Unify the Digital Experie-1

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Unify The Digital Experience Across Touchpointsby Stephen Powers and John R. Rymer, August 22, 2012

FOR: Application Development & Delivery Professionals

KEY TAKEAWAYS

An Explosion Of Customer Touchpoints Is At HandDigital customer experience today is de! ned primarily by websites, with mobile applications on smartphones not far behind, and the future will include as many as 10 additional customer touchpoints. Deciding which channels to incorporate into your strategy is crucial to de! ning your organization’s future in digital customer experience.

A Unifi ed Experience Requires The Right People, Process, And Tech FoundationsCustomers love their devices but also want consistency across the devices and apps they use. Uni! ed experiences that cross touchpoints demand improved yet common designs, common content assets and application code, and delivery processes tuned for speed and harmonized skills and roles.

Investments In Unifi ed Experience Foundations Will Pay Off NowInvestments in foundations for uni! ed customer experiences will pay dividends in the short term. Firms typically run dozens of di" erent and uncoordinated web campaigns. Uni! ed experience foundations will drive e# ciency into these situations while setting the stage for uni! ed experiences across web, mobile, and other touchpoints in the future.

© 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions re!ect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. To purchase reprints of this document, please email [email protected]. For additional information, go to www.forrester.com.

FOR APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT & DELIVERY PROFESSIONALS

WHY READ THIS REPORT

Today’s rush to reach customers on their smartphones and tablets is just the beginning of an explosion of so$ware-fueled digital touchpoints. Smartphones, tablets, eReaders, games, smart TV, goggles . . . there’s no end in sight. Each touchpoint represents a distinct opportunity to engage, service, and support customers but cannot be an island. Customers expect a uni!ed, consistent experience across the several touchpoints they use when engaging your !rm. Your role in a uni!ed customer experience strategy: Lead the search for the right common practices, talents, and technologies to meet the challenge of uni!ed customer experience. %is report discusses the technology, skills, and organizational future of digital experience and how application development and delivery professionals can bring about that future.

Table Of Contents

Digital Experience Vision: Continuous, Consistent, And Unified

Vital: Unified Foundations For Digital Customer Experience

Vital: Your Plumbing Skills

Vital: New, Coordinated Organizational Structures

RECOMMENDATIONS

The Path To Unified Digital Experiences Starts With A Vision

Supplemental Material

Notes & Resources

Forrester interviewed 18 user and agency companies for this report. This report is part of Forrester’s digital experience playbook.

Related Research DocumentsDrive Business Transformation With Digital Customer ExperiencesMay 22, 2012

The Future Of Mobile eBusiness Is ContextMay 1, 2012

The Uni"ed Customer Experience ImperativeApril 30, 2012

Mobile Is The New Face Of EngagementFebruary 13, 2012

Unify The Digital Experience Across TouchpointsFuture Look: The Digital Experience Playbookby Stephen Powers and John R. Rymerwith Kyle McNabb, Ron Rogowski, and Vivian Brown

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Unify The Digital Experience Across Touchpoints 2

© 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited August 22, 2012

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE VISION: CONTINUOUS, CONSISTENT, AND UNIFIED

So$ware-fueled digital touchpoints enable continuous relationships between enterprise and customer. As Internet-connected devices spread and people adopt them, companies can now reach and engage with their customers wherever they are and in new ways not possible through brick-and-mortar stores, television advertising, and catalogs.

Digital touchpoints allow !rms to design customer experiences that:

■ Converse with customers “in the moment.” Smartphones are intimate, personal devices that allow interactions at moments that matter. While shopping: At the moment of curiosity or decision to buy. At work: In the moment of product installation or sales objection. At home: In the moment of !nancial decision or medical activity. For some people, a tablet has the same intimate connection to their personal lives as a smartphone.1

■ Wrap business in appealing services. Customers use mobile devices, in particular, for many functions — to communicate, entertain, manage activities, and learn. %is fact opens the door for enterprises to provide interesting services, tools, and games to introduce brands and o"ers, build interest and intimacy, and deepen relationships. Examples include Nike’s Nike+ FuelBand apps (which wrap the Nike+ FuelBand product in extra value), Hipmunk and LinkedIn (which are engaging and fun), and GasBuddy.com and Untappd (which incorporate games and rewards to generate useful new information).

