Whitepaper March 2018 How a managed CMS can transform the customer experience.1
By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. Source: Customers 2020: The Future of B-to-B Customer Experience. According to Forbes, in 2016, 75% of companies said that their top objective was to improve the customer experience. And for good reason. Customers expectations have changed. The modern customer accustomed to receiving instant access to information on their devices, expects the same seamless and rapid experience when they interact with your brand. Thanks to the prevalence and availability of data, customers also expect that you will recognise and understand their needs in any engagement whether online or face to face. To inspire customers and drive long term loyalty, brands must focus on giving customers the information they need on any device as well as providing them with memorable and delightful experiences that are likely to keep them coming back. In order to do so, having the right technology in place in particular, a robust and managed content management system (CMS), is becoming increasingly essential..2
Adding value with the right content management system Biztech is a leading Australian technology firm and offers a full range of specialist IT services, ranging from IT consulting to software development. We have extensive experience implementing Adobe Experience Manager for many enterprise clients and we are the only local partner to have achieved the highest level specialisation status for Adobe Experience manager and Adobe Campaign. As well as being a Microsoft Partner, we have a long-running partnership with Adobe and were awarded Adobe Partner of the year in 2013, 2015, 2016 and again in 2017. Today, content management systems have gone beyond mere content publishing. They now function as powerful marketing engines providing sophisticated tools to help businesses enhance their customer relationships, tap into real-time data and analytics to determine which content they should be publishing in the first place. Content management systems can also help businesses store content assets in smart new ways, and rapidly disseminate content across multiple channels, in multiple languages, with ease. Yet selecting the right content management solution and managing it on an ongoing basis can take considerable time and effort. This is particularly the case for mid-market businesses, where content budgets are typically tight, and where both IT and marketing teams often need to wear multiple hats. In addition, the most powerful and feature-rich content management systems like Adobe Experience Manager have traditionally been out of reach for many mid-market businesses due to their lengthy implementation timeframes and associated costs. It s for this reason that the team at Biztech recently created Site Express a ready-to-go, fully-managed version of Adobe Experience Manager that s specifically designed for mid-market customers. Customers benefit from all of the great features of Adobe Experience Manager but get an out-of-the-box turnkey solution with a flexible payment structure. Site Express is also a fully-managed solution, which means there are no costly overheads, ongoing maintenance, or extensive set-up fees. As well as being more cost effective, it can be implemented quickly and easily, meaning you can start publishing content and driving more compelling customer experiences, sooner. Based on this, here are four key ways in which a managed CMS such as Site Express can transform the customer experience: Site Express is powered by Adobe Experience Manager, which in a recent Forrester report comparing web content management systems*, received the highest possible scores in terms of its offering, strategy and market presence. *The Forrester Wave : Web Content Management Systems, Q1 2015..3
1. More inspiring, engaging experiences To engage customers online, your business needs to be engaging and relevant. To stand out in a competitive market, you need to give customers solid reasons to consistently choose your products or services over another. Yet without the right technology in place, keeping content engaging and fresh can be a major overhead. This is particularly the case if your CMS is dated or requires extensive help from a large number of specialist resources when it comes to publishing interactive or complex content such as a videos, infographics, animatics, calculators or polls. By contrast, a solution such as Site Express enables you to use the content management tools within Adobe Experience Manager to publish engaging content quickly and easily, without requiring extensive technical assistance. With Site Express, you benefit from the key features of Adobe Experience Manager, but in a ready to go platform. This means you can get your website set up quickly and start delivering a positive user experience for your customers, faster. You can also leverage pre-configured text and media tools, web forms and search tools so you can give your users an interactive and valuable online experience, without the implementation time that you would usually associate with a traditional roll-out of Adobe Experience Manager. Site Express also gives you access to Adobe Experience Manager s content library feature, in which you can store a broad range of assets and tag them according to their relevance. You can then easily locate and publish these assets to a broad number of end-points ensuring a consistent look and feel across all your channels, campaigns and assets - without needing to recreate individual assets each time. This means you can more easily provide your customers with the engaging and customised experience they expect. Three years ago, people had the view that you bought a CMS that would allow you to organise content, and that s about as far as these things went. The Adobe platform really moves your settings from a passive to an active setting around digital and it really legitimises CMS as a digital, member service platform. Michael Patishman, Biztech s CEO..4
2. Data-driven understanding of customers needs When buying products and/or services, the modern customer expects a highly personalised, highly relevant interaction. According to a recent whitepaper by Walker Info, the customer of 2020 will be more informed and in charge of the experience they receive. They will expect companies to know their individual needs and personalise the experience. Immediate resolution will not be fast enough as customers will expect companies to proactively address their current and future needs. As such, data and analytics is playing an increasingly important role when it comes to delivering compelling and engaging customer experiences. The more a business knows about an individual customer, the more it can personalise their online experience or make a change when a particular initiative isn t working. As it s powered by Adobe Experience Manager, Site Express incorporates data from Adobe Analytics to help customers determine exactly what your customers want, via data visualisations and dashboards. This enables brands to see which content is working, and which isn t. In fact, according to a recent Forrester report, the personalisation of content is one of the five trends shaping the future of the customer experience in 2018. If you aren t in the business of saving your customers their precious time, making their lives easier and better, you risk being disrupted by a newbie who will. Personalization is the best marketing investment you could make. People want experiences that are actually relevant for them, the report says. With a sophisticated content management solution such as Site Express, you have all kinds of ways through which can identify both known and unknown users and therefore build personalisation. This just wasn t possible with traditional content management systems Michael Patishman, Biztech s CEO..5
