Experience Management

It's no secret that I'm not a big fan of what the content management industry is calling 'Customer Experience Management', or CXM.  To be clear, I firmly believe that it's important to manage your customer experience.  What I don't believe is that your content management system vendor has the answer.

Yesterday, Robert Rose from Digital Clarity Group posted a great article on CXM. However, I came to very different conclusions based on the facts he described.

Hippo today announced the launch of Hippo CMS 7.8 and its new Relevance Module. As the first open source CMS to address delivering customer engagement, Hippo puts marketers in charge of creating and maintaining contextualized experiences across the customer journey covering web, mobile and social channels.

Hippo CMS 7.8 actually makes targeting usable to the marketer by delivering a solution that is comprehensive, easy to use and easy to maintain.

As Forrester’s Ron Rogowski and Stephen Powers put it, “Three ingredients make relevant customer experiences: profile data about who the customers are, historical data about what customers have done, and situational data about what’s happening in their lives now”¹

Website Publishing Platform Raises the Bar on Your Web Experience

New York, N.Y. – September 26th, 2012 – Movable Type, a world leading online publishing platform, released the most advanced version of their software today, Movable Type 5.2. Movable Type has been a leader in the blogging and web content manage industry since their launch in 2001.  

There has certainly been a lot of debate about Web Experience Management. Some analysts like Janus Boye have called it "meaningless vendor jargon". Some others like Scott Liewehr of Gilbane have said that understanding Web Engagement Management is "crucial to your business". Forrester has attempted to create its own definition – calling it "customer experience management". And, finally, others such as Julie Hunt – have written how Web Engagement Management even extends into the intranet of Enterprise 2.0 – and how content should be utilized to engage employees.

So here’s my take on it:

The trend in Web Content Management for the last couple of years has been Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - and it was all about getting your audience to your site. Period. