A Great Digital Experience is Within Your Grasp

Every interaction – whether it’s with a partner, a supplier or a retail customer – is an experience, including digital experiences. Lou Blatt, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at OpenText, talked with us about how organizations can take control of the digital experience to innovate and stay in front of the competition.

Businesses have undoubtedly faced huge challenges in 2020. How can digital transformation efforts help when something so dramatic happens?

Major shifts in technology have defined winners or losers. Not so long ago, when HBO was streaming movies to the home, Blockbuster was recommending late fees for late tapes. When Tower Records was considering larger stores, Pandora and Spotify were enabling digital music distribution and moving beyond physical limitations. China’s Ant Financial, now known as Ant Group, provides financial services to more than ten times as many customers as the largest US bank, with far fewer employees. To compete, companies need to accelerate digital transformation to change outside factors, whether the pandemic or digital disruption, from threats to opportunities.

It’s easy to say “transform those threats,” but how can that be done, especially while the business has to stay up and running?

It’s entirely possible to transform while remaining operational. COVID-19, coupled with emerging technologies such as 5G and AI, has accelerated change as organizations have dispersed their workforces to work from home, schools have undertaken hybrid learning models and e-commerce has grown enormously. These changes are here to stay and, to remain a player, businesses need to embrace the concept of omnichannel personalized experiences.

What do you mean by an omnichannel personalized experience? Most organizations have websites, call centers and mobile sites, and a lot have apps. Is that what you mean?

That’s part of it. But creating such an experience means embracing a digital experience platform (DXP) that gives insight into – and full control over – everything about the customer experience, all united into a single platform.

Such platforms:

1. Combine customer data and AI to deliver data-driven experiences at scale.
2. Harness customer insights by listening to and understanding customer behaviors and feelings.
3. Embrace digital asset management and creative collaboration to deliver rich experiences with video, images and other emerging digital asset types.
4. Closely manage the experience to control an ever-increasing amount of content that needs to be created, delivered and personalized at scale.
5. Ensure an omnichannel strategy that provides customers everywhere, on every platform, at every time, a personalized, rich experience.

That last one is often the first thing that comes to mind, like in your question. But, as you see, a lot of behind-the-scenes work is needed to bring it to life.

Can you give a real-world example of a company doing this?

Well, let’s look at the winner of OpenText’s 2020 Voyager Award for Digital Transformation Excellence: L’Oréal. It might seem an odd pairing at first, technology and cosmetics, but it really does make sense. Cosmetics have always been about creating a personalized experience. That applies in the digital age as well.

The first big thing for L’Oréal has been embracing e-commerce. To get to know and better serve its customers through digital channels, L’Oréal digitized and unified its marketing assets across all brands, implementing a marketing backbone platform with OpenText’s Digital Experience Platform.

L’Oréal also merged worldwide marketing asset silos with OpenText’s Media Management to govern assets based on copyright information, localizing them for specific countries to serve the brands’ multichannel content and marketing strategy.

By rolling out this platform to 30 brands, L’Oréal is well on its way to accomplishing corporate-wide digital transformation, establishing closer relationships with its customers than ever before while maintaining its brand equity and brand integrity.

If an organization has a good brand and good customer promoter scores, is it really necessary to shake everything up with such a big project?

Absolutely. Customers are everywhere, on every platform, at every time, and interacting with a huge range of systems. That’s why an omnichannel approach is so vital. It allows you to engage in relevant conversations with prospects and customers across the entire journey, from acquisition to retention. This includes all kinds of touch points: email, SMS, personalized videos, web, mobile, contact center and digital assistance. You can no longer dictate how, when or where customers interact with the company. Every possible route to your brand has to offer a great experience.

And how is OpenText continuing to innovate and help organizations with these challenges?

To make an omnichannel experience work, we have to provide comprehensive options. So OpenText has partnered with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce and SAP to co-innovate and bring to market a DXP solution designed for key stakeholders, including knowledge workers, marketers, customer service professionals and supply chain managers.

The OpenText Digital Experience is part of the OpenText Experience Cloud, announced as part of OpenText Cloud Editions (CE) 20.4. Learn more about how the OpenText™ Experience Cloud delivers key innovations to help organizations rethink customer experience and enable social commerce.