■ Participate in compelling conversations. Compelling conversations range from social network activity that drives product choices and indicates shi$ing consumer sentiment through to life-or-death messages utilities send to their customers. Intimate digital channels provide the best insights and immediate reach for these conversations, and intelligence about the surrounding physical environment enriches the conversation.

■ Take advantage of context. %e GPS, camera, and gyroscope in a typical smartphone can perform double duty, as sensors reveal the location, surrounding environment, motion, and position of the device. %is contextual information alone can simplify and help organizations target interactions with customers but is even more valuable for informing an interaction when combined with that person’s pro!le, stated preferences, and history in addition to information gained from nearby quick response (QR) codes, barcodes, or other devices. Lastly, this contextual information can suggest the customer’s feelings or emotions.2




Opportunity: Leverage The Right Touchpoints For Powerful Interactions

Most enterprises, !xated today on smartphones and tablet devices — “mobile” — as new digital customer interaction channels, continue to invest in websites. But the future of digital experience spans an even greater number of customer touchpoints — e.g., apps, TVs, eReaders, and games. Some of these additional touchpoints exist today and are poised for adoption (see Figure 1). When planning your digital experience strategy, consider a variety of touchpoints:

■ Desktop-laptop web still has tremendous upside. %e traditional browser running on a PC, while inherently limited in its reach, intimacy, and intelligence about the physical environment, cannot be overlooked. Among digital touchpoints in our recent survey of 4,501 US online adults, the browser showed by far the greatest upside as a future digital touchpoint for purchasing.3

■ Smartphone and tablet usage comes on strong. In the same survey, smartphones and tablets showed growing potential in eCommerce — both as a vehicle for making purchases and even more so as a means of investigating purchases. Younger consumers (ages 18 to 34) showed a greater preference for researching product purchases using mobile and smartphones than did older age groups.

■ Internet TV and other nascent touchpoints are longer-term bets. Internet TV, set-top boxes, game consoles, and eReaders — the other major digital touchpoints in circulation today —are much less widely adopted. And new touchpoints — for example, digital eyewear, head-up displays in cars, and smart home appliances — are nascent.4

As you cra$ your organization’s future vision of digital customer experience, smartphones and tablets will play a big role in the nearer term, but no investment in a new digital customer touchpoint should be an island. Less-widely adopted and intimate touchpoints may have extremely high value to certain business models, customer segments, and business processes. Your digital customer experience strategy should position you to take advantage of whichever of these touchpoints best enhance your organization’s business model (see Figure 2).




Figure 1 Digital Touchpoints Are Slowly Advancing As Purchasing Channels

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.74821

7%

7%

7%

8%

8%

9%

9%

10%

10%

12%

13%

53%

61%

The Internet on an Internet-connected TV

A game console

The Internet on an Internet-dedicated TV set-top box

The Internet on an eBook reader

The television (e.g., shopping channel, infomercial)

A shopping application of a cell phone/smartphone

A shopping application on a tablet computer

The mobile Internet on a cell phone/smartphone

The telephone, speaking to a call center

A print catalog/magazine/newspaper

The Internet on a tablet computer

The Internet on a desktop/laptop/netbook computer

A traditional (o!ine) store

“Thinking ahead, how likely is it that you will buy a product or service in the followingways over the next 3 to 6 months?”

(6 or 7 on a scale of 1 [Not likely at all] to 7 [Very likely])

Base: 4,501 US online adults

Source: North American Technographics Consumer Deep Dive: Investigating The Customer Life Cycle(Buy Phase) Survey, Q1 2012 (US)




Figure 2 Intimacy Versus Adoption In Digital Touchpoints

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.74821

Level of adoption

Customerintimacy

Low

High

High

Smartphone

Tablet

Laptop/PC web

eReader

Set-top boxiTV

Game console

Smart eyewear

Head-up displayin car

Kiosk IVR

Social network

Required: Unified Customer Experience Across Touchpoints

Whichever digital touchpoints best extend your enterprise’s business model, assume you’ll have more than one and as many as half a dozen in the future. Separate, disconnected digital experiences for these several touchpoints will be unsustainable in the long run and, in the short term, harmful to your organization’s brand.5

%e future is uni!ed experiences that traverse multiple touchpoints. Why?

