A significant driver for needing to change platforms is when your business undergoes a significant digital transformation effort. Typically, a company chooses to undertake a digital transformation because they need to change the experiences their customers have with their brand. Usually, that means some amount of change in systems in order.

Reason #5: Your Business is undertaking a Digital Transformation

The first common type of digital transformation is to provide direct-to-customer (DTC) ordering of goods and services, which bypasses physical stores as the point of shopping and delivery. For a company wanting to undertake this type of transformation, you may have to replace several systems or augment them with additional systems and platforms.

For example, the physical store might rely on an inventory model of what a customer sees is available on the shelf. But when as you transition to a digital world, you need to tell the customer whether they can or cannot purchase an item. To do this, you need to have a system that can accurately track inventory as it sells, arrives, and even locate where it may be in the supply chain. This may involve evaluating and selecting several systems as part of our digital transformation effort.

The Second Type of Digital Transformation

In this situation, you can personalize the customer experience every time they interact with your company. This can be a very complex transformation, as each customer can have many different types of interactions and experiences. During this transformation effort, you must simplify this complexity by defining consumer personas and journeys.

A persona describes a typical type or category of customer, think of a senior citizen, for example, and they can be very detailed. A journey describes typical interactions that these personas have with your brand. The combination of personas and journeys helps you identify the types of experiences you need, and the messaging and personalization you need at every touch point. This type of information inevitably exposes gaps in your current systems. You will need a new system that will let you deliver the personalized customer experiences your digital transformation desires.

The Third Type of Digital Transformation

You may be thinking of moving to cloud-based technology. In the past few years, it has become more feasible and more economical to move IT work to shared data centers managed by companies such as Amazon, Google, RedHat, Microsoft, IBM, and others. Additionally, many software companies find it better to offer cloud-based systems rather than systems you have to install yourself. Salesforce is a great example of a cloud-based system that your business can use where you don’t have to install it on your servers. Microsoft Office has been moving to this cloud-based software model as well.

Since the cloud software model is so successful, other businesses are looking to move internal hardware and software to the cloud as well. To make this transformation happen successfully, businesses will need to select new systems and platforms that are cloud-enabled or cloud-ready.

How We Can Help

To help you find the right platform, learn more about our Platform Selection Jumpstart, which helps your business by evaluating your technology needs and key requirements to help you find and choose the right platform to alleviate your current issues and provide successful business outcomes in six weeks. Feel free to read through our reasons to replatform blog series to revisit certain information.

For any questions, contact our customer experience experts today.

Peter Drucker said, “The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.” This is often the case when a new leader is hired, whether it’s a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Customer Experience Officer (CCX0), or any other CxO. When making such a leadership change, the board or CEO is often looking for a change in strategy, direction, execution, or operations.

Reason #4: You’re Looking to or Hired a New CMO, CIO, or CXO

There are a couple of scenarios in which a change in leadership will trigger the evaluation or selection of a new digital experience platform. This first scenario is far more common and follows this pattern: A new CMO or CCXO will likely have responsibility for the company’s digital experiences, and their first initiative will be to develop an overall digital or customer experience strategy for the organization.

When we help an organization develop a strategy, we determine customer and business expectations and the current state of the technology, resources, and operations. Next, as we develop the vision and strategy, we identify gaps between future technology needs and the current state. When these gaps are significant, it’s time to evaluate new platforms.

Consider Another Scenario

When the new CxO is hired, they often want to bring in resources and systems with which they are most familiar and experienced and previously provided success. In this scenario, the leader arrives knowing that the existing system is not going to meet their needs, and replacing it with something better will be imperative. However, it is often not acceptable just to proclaim one platform as the new replacement without going through some formal evaluation or RFP process.

So, what should you do?

In either scenario, it is important to follow a sound process for selecting a new platform, as you should expect to use the system for at least five years. Our selection process starts with understanding and prioritizing requirements, then using those requirements to evaluate the major vendors in the market. After you narrow it down to a few vendors that will meet most of those requirements, experiencing hands-on demos to see the systems live and better understand how they work will be key in your decision-making.

