Web Experience/Engagement Management (WEM) Articles

This week we continued our exploration of customer journeys and took a look at making the most of our customer data. Over in social business we talked narrative building, while in information management we went over the ways to build confidence in your SharePoint governance strategy. And remember, Memorial Day weekend means more time to read!

By anyone’s standards Salesforce has had a very good quarter in difficult economic times, reporting a growth in revenues over the quarter of 28% to US$ 893 million, just US$ 100 million shy of its first US$ 1 billion quarter, which CEO Marc Benioff says is on the way.

Curating news and social media tidbits with Storify is a handy way to create sharable, engaging Web content, and now the company has partnered with Adobe's Typekit to give that content an added dose of style.

A sales response within five minutes of obtaining an online sales lead can make or break a sale, but only five percent of companies actually respond within that time and many companies mis-estimate their own response times. Those are among the key takeaways from InsideSales.com's report on the speed of sales responses in the Internet age.

The first time I heard the term Big Content, I thought “Oh brother, Are Web CMS and ECM vendors actually sticking the word 'Big' in front of 'Content' in an attempt to jump onto the Big Data bandwagon?” 

This month’s Tweet Jam sought to learn more about the value of the customer journey and the impact that big data may have on the way we develop and evolve the customer journey. In part one, we learned that it isn’t so much how you define your customer journey or the tools you use to map it, but rather it’s important that your customer journey map advances how your company deliver customer experiences. 

For as much as digital media has evolved, marketing behaviors have remained the same. That is, we’re still quite obsessed with driving traffic back to our websites even though that often means disrupting the customer experience. Think about it -- for every link you provide to your product, you’re letting the customer leave the page that they deliberately sought out. While you might think it’s a win for you, unless it leads to something the customer actually wants, it’s probably not working as well as you think.

Discussing the customer journey is never boring. And this month’s CXMChat was no exception. We learned that the customer experience can be wiggly, there are no obvious answers and that it always helps to “get out of the building” to experience new perspectives. Let's take a closer look at how the discussion unfolded. 

Online marketers spend a ton of time and money collecting visitor data under the pretense of figuring out who their customers are and what they’re looking for. Armed with these insights, they have all they need to make significant strides in improving the customer experience. Instead, many make a couple of tweaks here, a couple of updates there and feel they've sufficiently managed the experience.

When it comes to a Web content management system, there's no end to the amount of features and services customers want or may need in the near future. Bridgeline Digital has released version 5.0 of its iAPPS WCM system, and it's added key features many businesses truly need like mobile authoring, translation and personalization.

Drupal cloud services provider Acquia has reported its revenue more than doubled in 2012, a sign open source implementations are reaching an all time high in popularity.

The last decade has seen major disruptions in software, completely reversing the power roles between vendor and user. It’s been said many times that the customer is king, and it couldn't be truer.

Online content, in store: TigerLogic's Postano on a screen at Nine West.

Consumers now have access to the Net wherever they go, and their customer experience extends from everywhere to almost everywhere. With online shopping blending into offline, CMSWire.com pinged customer experience management provider Empathica and enterprise data management/app development provider TigerLogic for their insights. 

Ever since SDL bought Fredhopper in January 2010 it has been developing the technology to optimize the online shopping experience offered by retailers. Today with the release of v7.5, it has tweaked the Fredhopper technology again to offer retailers the ability to adapt an entire product catalog to target specific shoppers.

It's that time again! We're a little over an hour away from this month's Tweet Jam on Customer Journeys -- How do we define them? What are the advantages to customer journey mapping, and how do you measure their value?