April 2019 Omer Minkara VP & Principal Analyst Contact Center & Customer Experience Management LinkedIn, Twitter

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CONTENT-DRIVEN CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES: OPTIMIZE YOUR CONTENT TO ELEVATE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE RESULTS

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This report highlights the business value and best practices companies use to optimize content used throughout the customer lifecycle. We’ll observe the building blocks needed to use content to maximize business performance.

The ROI of Orchestrating a Seamless Content Strategy in CX

Customer experience has become more than just a buzzword. Companies that truly understand and address the expectations of their current and potential customers achieve far superior results, compared to firms that don’t. And this isn’t just true for firms selling to consumers.

Between December 2018 and January 2019, Aberdeen surveyed 369 businesses regarding their customer experience (CX) strategy and results. The findings from this survey revealed that managing customer experiences is a key strategic business objective for 86% of B2B firms (companies selling directly to businesses).

While all companies would aim to have happy and loyal customers, not all firms can achieve this outcome. The CX survey revealed that the ability to provide each customer the right information to help them make educated decisions is the number one challenge impacting CX leaders across B2B firms.

The second top challenge impacting these firms is the ability to seamlessly orchestrate customer journeys across all channels. This is a daunting task given the complexity of today’s customer interaction channel-mix. To this point, the CX survey shows that 51% of B2B firms use at least 10 channels (e.g., web, email, social media, chat) to interact with current and potential buyers. Adding channels to the CX channel-mix is easy. The challenging part is using each channel in such a way that the content provided to customers across each channel provides a consistent and personalized experience.

To uncover the role of content optimization in helping CX leaders overcome the above challenges, we separated the 369 respondents from our CX survey into two groups. First is a group of companies that self-reported having processes and technologies in place to optimize the content they use in customer interactions across all channels — see sidebar.

For clarity, content optimization doesn’t strictly refer to activities such as campaign management or search engine optimization. Rather, it refers to a more strategic approach to bridge the organizational silos within the business

Definition: Companies Optimizing Content

For the purposes of this research, Aberdeen refers to ‘companies that optimize content used in customer interactions’ to describe firms orchestrating a content strategy that enables seamlessly managing the end-to-end content lifecycle (planning, creation, distribution, management and analytics) in alignment with the customer experience strategy.

Content refers to the written and visual information and experiences companies provide to their current and potential customers. Examples include product images, videos, product sheets, text used in landing pages, etc.

Specifically, optimizing content means establishing content integrity across the enterprise where all stakeholders in the business (e.g., marketing, sales and customer service) use the right content when managing conversations at each phase of the customer journeys.

It also means ensuring consistency of the content-driven customer experiences across all customer interaction channels, geographies and product lines of the business.

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by using content to avoid delivering fragmented customer experiences. This requires dynamic views into customer journeys, identifying the stakeholders interacting with customers at each stage of these journeys, determining what content they use, as well as when, where and how they use it to achieve common objectives. Of the 369 participating firms to our survey, 65% indicated they currently use a technology platform to optimize use of content across the entire customer lifecycle — ranging from marketing programs to raise awareness to the purchase process with sales, onboarding experience with client success, and support activities through customer service.

The second group in our analysis comprised companies that don’t use such a platform. To reveal how content optimization influences company performance, we compared the year-over-year performance changes across these two groups. Figure 1 shows that firms optimizing content enjoy 48% greater annual improvement in customer lifetime value (11.4% vs. 7.7%) – a metric measured by the total spend a customer makes with a business through the course of the buyer / seller relationship.

Improving this metric requires firms to meet and exceed the needs of their clientele. It also requires increasing customer spend over time by driving customers to purchase more products, renew subscriptions to company services or buy related products / services. The favorable results enjoyed by firms optimizing content means that content optimization not only helps maximize the likelihood of potential buyers to purchase a product, it also helps firms retain clients and grow their spend over time.

Figure 1: Firms That Optimize Content Make It Easy for Buyers to Do Business with Them & Earn Customer Loyalty

11.4% 11.4%

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Improvement in customer effortscore

Customer lifetime value

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Companies that Optimize Content Used inCustomer InteractionsAll Others

Source: Aberdeen, March 2019

Savvy CX leaders use a technology platform connecting all business departments through an integrated content program.

