IBM’s annual Digital Experience Conference got underway this morning. Gary Dolsen kicked off the conference by announce the future of Digital Experience is mobile, contextual, and cloud-hosted. Engagement is a common need for partners, customers and employees. This engagement can now be helped with a digital experience that is consistent, includes analytics, cloud based, and omni-channel. Gary said that he thinks emotion and value drives engagement. Sites need to be emotive and provide value to keep people engaged.
IBM views their role as a provider of technologies that allow companies to implement these engagement techniques. Customers are look to transform their business model by digitizing information intensive processes. Forester excepts companies to spend $189 Billion by 2017 to transform their processes. And that won’t be the end, because transformation needs to be continuous.
In terms of a digital strategy, companies want to be hyper responsive and use lightweight technologies, but at the same time they want deep engagement, common services that will last. IBM is committed to meet this challenge in the Digital Experience platform.
Liz Miller, svp at the CMO Council talked about building unique brand experience for employees to drive engagement. Liz said that it feels like CMOs are investing in everything, but they are not confident they are investing well. CMOs say that people, processes, technology and funding are all things that are holding them back. Internal culture and processes are a first place to tackle the digital experience. Getting teams connected and cooperating needs to be the first thing CMOs do while they implement new technologies. IOT (Internet of Things) is starting to rise in marketing minds behind digital experience. Marketers are trying to rationalize IOT with other marketing tools and techniques.
Ted Schaefer at Forrester talked about the mobile mindshift. He is co-author of the book The Mobile Mindshift. People spend more time shopping from their phone
versus desktops. If we are not mobile, then we are behind. Mobile is about self service flipped on its head. Mobile can inject service into the customer experience rather than wait for the customer to seek out our website. This has enabled the age of the customer, where customers expect:
- Immediacy
- Simplicity
- Context and personal experiences
The mindshift is the expectation that i can get what I need at the location and moment I need it. Ted said that the mindshift will penetrate to the heart of you business. Lowes is spending $1.5 billion dollars to support the mobile mindshift by building new distribution centers to get products closer to customers for “immediate” delivery.
There are 177 million websites. 77% are mobilizing websites, but only 38% of web pages are being mobilized. 62% use responsive techniques and 50% are building native apps.
Ted talked about context in terms of Systems of Engagement, Systems of Record, Systems of Automation (IOT & others), and Systems of Insight. Systems of Insights drive the mobile engagement platform. There is a direct linkage of Systems of Engagement and Systems of Insights. These two systems are typically embodied in Digital Experience platforms.
Ted recommends to Stop Doing These Things:
- Treating mobile as small web
- Treat UX as an afterthought
- Invest in web-only architectures
- Host your own servers and build everything yourself
- Treat analytics as an afterthought
You should Start Doing These Things:
- Understand mobile moments
- Make the experience the priority
- Invest in four tier architectures
- Look at cloud providers with solutions and best practices
- Power engagement with insights