■ Customers demand uni"ed experiences. Customers will interact with most enterprises through a variety of means, both digital and nondigital. %ey see your !rm as one entity and expect the same experience of its products and services, policies and processes, and personality regardless of channel. %ey expect not only experiences appropriate for the channels they use but also consistency across those experiences.




■ Speedy, continual innovation demands leveraged development. Most organizations innovate most rapidly in their customer channels, creating new campaigns and o"ers, new products, and new experiences many times each year. In a cross-channel world, rapid innovation demands common visual and architectural designs; reusable content, platform logic, services, and application platform elements; and common, iterative, and &exible delivery processes. Moreover, common assets and architectures will promote the consistency vital to delivering uni!ed customer experiences.

■ Optimizing experiences demands common data collection and analysis. Actionable insight will set future digital customer experiences apart from today’s web experiences. Analytics of various descriptions produce those insights, whether they are an understanding of the customer’s physical surroundings, an assessment of brand sentiment on a hot social network, or the path of a transaction through syndication partners. Cross-channel experiences demand that data gathering and analysis occur across channels and touchpoints, not just within individual touchpoints.

Required: Shift From Personalization To Contextualization

%e future of digital customer experience depends on a key transition from the design of today’s web applications: Context replaces personalization as the way to achieve relevance. %e di"erence?

■ Personalization tailors content. Personalization approaches seek to put the proverbial right information in front of the right person at the right time. %ese approaches mostly address the !rst part of that equation by either selecting or generating the web page(s) a customer sees upon arrival at a website. Many organizations apply personalization techniques deeply within their websites, making recommendations, for example, when a customer selects a product for purchase. Most !rms and sites base personalization on a customer’s pro!le and history with the company.

■ Contextualization tailors the entire experience, including content. Contextualization uses a greater range of more personal information than the customer’s pro!le and history with the company. Contextualization adds data about the customer’s situation in the physical world, including location and motion, available social information, and signals indicating how the customer may be feeling at that moment. %is additional data comes from a variety of sources — devices, social networks, recent messages — and it continually changes. Contextualization also utilizes other factors such as past behavior, past purchases, language, and device used.

Gaining maximum bene!t from investments in digital customer experiences will require mastering contextualization. %e segment and pro!le de!nitions accumulated to date don’t go away; rather, the organization needs to supplement them with additional categories of data.




VITAL: UNIFIED FOUNDATIONS FOR DIGITAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

%e vast majority of companies don’t yet have the design disciplines, technologies, and organizations to support contextual, uni!ed digital experiences. We consistently observe two gaps:

■ Technology silos. Organizations source an array of technologies from multiple vendors to support digital experiences — and, generally, these technologies don’t support cross-channel campaigns and analytics very well. %e primary reason: At best, technologies such as web content management, eCommerce platforms, web analytics, search, and mobile platforms live in silos and are partially integrated — if they are integrated at all.

■ Organizational silos. Also, most companies su"er from functional or channel organizational myopia. %ey remain stuck in functional application development and delivery, marketing and channel (e.g., direct marketing, interactive, eBusiness, and call center), and business-leadership silos, which prevents them from achieving the uni!ed experiences of the future.

Barriers To Unified Foundations: Two Examples

A major travel and hospitality chain typi!es the challenges and barriers consumer-oriented organizations face when moving to the future of uni!ed digital experiences. %is company faces signi!cant delays in evolving its web and mobile websites because it lacks a uni!ed technology and organizational foundation. %e !rm has multiple technologies for managing both structured and unstructured content, for delivering content to the web and to mobile devices, and for measuring results. %e result? %e marketing team must use a variety of tools to create and launch content for basic campaigns and has no real way to measure results.

Moreover, the !rm uses multiple technologies to manage contextualization, such as mobile web presentation and recommendations. %e result: Inconsistent digital experiences across channels — the consequence of using a di"erent approach for each digital channel. In addition, the !rm’s traditional IT/marketing organizational divide has created a lack of trust between the two organizations, and its inability to decide on appropriate technologies to support a better digital experience strategy has further slowed progress.

A !nancial services !rm was able to overcome its organizational silos by creating an independent digital experience group. %e group includes technical, marketing, and business personnel, all reporting up through a common organizational structure. %is resulted in a well-communicated and coordinated digital experience strategy. %e new team has also reduced priority con&icts.