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For companies to retain their clientele and grow their spend, they must make it easy for customers to get their needs addressed. In other words, minimize customer effort across the entire customer lifecycle. Customers’ needs may be anything from getting price information, learning product features or receiving support. Content plays a key role in providing customers with the information to fulfill various needs throughout the customer lifecycle. Figure 1 shows that firms optimizing their content achieve 2.9x greater annual improvement (decrease) in customer effort scores (11.4% vs. 4.0%). That’s because firms with this capability establish clear visibility into customer journeys and provide customers with the right content to make it easier / effortless to get their needs addressed.

Figure 2 shows that content optimization isn’t just helping firms maximize their CX results. It also helps them enrich financial results. Specifically, firms optimizing content report that they achieve 19.3x greater annual improvement (shortening) of their average sales cycle (7.7% vs. 0.4%). This means that it takes a shorter period for these B2B firms to move a qualified sales opportunity to a customer purchase. In addition to such sales pipeline acceleration, when firms optimize their content they also report 2.4x greater annual improvement in overall sales team attainment of quota (14.4% vs. 5.9%). That’s because firms optimizing content empower sellers with the right content they need to improve sales rep productivity and performance.

Figure 2: Content Optimization Helps Savvy CX Leaders Maximize Sales Effectiveness & Drive Financial Success

In most B2B firms, an important part of Marketing’s role is supporting Sales with a pipeline of qualified opportunities to close. The above-mentioned improvements in shortening the sales cycle and sales team attainment of quota can also be attributed to marketers doing a better job educating prospects about the company and its products / services and generating more qualified

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Revenue from net-new customers

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Companies that Optimize Content Used inCustomer InteractionsAll Others

Source: Aberdeen, March 2019

Content managed in an ad-hoc manner means that your CX program is also executed in an ad-hoc manner / poorly. To achieve your CX objectives, you must tightly align content used in customer interactions across the entire customer lifecycle.

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opportunities for sellers to turn into closed business. In other words, content optimization helps marketers with demonstrable business impact in driving revenue growth for the business.

Figure 2 also shows that firms optimizing their content observe 2.4x greater year-over-year increase in their annual revenue (15.1% vs. 5.4%). This increase is fueled by growth in revenue from both net-new customers as well as referral revenue. The latter is the revenue observed by net-new clients who spend money with the business as a result of a referral from an existing client.

Firms optimizing content report far superior annual improvement across both revenue metrics — meaning that optimizing content across the entire customer lifecycle isn’t just helping companies acquire more net-new buyers, it also helps ‘activate’ loyal and satisfied clients by increasing the likelihood for them to share positive experiences and drive incremental revenue through these referrals.

Building Blocks to Optimize Your Content Across the Enterprise

It’s clear that content optimization is an invaluable activity for CX leaders. Let’s now look at the top capabilities adopted more widely by companies that excel in content optimization.

One of the most widely adopted capabilities by companies optimizing content is delivering content-driven omni-channel customer experiences. This refers to tailoring content used in each customer conversation to align with the context of the customer journey while maintaining consistency of the customer experience throughout this journey. Figure 3 shows that firms optimizing content are 74% more likely to have this capability (87% vs. 50%).

Figure 3: Key Activities to Deliver Truly Personalized & Consistent Content

87% 84%76%

50% 49% 47%

30%

50%

70%

90%

Deliver consistent andpersonalized customer

experiences fueled by trulytargeted content

Analyze how content influencescustomer experience results byvarious criteria (e.g., product,

demographics)

Analyze how unique customersegments (by spend, loyalty)

interact with content

Percent of respondents, n=369

Companies that Optimize Content Used inCustomer InteractionsAll Others

Source: Aberdeen, March 2019

Firms optimizing their content achieve sales and marketing effectiveness.

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Delivering omni-channel customer experiences means that the customer experience is consistent not just in one phase of the customer lifecycle (e.g., awareness), but rather across the entire lifecycle, including onboarding, support and loyalty. Hence, it requires all stakeholders involved in managing customer conversations to communicate and collaborate effectively so the content lifecycle in the business aligns and evolves with the customer lifecycle.