You should also take into account the costs of the systems at this time. You may ask, “Why not evaluate costs for all vendors at the beginning?” While it’s not a bad thing to consider, the truth is that many vendors are reluctant to share costs without jumping into complicated sales processes. It’s not worth putting your business through that process if a vendor has no chance of meeting your requirements. You’ll be in good shape to make your final decision when you have all of your information on your leading contenders.

How We Can Help

To help you find the right platform, learn more about our Platform Selection Jumpstart, which helps your business by evaluating your technology needs and essential requirements to help you find and choose the right platform to alleviate your current issues and provide successful business outcomes in six weeks. In the meantime, stay tuned for the final installation of our #reasonstoreplatform series. For any questions, contact our customer experience experts today.

If you follow the customer experience or marketing technology market with any regularity, you’ll notice platform vendors are always releasing newer versions of their systems. Sometimes those releases are very incremental changes such as small updates or fixes. However, major new features and capabilities are sometimes put into the market that will shake up the competition.

Reason #3: New Features Appearing in the Market That Your System Doesn’t Have (And Should)

Adding newer features and functionalities can certainly stir the pot and make certain vendors feel like they’re falling behind. An even more disruptive scenario is when two vendors merge two platforms with complementary capabilities into a single feature-rich offering.

Here are some examples from recent years:

• Episerver, a content management vendor merged with Optimizely’s optimization platform to create several Optimizely cloud platforms.
• Sitecore acquired Stylelabs to add digital asset management (DAM) and marketing resource management capabilities to the Sitecore Digital Experience Platform (DXP).
• Adobe acquired several companies to build out their DXP and marketing platforms.
• Acquia bought Widen to add DAM capabilities to the Acquia Cloud.

You may look at your current platform and wonder when it will update with those features you craved for several years. If the vendor is small with limited resources, you might have to set your expectations low.

What you should consider

Rather than change your expectations, you could start looking for a new platform instead. While it can be costly to switch platforms, the newer capabilities that you’re missing may make the investment completely worthwhile. We see a lot of companies struggle with managing digital assets and saving time, profits, and frustration may justify switching to the new DXP that includes DAM capabilities.

How should you start the process of looking for that new platform?

You don’t want to chase the “whiz-bang” or clever-sounding features to the exclusion of the core platform. Artificial intelligence (AI) can offer some compelling capabilities, but authors have to enter content into the system and need a good environment for creating content.

You need to start with understanding all the requirements you have now and can anticipate needing them in the future. If you are a large organization looking for a single platform, you’ll want to include all the stakeholders in this effort. Use a critical eye to identify these requirements and only include those that are truly needed. A development manager once told me they previously gathered several requirements and built as many into the system as possible, but when they analyzed how the system was used, only 10-20% of the requirements were ever used. Additionally, you can seek out expert advice on if those new capabilities will be useful to your organization.

How we can help with your platform selection

Perficient’s Platform Selection Jumpstart is designed to guide you through requirements prioritization and vendor evaluation activities in as little as six weeks. These time savings allow you to plan and start implementing the new system before your license runs out. And, stay tuned for our next installation of the reasons to replatform series.

For any other questions, contact our customer experience experts today.

In this second installment of our five-part blog series, we’ll talk about the second reason customers decide to seek out a new system. Let’s get back into it.

Reason #2: Licenses for the current system are expiring or the system is discontinuing

When you signed the license agreement for your current platform, chances are you agreed to a 3-5 year deal. Whether that deal was for a perpetual license or a yearly subscription, a multi-year agreement probably saved you a lot of money. But now it’s time to renew the subscription or the maintenance contract, and the price has increased significantly. If you can’t justify the increased costs, it’s time to look for a new system.

Related to licensing, another reason to look for a new system is that the vendor declared an end to life of the system. The vendor may be leaving the business, selling the software to another company, or will only support a newer version of the system. In any case, the vendor will stop supporting the system in the future, and you need to find a replacement.

What you should consider

You may want to upgrade the system to the latest version, especially if you have been a satisfied customer. Many vendors provide easier upgrades to newer versions and can preserve some or all your existing content.