However, the !rm quickly found that its technology stack was dated — producing static web pages with limited ability to contextualize, very plain mobile websites, and limited multilingual support. %e team had to limit the number of segments it was targeting in the web channel to 10, because any more required an unsustainable amount of manual e"ort to publish contextual web pages. Ultimately, this company wasn’t able to execute its digital strategy plans because it simply didn’t have the technology to support them.




Design Foundation: Get Up Close And Personal

Made up of several distinct design disciplines, digital experience design centers on the customers your enterprise will engage with (usually de!ned as personas).6 For each customer persona, the experience design answers four questions:

■ Who is the customer, what are her goals, and how does she behave?

■ How should our brand be expressed throughout all of our interactions with this customer?

■ What content and functions does the customer need to accomplish his goals?

■ Where do we reach this customer (which touchpoint or channel)?

%e answers to these questions provide the foundation for experience design — distinct from page or site design. Digital experience design addresses !ve distinct domains: content, functionality, interaction design, visual design, and information architecture. Ultimately, each digital experience must be both functionally relevant and emotionally satisfying. At the same time, each experience must !t within a uni!ed digital customer experience strategy that spans touchpoints.

AD&D pros sometimes will lead digital customer experience design projects, in which case they must become competent, even expert, in experience design.7 In many cases, however, AD&D pros will provide a supporting role for designers and outside contractors (e.g., interactive agencies) who design the digital experiences. In this supporting role, AD&D pros should provide advice and services to achieve three vital goals:

■ Provide design conventions for each of the "ve design disciplines. Leading !rms start with visual design and content conventions and then move on to common functional services, information architecture, and interaction designs.

■ Guide the shi# from web to mobile. %e rush to mobile apps — the marketing rage of the moment — can lead to substantial resource waste. %e biggest immediate issue is ensuring that mobile projects are tied to the business model rather than implemented as a disconnected reaction to a perceived gap.8 Longer term, AD&D must help guide the move from today’s native apps and mobile websites to a model that provides the task-speci!c experience of a native app, but on the cost-e#cient base of HTML5, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Representational State Transfer (REST), and JSON.

■ Provide common services to support experience designers. %e consistency demanded of uni!ed digital customer experiences drives an obvious need for new digital asset repositories and management life cycles as well as common services to provide access to ordering, pricing, customer management, and other core business systems in addition to access to feedback on designs. %ese common infrastructure services are a natural responsibility for AD&D pros.




Technology Foundation: Manage, Engage, And Measure

Leaders of AD&D must think about the technology foundations of uni!ed digital experiences as services. %e people using those services will be marketing and eBusiness professionals, not just professional developers, as marketing and eBusiness pros have taken responsibility for much of the delivery of content behind web experiences. In the world of digital experiences that are consistent across channels, marketing and eBusiness pros will need tools that allow them to easily administer, support, and optimize contextual cross-channel experiences in order to achieve their company’s strategic goals (such as increased conversion rates, higher click-through, brand consistency across multiple channels, lower call center costs, and better customer self-service). To do this, they will need tools that allow them to:

■ Manage the components of the experience. Web content management and digital asset management tools help turn unstructured content and product catalogs into structured content. Presentation management tools allow developers to create and manage look and feel for websites, mobile applications, smart TVs, and kiosks. %ese tools also enable nontechnical sta" to continue to optimize presentations without developer help.

Some content management vendors already o"er what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) presentation management tools. Many vendors have begun work on tools that enable marketers to manage basic elements of web pages that follow responsive design standards. Marketers also need tools that enable them to deploy and remove content as part of cross-channel, interactive campaigns as well as to manage customer segments. Additionally, arming marketers with support within the devices and channels they use — e.g., laptops and desktops (for content creation), tablets (for more minor content and presentation modi!cation), and smartphones (to advance work&ows and publish) — will help !rms keep pace with their customers.

■ Engage customers with hyper-targeted experiences. An ideal engagement application for multiple channels will take structured and unstructured content from various repositories and dynamically transform it for the appropriate channel and context. Marketers will have some ability to manually optimize context, but given their relatively limited bandwidth, a good deal of this contextualization will need to be automated. %e analogy: Contextualization will work the same way that recommendations use “wisdom of the crowd” rather than “wisdom of the expert” to create context.