To tailor content for each customer, companies must have a deep and accurate understanding of their current and potential buyers. To do that, firms with optimized content analyze how different customer segments interact with content across all stages of the customer lifecycle (Figure 3). Segmentation can be done by grouping customers into categories by their total spend, duration of being a client, demographics, etc.

Segmentation establishes visibility into how different customer groups engage with content, what information they need at different stages, etc., so the company can adopt a more data-driven approach in using content when managing conversations with customers in each group. This is particularly important given that our CX survey shows that 73% of firms struggle with using account data to manage customer conversations. Segmenting customers into different groups and analyzing their interaction with content allows adopting and implementing a truly data-driven CX program.

Figure 3 shows that, in addition to analyzing how different customer segments interact with content, savvy CX leaders also conduct root-cause analysis of how content influences CX results. Root-cause analysis can be done by using business intelligence tools integrated within content platforms to uncover hidden insights. Those insights can reveal content that’s most likely to drive buyers to buy a related product / services. They can also reveal content that’s most likely to maximize the adoption rate of a technology product so the company buying it observes greater benefits. Firms optimizing content are 71% more likely to have this capability (84% vs. 49%).

Analytics can be used to uncover a wealth of insights. We recommend firms to first determine an objective (e.g., minimize customer churn), so they can then use analytics to observe which content is more likely to be related to that outcome. Following this approach, all stakeholders across the business can learn how they can utilize content in a more intelligent way to achieve their departmental goals as well as the company-wide CX objectives.

One of the mistakes CX leaders make when using analytics is not ensuring that the customer data they analyze is complete, relevant and accurate. In other words, they don’t ensure that the data they use to analyze represents a holistic view of all the historical and recent customer interactions captured across all

Your content strategy must be truly integrated with the entire customer journey. It must focus on managing the end-to-end content lifecycle for all business departments influencing customer experiences.

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channels. As such, when analyzing how customers engage with content, the results of this analysis may be skewed if the company doesn’t have a holistic view of the customer journey.

Figure 4 shows that savvy CX leaders understand the importance of building and maintaining accurate customer insights to optimize content. It shows that firms optimizing content are 2.1x more likely to enrich internal account data stored in systems such as CRM and other in-house systems with external data (e.g., customer-generated social media content) to build a holistic view of customer journeys (70% vs. 33%). This capability is particularly important as it helps all employees across the business with the same view of customer data at the same time. Establishing a consistent view of the customer data across the business ultimately enables employees to ensure the consistency of customer experiences driven through the content used across all stages of the customer lifecycle involving multiple business departments.

Figure 4: Enrich Your Content Optimization Efforts with Greater Intelligence and Empower Employees to Seamlessly Manage Content

Figure 4 also shows that firms optimizing content are 52% more likely to equip all employees interacting with customers with templatized content (50% vs. 37%). This refers to providing employees with the ability to customize certain aspects of content (e.g., parts of an email, images on a web page) while maintaining brand consistency. For example, marketers can update a product page on the company website by using content that better resonates with changing buyer preferences while keeping the user experience and branding consistent with the rest of the web site — without needing support from IT for coding.

70%

59%

50%

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37%

10%

30%

50%

70%

Enrich internal account data withexternal data (e.g., customer-

generated social media content) fora holistic view of customers

Use AI-enabled contentrecommendation capabilities tohelp employees find and use the

right content when managingcustomer journeys

Equip customer-facing staff withtemplatized content to reduce

content management costs,decrease reliance on IT and ensure

brand consistencyPercent of respondents, n=369

Companies that Optimize Content Used inCustomer InteractionsAll Others

Source: Aberdeen, March 2019

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Even though content may be optimized for buyer preferences today, this doesn’t guarantee that this content will be optimal in the future. That’s because customer behavior is not static. It’s dynamic — meaning that it changes over time. To keep up with those changes, firms must closely track changing customer behavior and preferences with the help of analytics. Enabled with those analytics-driven insights, employees can continuously adjust content to address evolving buyer needs. For example, if the marketing team observes that buyers of a certain product increasingly prefer watching videos to educate themselves on different product features, they can then incorporate more videos when engaging these buyers.