However, you should do your due diligence and explore the available systems in the market. Other vendors may now offer better solutions, lower pricing, or improved experiences. It certainly doesn’t hurt to quickly evaluate the leading platforms just to see if a new system will be better for your needs.

If you haven’t examined your business or system requirements recently, you should take the time to identify and prioritize your requirements. You may have originally wanted several special features in your current system, only to find out nobody used those features. As time has gone by, your users may be clamoring for newer features that are not part of your current platform. By focusing on your current and future requirements, you can objectively evaluate whether a different platform will be better for you to switch to.

Time may be your enemy when faced with any of these license-related issues. For an end-of-life situation, the vendor may give you a couple of years before shutting off support. But we find customers often delay the platform decision until there’s less than a year available. The same applies to end-of-contract situations. Sometimes you can get the vendor to extend your current contract or license, but you may be forced to find a new system in only a few months.

Here’s how we can help

Perficient’s Platform Selection Jumpstart is designed to guide you through requirements prioritization and vendor evaluation activities in as little as six weeks. These time savings allow you to plan and start implementing the new system before your license runs out. And, stay tuned for our next installation of the reasons to replatform series.

For any other questions, contact our customer experience experts today.

One of the biggest hurdles to selecting a new platform is recognizing when you should look for something different. In this five-part blog series, we’ll look at the top five reasons our customers make the decision to seek out a new system. If you recognize one of these in your current state, then you may want to pay close attention.

Reason #1: It’s been years since a platform upgrade

We’ll often encounter customers who implemented their current system more than five years ago and have not updated it since. Yikes.

Users of the system are typically unhappy because the system no longer works efficiently or doesn’t meet their current needs. There are several reasons why a system is installed and never updated. In some cases, a customer has customized the system so much that installing a new version is too risky, so no one is willing to attempt an upgrade.

With an older platform, the people who installed the system – who may have been the only ones that knew anything about maintaining it – could have left the company. Likewise, an agency could have been used to implement the original system and the company relied on them to maintain the software. Since then, a new agency can be hired, but the internal staff and new agency don’t know the platform.

Sometimes there just isn’t any budget available to pay for an upgrade or to install the maintenance provided by the vendor. As a side note, many of these issues are solved by using Cloud-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) systems. Vendors will maintain the system, make frequent updates and upgrades, and keep the platform as current as possible.

If you are in this situation, you should consider upgrading the system to the latest version.  Unless you have customized the heck out of the system, then this is often the least-effort path to take. Many vendors provide easier upgrades to newer versions and can preserve some or all your existing content.

Too often though, we encounter users who are fed up with the current situation and will never accept a newer version of the same system. In this case, you should be looking for alternative solutions.

Here’s What You Should Takeaway

Before you start looking, you should document the current issues and identify the capabilities you need to support in the future, such as personalization, optimization, or better digital asset management. If you are a large organization, then make sure you capture this information from all the involved users. Many users will have very different perspectives on what’s wrong with the current system and what is needed in the future.

Learn more about our Platform Selection Jumpstart, which helps your business by evaluating your technology needs and key requirements to help you find and choose the right platform to alleviate your current issues and provide successful business outcomes in six weeks.

In the meantime, stay tuned for the next installation of our #reasonstoreplatform series. For any questions, contact our customer experience experts today.

The COVID-19 pandemic stressed everyone in 2020. Many of our clients had prepared their digital businesses ahead of time and survived.  Other companies who were late to creating digital customer experiences suffered as people stayed away from traditional stores and shopped online.  But even the best companies struggled to keep customer satisfaction levels high during 2020.  The American Customer Satisfaction Index’s recent COVID-19 special retail study showed satisfaction declines across 75% of the retail companies.

Some might think that online stores would have done better than brick and mortar stores during the pandemic.  But the ASCI study showed a decline of almost 5% in customer sat for internet retailers versus just a 1.3% decline for Department & Discount stores.

“Among internet retailers, no companies improve customer satisfaction during the pandemic, as the category tumbles nearly 5% overall.”