Automated digital experience delivery systems will work across customer touchpoints, relying on metadata and search algorithms and creating additional contextual information by learning from previous customer behavior and outcomes. Automated systems will also handle delivery of content, applications, and services to appropriate channels among the range of possibilities.

■ Measure customer experience to learn and "ne-tune. Marketing’s tools to measure web experiences tend to be siloed and, o$en, underutilized. Measurement tools for uni!ed digital experiences simply cannot su"er from these same limitations and must be useful in day-to-day operations.




Uni!ed digital experience measurement tools must provide marketers and eBusiness professionals with actionable insight. %ese tools include an array of testing analytics tools to optimize digital experiences, assess business results in light of customer experience (e.g., brand health measures), and measure individual experiences. To glean actionable information from these results, business leaders need them in actionable forms. Sometimes that means key performance indicator dashboards, but o$en business leaders will need to slice, dice, and explore data on their own. Some !rms will also need to trace transactions across channels, which gives marketers the ability to see in aggregate where one channel drives behavior in another (for example, to identify potential shortcomings on the website that drive customers to a call center).9

Digital Intelligence Must Be A Top Priority

Connecting the enormous amount of data in and across digital channels — and making sense of it all — will be paramount to success. Most !rms struggle to collect and analyze vast amounts of information in a form that allows action. Uni!ed digital experience success requires digital experience intelligence strategies that take into account increasing numbers of devices, interactions that span channels, and dynamic interactions.10 A digital experience intelligence environment:

■ Aggregates from multiple channels and touchpoints. Digital experience intelligence initiatives won’t require a single, all-encompassing analytics platform. Instead, they will need to accommodate data collections across a variety of channels and touchpoints. Data collections will include results of other analyses, including web, social, and predictive analytics as well as search logs, product catalogs, and customer pro!les.

■ Provides real-time operational insight. AD&D pros will need to enable marketers by providing access to real-time data beyond just traditional dashboards. Digital intelligence must be baked into day-to-day operational processes, and marketers will need tools that proactively detect trends and patterns rather than force them to pore over endless amounts of data.

■ Is embedded into delivery. AD&D pros will also need to utilize digital intelligence so$ware — such as multivariate testing and predictive analytics — directly in the engagement layer to better automatically contextualize and optimize experiences.

Technology alone won’t !ll today’s digital experience intelligence gap. Most !rms also need more people adept at discovering the insights that matter to sales, product usage, ongoing support, and avoidance of fraud. Expect these people to fall into two broad categories:

■ Data-literate marketers. Marketers tend to be big consumers of data who are comfortable exploring whatever data they can get their hands on to gain new insights. In the future, these




people will be comfortable working with much more data and much more-volatile data.

■ Data-literate developers. While some in the industry call these people “data scientists,” o$en associating them with so-called big data technologies such as Hadoop and MongoDB, don’t be intimidated.11 Data-literate developers will be the designers of algorithms for these environments. In essence, these development pros will specialize in sophisticated analysis of large and varied data pools and presentation of results to drive business action.

VITAL: YOUR PLUMBING SKILLS

%e full complement of AD&D specialties — solution architects, business analysts, developers, relationship managers, and quality assurance (QA) pros, among them — has something to o"er to digital experience initiatives; these roles can o$en act as advisors and brokers in !nding the platforms and tools required to build and broker digital experiences that cross channels. But the prospect of buying all of the platforms, tools, and services in a nice neat suite is a pipe dream. %ere’s much work for AD&D pros to help broker, build, and integrate the full range of technologies needed for uni!ed digital customer experiences:

■ Solution architects and business analysts can help broker cloud solutions. As many areas of the organization o$en do today, marketing and eBusiness teams will source cloud technologies with less input from AD&D than they would for on-premises so$ware. Already, many vendors have taken analytics, testing and optimization, content delivery, and customer relationship management (CRM) technologies to the cloud. In these cases, AD&D pros can provide input on integration, scalability (up and down), and compliance.