Analyzing vast volumes of customer data isn’t easy. The good news is that AI capabilities help augment employees with this activity. CX leaders can use machine learning capability to utilize software that observes and learns changing customer behavior. They are also enabled with prescriptive intelligence tools that provide next-best action guidance for employees across all departments on which content to use to achieve specific outcomes with different buyer groups.

To give an example of how these capabilities work together, machine learning can be programmed to analyze customer renewals by observing the journey different clients take before renewing a service program. It would then learn of various ways to guide other customers subscribed to the same service program to renew their service. When a customer success manager would engage customers to renew their subscription, an AI-enabled content platform can provide recommendation to the employee on which content to use to maximize the likelihood of renewal based on the unique journey of each client. This helps companies improve employee productivity by supporting employees across all departments through technology to become more data-driven in using content to guide customer experiences. Figure 4 shows that firms optimizing content are 2.1x more likely to have this capability (59% vs. 28%).

Key Takeaways

Content is a key driver of customer / company conversations. Optimizing the use of content across the entire customer lifecycle must be a top priority for all CX leaders aiming to achieve their objectives. Businesses that know how to use the right content with the right customer at the right point of the customer journey outpace competitors across a variety of CX and financial measures. They retain more clients, grow customer spend, and enjoy significant increase in annual revenue. In turn, their customers report that these firms are easier to do business with. While the payoff is significant, achieving success in optimizing content isn’t easy.

Use AI capabilities to turn vast volumes of customer data into actionable insights guiding your content optimization activities.

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The good news is that the findings in this report reveal that there are already numerous savvy organizations that successfully use content to bridge organizational silos and deliver truly personalized and consistent customer experiences across the entire customer lifecycle. These firms don’t have any secret recipes. Rather, they use a series of activities to drive their success.

If your performance trails that of the businesses optimizing content or if you know that you’re already challenged with this activity, we highly recommend you observe the key capabilities listed across Figures 3 and 4 of this report to find which of those capabilities are currently missing in your business. Prioritize those capabilities that you don’t have by determining which ones you can implement more quickly to achieve rapid performance gains. We recommend repeating this process until you incorporate all the building blocks within your CX activities. If you’re just establishing a CX program, and need recommendations on where to get started with optimizing your content to achieve your goals, we recommend following the below order:

• Establish accurate, relevant and complete view into customer journeys. Integrate your disparate systems to build a single view of customer data and enrich existing insights with external data to truly know your customers’ journeys.

• Observe how content influences customer behavior through all stages of the customer lifecycle. Use business intelligence tools to conduct root-cause analysis and determine hidden correlations on how content is linked with certain results such as increased customer spend, customer referrals and renewals.

• Use analytics and AI capabilities to incorporate greater intelligence into your content optimization efforts. Capabilities such as next-best action guidance allow augmenting employees across the entire business to boost their productivity and efficiency and improve the ability to use data to achieve desired customer experience outcomes.

Related Research

Customer Experience Executive's Agenda 2019: Minimize Customer Effort through Intelligent Journey Management; March 2019

The Top Ten Technologies CX Leaders Are Planning to Adopt in 2019; December 2018

Customer Analytics: Connect Data to Insight to Results; May 2018

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Artificial Intelligence in Customer Experience: How AI Influences Results; March 2018

About Aberdeen Group

Since 1988, Aberdeen Group has published research that helps businesses worldwide to improve their performance. Our analysts derive fact-based, vendor-neutral insights from a proprietary analytical framework, which identifies Best-in-Class organizations from primary research conducted with industry practitioners. The resulting research content is used by hundreds of thousands of business professionals to drive smarter decision-making and improve business strategies. Aberdeen Group is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA.

This document is the result of primary research performed by Aberdeen Group and represents the best analysis available at the time of publication. Unless otherwise noted, the entire contents of this publication are copyrighted by Aberdeen Group and may not be reproduced, distributed, archived, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written consent by Aberdeen Group.

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