3. More frequent, high-value contact To stay relevant and current, brands need to move quickly engaging customers by providing frequent and targeted cross-channel updates that provide valuable information. Providing a great customer experience is about the ability to produce content and disseminate it to all the areas where it touches your brand. You need to deliver with speed and agility producing more content, faster and easier, says Simon Bowker, Adobe Regional Director ANZ Experience Cloud. By using the automated marketing tools in a solution such as Site Express, marketers can publish content quickly across multiple sites and platforms without requiring technical assistance or specialist training. If you have good platforms in place that allow you to continually deploy new experiences and find out what customers want, that s when you will achieve success, says Michael Patishman, Biztech s CEO. ANZ bank, for instance, has rapidly sped up its time to market for new content since working with Biztech to implement Adobe Experience Manager a few years ago. We used to have SLAs sometimes in the order of two to three weeks to take content from an idea to production, says Chris Venter, ANZ s General Manager of Consumer Digital. We have now brought that down to literally days, sometimes even hours where we can have an idea and have it in production and AB test and decide whether it s something useful, he adds. According to, Simon Bowker, Adobe Regional Director ANZ Experience Cloud, a big part of Adobe s philosophy has always been about taking content away from being a function of IT and the technical teams that support marketing. It s also about genuinely connecting the dots when it comes to audiences and their behaviour, he says. By automating much of your marketing and communication activity via a system such as Site Express, you can also free up your marketing and technical teams to think of new, valuable campaigns and initiatives that are more likely to drive additional revenue..6
4. Less time managing the CMS, and more time using it While content management systems are essential for quality marketing and CRM, they can also require a considerable investment when it comes to time and ongoing maintenance. This is particularly the case if you are investing in an on-premise solution, which requires hosting, set-up, customisation and ongoing maintenance. And of course, the time required to implement and manage the technology itself can take away from more customer-focused activities like publishing fresh content, creating new campaigns, or determining how best to respond to customers needs. It s for this reason that a managed CMS service such as is provided with Site Express makes perfect sense for mid-market operators. With Site Express, the team at Biztech will determine your requirements, create a cloud-based Site Express solution for you, and then manage it on an ongoing basis. This includes uploading enhancements and patches where required. You simply pay a monthly fee to use your Site Express solution, without worrying about hosting, technical fixes or keeping your software up to date. For both your people and your customers, this has some clear flow-on benefits. The less time your technical and marketing teams need to spend on managing the technology, the more they can respond to customers needs which can mean richer, deeper and more effective customer relationships..7
How a managed CMS helped CBUS revolutionise its customer experience CBUS is Australia s largest super fund for the building, construction and allied industries. They provide superannuation and income stream accounts to more than 755,000 members and manage over $43B of their members money. Around two years ago, CBUS embarked on a journey to select and implement a new content management solution eventually engaging Biztech to implement Adobe Experience Manager. CBUS was looking or a solution that would allow them to meet their growth aspirations. Previously, their content management solution was quite antiquated, and didn t let CBUS manage or track the user experience. It lacked mobile compatibility, was slow and difficult to use, and as a result, CBUS bounce rate on its website was close to 50%. The system was very unreliable, difficult to update and hard to work on. It also didn t enable us to publish directly to mobile, which is one of the most important channels for our users, says Peter Little, CBUS s General Manager of Member Experience Customer & Communications. What we really wanted to do is improve the customer experience, improve our level of analytics, improve our flexibility with being able to update content dynamically and invest in a platform that could grow on our terms, he adds. The fact we didn t have a great mobile experience was holding us back, he adds. Since implementing Adobe Experience Manager and creating a robust and highly professional mobile site the business has reduced its online drop-off rate to close to zero. While rebuilding the website, the business also consolidated its online content reducing the number of pages from around 260 to 60. A big benefit is that we re starting to realise the potential of online as a legitimate channel both from a member and customer servicing point of view, but also as an acquisition channel. This has been really big for us because like many financial services businesses, a critical part of our success is our distribution strategy. Having a really healthy online channel is really good for our business, says Little. Another key area of focus for CBUS has been on using data to gain a far greater understanding of customers needs, and respond accordingly. We are 100% committed to using the data and analytics aspect of the solution. It s given us a really strong sense of how our users come in, and what they do and how they do it. We are able to accurately document user journeys, dropout points and also measure campaigns and acquisition funnels, as well as join rates. As such, we re able to be much more granular in how we understand our customers and how we re able to market to them, Little says..8
Why Biztech? When it comes to content management, Biztech has extensive experience implementing Adobe Experience Manager for a range of clients and is the only local partner to have achieved Adobe Specialisation status in Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Campaign and Adobe Analytics. As well as being a Microsoft Gold Partner, Biztech has a long-running partnership with Adobe and was awarded Adobe Partner of the year in 2013, 2015, 2016 and again in 2017. Biztech are solid operators. They are adept at finding suitable talent, and we have a very collaborative, open partnership. All of our metrics are heading in the right direction and Biztech has been instrumental in delivering this. Peter Little, CBUS s General Manager of Member Experience Customer & Communications. Together, Adobe and Biztech have built and implemented some projects for some of the largest organisations in Australia. We have a history that s probably unrivalled in this market and that s experience you can t match. Simon Bowker, Adobe Regional Director ANZ Experience Cloud. Find out more If you re interested in learning more about Site Express via Adobe Experience Manager can help you optimise your customer relationships, get in contact with Biztech today.