■ Solution and technical architects can help vet the reality of vendor suites. Over the past two years, vendors such as Adobe Systems, IBM, and Oracle have invested in digital-experience-based technologies — both natively and through acquisition. %eir goal of creating a suite of solutions that can cover “manage, engage, and measure” across multiple channels remains just that — a goal. %ough vendors such as Adobe Systems, IBM, and Oracle have made acquisitions to complement their existing portfolios, no single vendor o"ers an integrated suite of all customer experience management (CXM) technologies, such as content management, marketing, search, commerce, customer service, and measuring and optimization tools.12 Given how quickly this space is evolving, it’s unlikely that one will any time soon, and even if the ideal suite existed, most organizations have already invested far too much in existing technologies to make a rip-and-replace scenario !nancially feasible.

■ Web architects will manage planning and integration of full environments. Where technologies have commonalities, organizations may source them from a single vendor. %ink web content management (WCM) and digital asset management (DAM), WCM and commerce, or web analytics and testing and optimization. Adobe Systems, IBM, and Oracle




have announced intentions to head down the integration path with their acquired technologies. However, other legacy, entrenched technologies — such as CRM — will drive multivendor sourcing needs. Integration will be the byword in digital experience for the foreseeable future. Web (and mobile) architects, integration specialists, developers, and project managers will help weave together these connecting disparate systems and data sources.

VITAL: NEW, COORDINATED ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES

Organizational silos — particularly ones that separate AD&D, marketing teams, and digital agencies — present a major impediment to achieving uni!ed digital experiences. %ese barriers exist for many reasons: politics, legacy issues, established advertising practices, and industry-speci!c concerns (such as regulatory approval in the !nancial and pharmaceutical sectors). Some organizations are actively engaged in silo-busting, but many are not. As one executive from a digital marketing agency explains, “It’s di#cult to make changes in inherently risk-averse industries, such as !nancial services, government, and energy.”

Some organizations we’ve spoken with have set up a dedicated technology team focused on partnering with business and marketing teams to support digital experiences. %is dedicated digital experience technology team o$en still reports through IT, though one major !nancial services !rm we interviewed combined its dedicated digital experience technology and marketing teams to report through a single organizational structure, with common goals.

In the next several years, the emerging role of the chief customer o#cer (CCO) will become increasingly important, as the CCO will act as an evangelist and stakeholder to promote integrated teams of AD&D pros, marketing pros, and agency partners.13 One interviewee told us: “%e CIO/CMO partnership didn’t bust any silos. We don’t see the marketing department having the authority to support a true cross-channel experience initiative — they don’t have the framework. A chief customer o#cer may not own a big team but can set up the ground rules.” How? In the classic case, the CCO will:

■ Set the ground rules for integrated planning and execution. %e CCO de!nes customer experience planning and work processes, including roles and responsibilities, and communicates priorities to those responsible for supporting experience projects.

■ Direct digital customer experience work. %e CCO may have operational responsibilities and manage uni!ed teams of technical and nontechnical sta" with common customer experience goals.

■ Advise and cajole teams working in silos to cooperate. Established companies tend to favor CCOs in advisory, rather than operational, roles. In this model, the CCO role has little or no direct control over digital experience teams and their agencies. Rather, advisory CCOs rely on personal and/or top-executive in&uence to e"ect change.




Regardless of the CCO’s exact role, putting one in place seems a promising approach to driving the team integration that’s required to overcome functional and political barriers.

R E C O M M E N D AT I O N S

THE PATH TO UNIFIED DIGITAL EXPERIENCES STARTS WITH A VISION

AD&D pros will play a vital role in supporting uni!ed experiences across multiple channels and touchpoints, largely focusing on sourcing technologies, collecting the right data, and developing an enterprise vision with other stakeholders. Your strategy to support uni!ed digital experiences starts with a view of the future and extends to the services, talents, and organizations required today to provide uni!ed experiences across your chosen channels. Speci!cally, when planning for the future of digital experience, AD&D pros should:

■ Reach across organizational boundaries to determine which digital channels are vital. Many organizations today are allowing events to control them by leaping blindly into mobile applications. Mobile is urgent, but not so urgent as to justify executing badly. Work with marketing leadership to create models that clearly describe how the digital channels your organization uses will drive key business goals (e.g., grow the top line, cut support costs, prevent fraud, or drive brand loyalty). In those models, include costs and risks as well as a position on when and how your organization will introduce new channels and/or expanded use of existing channels.