We know from past work that digital transformation has been a big factor in increasing customer satisfaction over the years.  See Report: Digital Transformation Is Key To Boosting Customer Satisfaction.

So what went wrong in this pandemic?

The largest online retailer – Amazon – had a 7% decline in satisfaction. According to the ACSI data, Amazon had troubles with site performance, merchandise variety, inventory, customer support, and shipping.

What about companies that had both strong internet and store channels?

Except for Macy’s and Nordstroms, all other brands did better (or less bad) on the internet channel versus the store channel.  Why?  There could be lots of reasons, such as some stores being closed, most operated with restricted hours or restricted number of guests, or other COVID-19 restrictions that didn’t affect the online channel.

For many of these brands, balancing store versus online inventory must have been a big challenge.  Imagine having fully stocked stores that were closed and could not supply the needed inventory to online channels.

In online stores, many brands weren’t prepared for the sudden increase in traffic, orders, and fulfillment.  Over the course of 2020, many of these brands were able to improve online operations, but of course, first impressions can be lasting.

This customer satisfaction data highlights the need to get digital transformation right. While customer satisfaction took a downturn for the online channel during the COVID-19 pandemic, many brands that operated both online and stores saw the store’s customer satisfaction score drop more. Digital transformation isn’t just having an online store.  Digital transformation includes digitization throughout the organization to better handle these types of market disruptions.

COVID-19 vaccines appear to be close to helping resolve the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic.  The pandemic exposed both good and bad customer experiences as companies reacted to the changing market and economic conditions.  As we start to emerge from the pandemic in 2021, what should customer experience practitioners focus on to begin to ramp back up?

Expectations vs Reality

In the Pega 2020 Global Customer Experience Study, Pega identified several key data points to which we should pay attention. Let’s start with expectations vs reality.

• Expectation: 92% of the organizations claimed customer-centricity is a high priority.
• Reality: Only 35% of companies have a C-Level sponsor for CX.  36% leave the CX lead to Directors and below.

“Without strong CX leadership to champion the company’s initiatives and set cross-departmental goals, CX efforts typically stagnate, devolve, and disintegrate. ” Pega Study

Ask yourself “What do your customers think about their experiences?” If the answer is not good, then look at leadership as the first step.

Critical Components of CX

Here are other interesting data points that Pega describes as Critical Components of CX:

1. Enabling elegant, painless interactions (66%)
2. Providing speedy service (66%)
3. Ensuring that customers feel understood (65%)
4. Making relevant information easy to find (63%)
5. Being consistent and connected across channels (63%)

As we try to get out of our Pandemic mindsets, item 3 – Ensuring Customers Feel Understood, stands out to me.  Your customers have gone through significant personal events in 2020.  Some have struggled through lockdowns, some have lost jobs, and many will be hesitant to get back to normal.  The more we can empathize with customers and adjust our ability to satisfy their needs (even if seems impossible), the better customers will view our company.

Buried in the study results is another interesting bit of data that also relates to understanding customers. In the list above, one critical component is 5 – Being Consistent and Connected Across Channels. As mentioned above, expectations and reality don’t agree:

• Expectations: 68% of companies say customer needs will drive their channel focus.
• Reality:  Channel focus (investment) for these companies were #1 Email, #2 Web, #3 Digital Ads. This sounds like company needs (or habits) are driving channel focus.
• Extra Reality: Email response rates are 1% and Digital Ads are blocked 26% of the time. So customers may want a different channel than we prioritize.
• Extra, Extra Reality: Emerging, high potential channels include: Messaging, Mobile Push, Chatbots, and Connected Devices.  If you don’t have these channels in your plan, you may be missing out.

Final Thoughts

I think there are two major groups of customers emerging from the COVID-19 Pandemic:

1. Customers who want to get back to “normal” or the way they behaved in 2019
2. Customers who are expecting to forever change their behaviors

Customer experience professionals are going to be challenged to identify these customers and how to deal differently with each group.  If you are not thinking about your customer’s expectations and their reaction to exiting the pandemic, now is the time to start.

