, taking the onus away from the marketer for content that can be filled in systematically. In the example below, the marketer would provide the call-to-action component — just the link to the Gartner MQ Report. This component accesses the metadata that was tagged by the subject matter expert as part of the content creation and curation. The metadata that the component receives back will automatically populate the call-to-action caption, in turn eliminating the need for the marketer to manually make any edits to ensure alignment with the content goal.

The example above shows a basic use case of using metadata to inform a call-to-action component. In the example below, the call-to-action component is using more complex metadata attributes, an image metadata attribute instead of just plain text.

With Adobe Experience Manager Assets, a digital management tool for video assets, a content subject matter expert can associate a static image thumbnail for the video. This thumbnail can be extracted from a frame within the video, and within AEM Assets the curator can scrub through the video to mark the frame for the static image, or upload a static image that the creative team has provided with the video. By using the video thumbnailing in the call-to-action component, the experience is more engaging than a simple hyperlink to the video.

This example above shows how the different teams’ subject matter experts (who are curators of the content and assets), marketers (who create the marketing landing pages), and developers (who develop the templates and components), are working together seamlessly to create an engaging customer experience. Adobe Experience Manager makes the coordination effortless for the teams working on the website.

With large teams of subject matter experts and marketers working on corporate websites, it’s hard for the brand to ensure a consistent customer experience specially around a basic call to action. Adobe Experience Manager can simplify how the different teams manage and coordinate their activity and ensure a consistent and intended brand experience.

To learn more about Adobe Experience Manager and how it can help you deliver awe-inspiring experiences time and time again, click here.