■ Work with the customer experience team to understand the contextual road map. As one-size-!ts-all experiences give way to hyper-contextualized experiences, organizations need to support the concept of “converse in the moment” by understanding how they will contextualize experiences using factors such as demographic, environment, channel, language, and behavior. Technology will be particularly important in the journey to contextualization, as providing this context to customers can’t be an entirely manual process. Understanding which contextualization factors your !rm will use and when it will use them will inform your sourcing of appropriate technologies.

■ Develop a basic supplier orientation — integrated versus best of breed. Larger vendors will focus on tying together their multiple products into comprehensive marketing platforms, with the primary value of integrating engage, manage, and measure activities. Best-of-breed vendors o"er advanced function, as opposed to integration, as their primary value. Both approaches are valid, but whichever you choose, preserve your !exibility to change your mind in the future.

■ Own integration. Watch for some of the big players to continue to add to their arsenals. Adobe Systems will likely add commerce functionality, and IBM will improve or acquire




web and digital content management tools. Oracle and Microso$ will need to tie together what they already have before making any more CXM acquisitions. But we haven’t spoken with any client in a position to rip and replace its existing digital experience technologies; instead, organizations prefer to source their technologies from multiple vendors. Packaged connectors, proven and referenceable !eld integrations, open architectures, and well-documented application programming interfaces (APIs) will be important factors in technology selection.

■ Leverage development e$orts across channels and keep point solutions in check. Pulling content from multiple sources and contextually transforming it to support uni!ed digital experiences will be one of the biggest challenges in this space in the next several years. Keep an eye on vendors that focus on the customer engagement tier as their di"erentiator, enabling you to use a single set of technologies to serve multiple channels. You may be tempted to use point solutions — such as cloud-based microsite tools — to reduce time-to-market and score quick wins in your digital experience strategy. However, a purely siloed technology approach can result in disconnected experiences and increased development and operating costs, as you will have to take a separate approach to contextualization with each solution. Understand the limitations of point solutions and work to communicate where your !rm should and shouldn’t use these solutions to prevent them from going viral.

■ Create rules of the road for buy-versus-subscribe decisions. Expect that just about every supplier will o"er your organization the option of either installing its so$ware in your data centers or using its so$ware deployed in a cloud under a subscription. Understand the di"erence between so$ware-as-as-service and hosted models. Balance the time-to-market advantages of cloud services with the integration and potential cost advantages of on-premises installations.

■ Prepare for organizational changes. More-progressive organizations will simply tear down the IT/marketing wall and create new digital experience (or even broader) organizations composed of technology, marketing, and eBusiness professionals. %e more risk-averse organizations that can’t stomach such radical change will at least need to have a centralized experience team that can act as a bridge between IT and the business. %is team will not only set digital experience priorities but will also be in charge of marshaling ever-changing requirements — both short-term and long-term — and act as a liaison between design teams, marketing, and IT. Also, clients o$en tell us that their use of interactive agencies for experience design o$en falls short of overall digital experience delivery expectations as well as on use of existing technology portfolios. Prepare to educate these partners on your technologies’ abilities and limitations.

■ Put measurement "rst. One interviewee told us, “We don’t create any experience without !rst understanding how we’ll measure customer response.” But the analytics gap is the most




urgent problem in most uni!ed digital experience strategies. Even leading !rms acknowledge that their e"orts are primitive, oriented to web metrics only, and ultimately inadequate. All AD&D groups — even those with only minor involvement in creating digital customer experiences — urgently need to tackle the analytics gap. How? First, by !nding people with the data-literacy talents necessary to interpret this data and act on it to improve digital experiences and generate more revenue from those experiences. Second, by brokering or building tools that allow marketing and eBusiness pros to make sophisticated analyses on their own without the direct involvement of “data scientists.”

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

For Technographics Clients

How To Get More Technographics Data Insights

Forrester’s North American Technographics Consumer Deep Dive: Investigating %e Customer Life Cycle (Buy Phase) Survey, Q1 2012 (US) of 4,501 US individuals ages 18 to 88 includes many additional questions and parameters by which you can analyze the data contained in this report. If you wish to subscribe to Forrester’s Consumer Technographics services, please contact your account manager or [email protected]. If you are an existing Technographics client, please contact your data advisor at [email protected]

ENDNOTES1 Forrester forecasts global tablet sales to increase from 56 million in the year 2011 to 375 million sold in

2016, a compound annual growth rate of 46%. For more on the business drivers of tablet growth, see the April 23, 2012, “Tablets Will Rule The Future Personal Computing Landscape” report.