I talk with a lot of companies who want to up their game in delivering a better customer experience.  Yet, I’m always struck by the impediments companies always put in front of themselves that negatively affect that experience.  “We can’t do that because…” is always the first part of a long set of internal issues that we just can’t seem to overcome.  I most often hear “We can’t do that because our business is so complicated.”  Another common version of this is “We can’t do that because our technology stinks.” 

I tend to think that “We can’t do that because…” really means “We don’t want to do that because it’s too much effort to fix the real issue.”  There’s no doubt that many efforts to improve customer experiences is very difficult and is a lot of effort.  But isn’t the value of achieving the desired experience worth it?

Economic Value of Customer Experiences

Given the inability to square the effort to the economic value of creating a great experience, I did some research.  I found a recent paper by Julio Henandez titled “Customer experience in the new reality”.  The author talks about the impact that the COVID-19 Pandemic has had on customer behavior, expectations, decision making, and buying behavior.

Mr. Hernandez provides a lot of information about his take on how customers are adjusting to the new “reality” of managing the virus.  I won’t go into all the data, but one chart, in particular, struck me on the economic value of customer experience relative to customer expectations. 

Source: Julio Henandez

The chart argues three main points:

1. Economic value to our company is lost when an experience doesn’t meet customer expectations.  That’s shown on the left side of the chart.  This sounds like common sense, and I think most people would agree with this point.
2. On the right side of the chart, the point is made that economic value to our company is lost when the experience significantly exceeds expectations. The idea that you spend too much on the experience and don’t get a commensurate return in value.  
3. In the middle, the argument is that economic value is maximum when experience meets customer expectations. 

After reviewing this, I immediately took offense to the idea that economic value is lost when experience exceeds expectations.  Maybe the “significantly” qualifier eases my offense a bit, but I’m not sure.  Likewise, to argue that value is maximized when expectations and experience are aligned is short-sighted, in my opinion.  

Exceeding Expectations to Rule the World

Hopefully, you can think of examples of when an experience exceeded (significantly!) your expectations. I think back to the first appearance of Uber.  Clearly, the experience of getting a ride to the airport was significantly better than my experiences with cab rides.  The economic value of creating this significantly better experience went to Uber in a big way.  

I think the only way to think about customer experience is to try to exceed your customer’s expectations.  As pointed out in many other studies, companies with better customer experiences do better in the market. Just meeting expectations is no way to rule the world. 

Have you heard about Mini Apps or Apple’s new App Clips feature?  I think these technologies have a way to dramatically improve the mobile experience if you can take advantage of them.  Both concepts are relatively new, with Apple’s App Clips becoming available in IOS 14 this month (see our Prepare Your App for IOS 14 introduction).   Snapchat introduced Mini Apps in 2020 as well.  Before jumping into why these new technologies will become important, let’s discuss the current state.

A Good Experience could be better

I find it frustrating when mobile apps aren’t nicely connected and they force me to spend extra effort to get things done.  As an example, take a look at the mobile experience provided by the iPhone’s Map application.  Let’s say you want to order from a local restaurant.  So you open the map app and search for nearby restaurants.  You locate one, click on the location symbol, and the map app displays the Directions button prominently on the screen as shown in the first image here.  If you scroll far enough down, you might find a website link, a phone number, or other information about that location.

While this Map experience is better than more manual alternatives, it still leaves me wanting more.   What about providing more actions in the Map app? Since I found a restaurant, one of the obvious actions is to place an order.  Another is to make a reservation.  A third might be to quickly look at their menu to see if I like anything. The only way I can get to the actions is to find a link to their site and start navigating through a series of pages.

Why are none of these actions readily available inside the Map app?  You could rightfully argue that none of these capabilities are the responsibility of the Map app, right?  The map app has enough to do already!

App Clips to the rescue

Apples’ App Clips are mini-apps that are embedded in your mobile app and can be surfaced independently of the full mobile application.  As an example, assume you are Panera Bread and have built a mobile app that includes an ordering feature.  You can now (in IOS 14) build an App Clip that can surface your ordering feature without first requiring the user to download your full app.  Apple can embed this clip into the experiences of other applications, making it quick and easy to spread your capabilities around.

