CXM Perspectives: How OpenText Approaches Customer Experience

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Feb 1, 2012

OpenText sits at the top of Gartner's list for Web Content Management and customer experience. The vendor took major strides in 2011 to ensure that its technology enables organizations to truly engage and support their customers. And it isn't done yet.

All the Elements of Customer Experience

Customer Experience Management (CXM) is huge. It's made up of so many different elements and includes both online and offline relationships with both customers and potential customers (prospects), and employees. OpenText is one of a number of vendors focused on bringing together all the technology required to support that customer experience. And to provide the right technologies, you need to have a vision. And that — OpenText clearly has.

It's About More Than Marketing

This is a theme you will hear from OpenText throughout this year. Customer experience management (CXM) is more than a marketing function. According to Marci Maddox, Director Global Product Marketing at OpenText, customer experience management needs to be core to your entire business. It's about employing the strategies and associated technologies that enable every employee in your organization to get to know the customers better. This is also a focus not just of the online customer experience but offline as well, so things like print, digital signage, peer to peer and lots more.

OpenText thinks of it in two core terms:

The Lifetime Value of your Customer, and
The Lifetime Value of your Content

What is critical, says Maddox, is finding your customers throughout the lifecycle and applying technology to contextualize the experience at that particular stage. It's also critical to capture data on that experience and analyze it, using it to make the experience, and the one after that (and the one after that) even better. Customers want to feel known, not just in a single channel, or for a single interaction, but across all channels and time.

To achieve this level of customer experience takes more than the marketing department, it takes the entire company working together. And what we know is that happy employees almost always result in happy customers. So you need to ensure you are employing the tools and process necessary to enable your employees to do their best work (ultimately making them happy in their jobs), and this in turn will produce a brand that customers love and want to work with/buy from. Maddox described this to me a while ago as "big C (customer), little C (internal customer — or employee)."

What OpenText Brings to the CXM Table

There are a number of Customer Engagement Solutions in the mix here from OpenText, including:

Online Marketing
Management of Global Brands
Social Business
Customer Communications Management
Customer Self Services (these are CXM solutions for specific verticals)

OpenText solutions are a mix of on-premises and cloud-based offerings.

Getting into the Cloud

Maddox told me that CXM is tied to business processes and many of these processes are already hosted in the cloud. Although many regulated industries are unsure that cloud-based offerings are viable for them, OpenText does have security and compliance capabilities that will make a move to the cloud easier for organizations.

OpenText sees major shifts in the IT department as organizations move their apps and content into the cloud. New titles such as Web IT and Web Business IT will pop up for what were formerly IT resources. IT staff will be able to move away from day to day maintenance and focus on things like analytics and data queries — tasks that are much more important to the organization.