2 For a full discussion of opportunities to obtain contextual information using mobile devices, see the May 1, 2012, “The Future Of Mobile eBusiness Is Context” report.

3 Source: North American Technographics Consumer Deep Dive: Investigating %e Customer Life Cycle (Buy Phase) Survey, Q1 2012 (US).

4 Google Project Glass is a pair of glasses that provides information and takes commands from the wearer. Source: Adario Strange, “Brin O"ers Close-Up View Of Google’s Project Glass,” PCMag.com, May 30, 2012 (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2405014,00.asp).

Automobile head-up displays project visual advice, directions, and warnings into the driver’s line of sight. BMW, GM, and other car manufacturers are actively engaged in adding this technology to future models. For an example, read Horatiu Boeriu’s blog post: “Head-Up Display 2.0 — Augmented Reality,” BMW Blog, October 7, 2011 (http://www.bmwblog.com/2011/10/07/head-up-display-2-0-augmented-reality/).






Smart grid appliances incorporate displays to help customers manage energy usage but also provide a variety of other relevant information. For an example, read Paul Ridden’s article: “LG Launches First Smart-Grid Appliance: %e Smart Fridge,” Gizmag, April 27, 2011 (http://www.gizmag.com/lg-smart-fridge/18502/).

5 For more on the risk to brands of siloed digital customer experiences, see the April 30, 2012, “The Unified Customer Experience Imperative” report.

6 Companies need a digital customer experience strategy to ensure that they build the right experiences to suit their customers’ needs and expectations — especially in a world of proliferating interaction points. For more, see the June 25, 2012, “Develop Your Digital Customer Experience Strategy” report.

7 For AD&D pros, new rules of application development are required for digital experience: 1) design dopamine experiences; 2) be everywhere your customers want you to be; and 3) be !rst at innovation. Doable? De!nitely. See the December 15, 2011, “Digital Experience Strategy: Follow These Three Mega Rules To Beat The Competition In 2012” report.

8 Forrester recommends using the POST (people, objectives, strategy, and technology) method to guide mobile development strategy. In essence, technology selection is your last step in building your strategy — a$er determining your business objectives. See the August 24, 2010, “Define Your Mobile Development Strategy” report.

9 To read about the approaches of Southwest Airlines, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida, Royal Bank of Canada, and Progressive Insurance, see the May 4, 2012, “How Four Firms Measure Customer Experience” report.

10 Because subpar analytics put customer relationships at risk, Forrester is rede!ning the modern practice of web analytics as “digital experience intelligence.” %is new approach to analytics brings a set of expanded requirements and calls on !rms to consider their technology frameworks, organizational structures, metrics, and optimization practices. See the February 10, 2012, “Welcome To The Era Of Digital Intelligence” report.

11 IBM de!nes “data scientist” on its website, starting with an association with big data: “Rising alongside the relatively new technology of big data is the new job title data scientist. While not tied exclusively to big data projects, the data scientist role does complement them because of the increased breadth and depth of data being examined, as compared to traditional roles.” Source: IBM (http://www-01.ibm.com/so$ware/data/infosphere/data-scientist/).

%e term “data scientist” has also begun popping up in job postings. For an example, read the Kim Nash’s blog: “Desperately Seeking Data Scientists,” Strategic CIO Blog, June 21, 2012 (http://blogs.cio.com/business-intelligence/17184/desperately-seeking-data-scientists).

12 Organizations use increasingly complex cross-channel strategies to drive customer response, and more will take advantage of CXM solutions — particularly in the online channels — to drive optimized experiences, improve service levels, and increase sales. See the August 10, 2011, “Harnessing The Convergence Of Customer Experience Management Solutions” report.

13 Forrester studied 165 executives in charge of enterprisewide customer experience to create a composite pro!le of this relatively new position of chief customer o#cer within companies. See the January 20, 2012,

“Three Organizational Models For Chief Customer Officers” report.













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