Here is an example using the Map app and a Panera Bread App Clip.  In the first image, you can see that in addition to the Directions button, the Map app also displays an Order Food button.

When you click on the Order Food button, the Panera menu opens as an App Clip allowing you to quickly place an order.   You don’t have to open the full Panera mobile app, and you don’t have to open a web page and then navigate to the ordering page.

In addition to taking action, App Clips include the ability to pay using Apple Pay instead of asking for credit card info.  You can even use Apple security to sign-in to your app without prompting with a form to fill in.

There are all sorts of ways App Clips can be called up within IOS 14.  Apple identifies using NFC Tags, QR Codes, Safari App Banner, Links within messages, and, as we have seen, in Place Cards in Maps.

The impact on customer experience can be enormous

Imagine the impact this type of technology can have on our customer’s experience.  How often do customers navigate through a place card in Maps or click a link in Safari, only to be asked to spend time downloading our app or have to navigate through a web app?  Instead of getting lost in a maze of clicks, the customer can quickly accomplish key tasks on our mobile apps.

You should think about how to create these mini-apps that will drive true customer value.  Ordering food is an obvious example, but what other mini-app experiences could you create for your customers? I think the possibilities are vast.

Our ability to drive engagement can be dramatically improved

One use of the App Clip that is often cited by others is the ability to highlight information about your mobile app in a clip and provide a quick way to download or open the full app experience.  While this can be an important use of App Clips, I think it is a limited vision of their potential.  The real potential wins include the ability to promote our brand, provide meaningful information to the user more quickly, and making it easier for a customer to engage with our products or services.

While we could wait for developers of other apps to include links to our app, or provide a more connected experience, why wait for that?  App Clips gives you a way to control how your app can be surfaced and connected.  While these connections are mostly limited to Apple-specific apps at the moment, it would be great for this capability to expand to other developers.

About Perficient

Back in early 2019, I became interested in how I could use Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to write content for my blog posts.  The idea was elementary: come up with a story idea and let an AI tool write the content!  I didn’t want to create a tool like this, as I figured with all the hype over AI, ML, and NLG that many people have already made a solution. At that time, I found a few entrepreneurs who had built such applications, but the resulting written content wasn’t even useful.  The first image shows the AI-generated article for the topic “What are Future CMS Trends?”

As you can see in the image below, the content is mostly a collection of one line of text pulled from various sources available to the tool. Some of this content might have been useful as a very limited starting point, but in general, it would not have been worth paying for this result.

AI Written Content form 2019

News Organizations Lead the Push

News organizations saw the enormous potential benefit and have been actively using AI technology to generate content quickly and efficiently.  Back in 2017, Julia McCoy at the Content Marketing Institute, wrote about Content Creation Robots and cited examples from the Washington Post and Associated Press. The Washington Post used a system they built called Heliograf to write social media posts from the content.  While the Post describes this as a storytelling engine, it seemed to be more of a summarizer to get a story down to 140 characters.  Anyway, it saved a lot of time for journalists and copywriters by eliminating the rather mundane task of posting to social media.

Of course, the idea of generating content automatically implies some serious savings in time and resources if it can be achieved.  As we look at where the industry is currently, there are more encouraging signs for AI Content Generation than discouraging signs.  More content-generating applications are popping up every day, and the types of content being generated are becoming very interesting.

Turning Data and Charts into Content

Charts are an effective way of communicating complex data, but for many people, looking at maps, tables, and data is still daunting.  Narrative Sciences has created several AI-driven tools to automatically generate written content from data.  These images show some examples of their Lexio system that makes narratives from data. The first image shows plain text generated from COVID 19 data.  Notice how the written text is interspersed with the data to tell a story.  You might be able to imagine how easy it would be to generate a social media post or even a fuller account from these two AI-generated paragraphs. With our global pandemic going on right now, this kind of automation can keep your audiences up-to-date without having to dedicate one or more people to the task of writing the content.

