5 Keys to the digital Experience

I just finished reading the "5 Keys to the Digital Experience Equation" from Oracle.   In this white paper the authors provide an exploration of the five key components of the digital experience equation.  They list these 5 key components as:

1. Content and Commerce
2. Customers and Context
3. Digital and physical convergence
4. Brand and commerce convergence
5. Scalability

1. Content and Commerce

• Content assets take many different forms and can stem from dozens of systems within an organization as well as external sources.

I hadn't thought about the content and how Commerce and brand sites are the two types of content used in Commerce.  the papers states that most product information resides on the ecommerce site and brand content is featured on the brand site.  The example below show the segregation between the two.

By bringing all of this content together and not having the visitor 
visit multiple destinations companies can differentiate themselves by providing and engaging digital shopping journey that brings together commerce and content at all stages.

In order to provide a successful digital experience you need to ensure that your content is available and that you are able to dynamically filter and adapt this content in real time.  In addition access to data originating from other sources like, CRM, Search and navigation, ERP, Social Media, in-store data, merchandising, pricing, inventory, customer service and more.

2. Customers and Context

• Content in context of the customer at any point of the purchase journey

This is all about providing the right content in the right context to the individual customer.  In addition to knowing what context to provide, you must have context on the customer.    Knowing who they are, their age and demographics, where they have been and even anticipating what they will do next.  To truly provide a personalized and engaging experience you have to leverage data to present relevant content, at any point in the customer journey both pre and post sells.

3. Digital and Physical Convergence

• Synchronization of online and offline customer behavior as the lines between these channels further blur

Digital experience cannot be restricted to online channels.  You will need to be able to capture both online and offline channels to be able to understand the customer context at any given time.  In physical environments some companies are leveraging digital displays that provide relevant content.  This could be videos, interactive kiosks, previous purchase history.  Some companies have developed clienteling applications that allow sales associates to provide optimized sales assistance.

4. Brand and Commerce Convergence

• Collaboration between marketing and commerce team with shared systems and metrics

In order to achieve the ability to provide a quality digital experience the silo's between marketing and commerce teams need to be broken down.  Both should be a combined to create a highly collaborative team.  They should be empowered to collaborate, sit together and have similar and combined success metrics.  By keeping these two separated you find yourself supporting multiple technology platforms for delivery, this is redundant and expensive.

5. Scalability

• Ability to scale for new brands, touch-points, markets, or even single-purpose campaigns

To deliver a relevant experience that is tailored to the individual customer you have to be able to scale in providing relevant content.  It is impossible to do this with static pages, there is no way to create static pages for every potential customer journey or path.  Beyond the online experience, companies also need to consider scaling to new digital formats, new sites and new business models.

References: 5 Keys to the Digital Experience Equation, John DeCapria and Laura Swanson, FitForCommerce