The next image shows an example of Lexio combining text and graphics to tell an even richer story. In this example, Narrative Sciences created an interactive application where the user could select elements of the data (Country), and the application would display both a written narrative as well as create a chart. Of course, this whole application and content were not generated 100% by AI. Still, it shows how you can apply AI, ML, and NLG to generate more useful content, especially when you don’t have the human resources available.

These and other examples show that AI tools really have the potential to address simpler forms of storytelling.  Other examples I’ve seen include looking at box scores from sporting events and creating simple articles.  According to Julie McCoy, the Associated Press uses a system to generate 3,700 corporate earnings report a quarter.

How about writing full stories?

Back to my quest.  Can I now have an AI-based system write an entire article for me?  According to several reports, complete books of fiction have been written by computers.  Brian Merchant wrote a story in The Atlantic titled “When an AI Goes Full Jack Kerouac.”  While the book contained some good lines and good characters, Ross Goodwin, who produced the book I the Road, provided his view of the results:

“This is very much an imperfect document, a rapid prototyping project. The output isn’t perfect. I don’t think it’s a human novel, or anywhere near it”

Things Change Rapidly in AI and NLG

Given all this progress in AI, I hoped that the system I used in January 2019 had improved in 18 months.  So I went back and tried the exact same topic again.  My ambition was not to write a novel or create poetry, but just to generate 60%, 70%, 80%, or even 90% of a blog post.  So here is the result.

AI-Generated Content August 2020

The content has undoubtedly improved since my first attempt.  Instead of single lines of text, I now have somewhat coherent paragraphs of content.  Most of the content is also pretty relative to the topic I proposed.  I don’t see as much repetitive content as the first time around.

So, I could use some of this content to start a blog post.  But, in reality, only one or two paragraphs would be useful.  Maybe that’s a success rate of 20%?  It’s still far from my goal of even 60%.

I’m not discouraged, however.  The improvement in 18 months is impressive. And this was only one commercially available site.  I know there are more sites I could try out.  I could also try to create my own generator using new models.  OpenAi’s GTP-3 has received a lot of attention and press lately.  I think we are getting closer to having a general-purpose content generator that is useful.  What do you think?

Let’s say it has been ten years since you last implemented your self-service customer portal and it’s starting to show its age. A lot has changed in the portal space since that time and you want to consider a new platform to support your ongoing digital transformation efforts. As you start to research what’s available in the market, you find that there are hundreds of potential systems, all at different price points and all that claim to be the best solution.  As you get lost in the overwhelming amount of information or a lengthy RFP, you decide you need some expert help on the topic. That’s where Perficient’s Platform Select Jumpstart can save the day.

Platform Select

We’ve crafted a Selection Jumpstart that includes a well-defined process, a curated collection of common requirements from a variety of customers, and a database of vendor system evaluations all designed to help you move quickly to find the right system for your company. Here are some key elements of the selection process where our jumpstart helps tremendously:

• Selecting a system depends on knowing and prioritizing your specific requirements.  Through our past work with a variety of clients, we collect and maintain a database of these requirements.  All you have to do is prioritize which of those you need most, and which you don’t need at all. You don’t have to spend several months trying to identify requirements. Our jumpstarts typically start with 80% of the requirements you likely will want, and then we’ll add any new requirements that we help you identify.
  

  Platform Selection Process

• Evaluating vendors and systems against those requirements can be challenging when you only get surface-level information from the vendors.  You really want an expert analysis of how well each vendor really implements your requirements.  Our Perficient experts work with the systems every day over their careers.  Our experts evaluate each of the major, enterprise vendors and give an honest evaluation of each requirement.  In the jumpstart process, we use that expertise to identify the platform vendor that will implement your requirements.
• We have developed an online system to quickly generate a variety of reports so you can understand how each vendor performs and you can narrow down to one or two vendors that best meet your needs.  We also provide a structured process for vendor demonstrations, calculating the total cost of ownership, and enterprise architectures.

We have an RFP Process, what about that?

Elaine Hunt, a Principal Consultant at Forrest blogged about the demise of the traditional RFP: RIP, RFP – This Is Not Your 1990s Vendor Selection Process.  Among Ms. Hunt’s points are these gems:

• RFPs are expensive and time-consuming – already stretched internal resources can take several months to get through the process
• The process is not always transparent or objective – sometimes our internal biases interfere with selecting the best vendor. And, vendors are often very good at responding positively to an RFP without revealing too much.

We overcome these problems by:

• Making the jumpstart process faster with 80% of requirements already identified and major vendors already evaluated
• We rely on industry/system experts for answers, not just the vendors. We can provide real-world experience about how the systems perform, including their strengths and weaknesses
• By prioritizing your specific requirements, we identify the vendors who perform best against your most important needs.

Our company requires an RFP, so how can the jumpstart help?

We like to be flexible and responsive to our customers. So, we can tailor the Platform Select Jumpstart to meet your needs.  For some customers, we’ve used the evaluation process to help them narrow down to 3 vendors for their RFP process.  By doing so, they eliminated the tedious process of evaluating ten or more RFP responses and were able to complete their RFP process much faster.

For other clients, we’ve come in after they used their RFP process to narrow down the vendor field.  In these instances, we used the later phases of the Jumpstart to calculate TCO, identify how the finalists fit into the overall enterprise architecture, and established final demonstrations focused on the most critical use cases.

What platforms are good for a Platform Select Jumpstart?

Just about any type of platform decision can use our jumpstart solution.  Using the jumpstart process, we’ve helped clients select the best system in each of these areas:

• Digital Experience Platforms
• CRM
• Digital Asset Managment
• Enterprise Content Management
• Enterprise Search
• Artificial Intelligence for Chatbot, Machine Learning, NLP, and Image Recognition platforms
• Commerce platforms
• Portals
• Event Management
• Social Networks

We also have many other platform types in the works, including

• Master Data Management Platforms
• Product Information Management Systems
• Contact Center Technology

For additional details or to request more information about the Platform Selection Jumpstart, leave a comment or follow the link below.

https://www.perficient.com/what-we-do/jumpstart/platform-select

Customer experience leaders continue to look for ways to improve their customer experience technologies. These leaders understand that as expectations evolve, competitors try to jump ahead, and other companies invent new capabilities, they must also evolve their capabilities. Assessing your technology stack with respect to customer experience is essential to making sure your technology is keeping pace and able to deliver new and innovative capabilities.

Too often, we think of CX technology as the platform that runs our website or ecommerce site. However, customer experiences are not isolated to these channels. If you want to understand the state of your experience technology, you have to broaden your review to cover the wider range of digital touchpoints.

When we help customers assess their CX technology, we typically review the following areas:

• Experience Platforms – These systems typically drive your owned web and mobile experiences and include content management, search, digital asset management, and others.
• Demand Gen – These are more top-of-the-funnel systems that we experience, such as display ads, paid search, social posts, etc.
• Customer Portal – Many times the self-service customer portal is built with platforms different from the main experience platforms.
• Digital Analytics – Collecting usage and behavior data across all touchpoints can help you optimize each experience as well as each journey.
• Leads to Order – Here we look at systems that manage leads, provide lead scoring, and move a potential customer into a true customer. This category also includes ecommerce platforms, order management systems, and fulfillment systems.
• Data – Backend data, front-end data, customer profiles, and product information are all critical elements of data that must be right for our experiences. In addition, we look at how the integration systems link all the other systems together to provide data to all channels.

Looking across this landscape, it’s not uncommon to discover 50 or more systems involved in delivering customer experiences. Sometimes this is due to the specialization of systems within the stack. For example, there are many digital analytics systems that focus on one channel only or one type of measurement. Other times, we find duplicative systems that can negatively affect both the experience and the teams trying to manage the experiences. As an example, we have seen customers implement two or more tag management systems. One large customer had more than 10 web content management systems in place.

Understanding your inventory of systems is one step in an the overall assessment. Evaluating whether the systems you have implemented are right for your team and your customers is the next step in assessing your CX stack. Many times customers purchase a new platform in one of these areas but later find out that it won’t integrate with other systems in the CX landscape.

Have you undertaken a broad customer experience technology assessment lately? I’d love to hear about your experience.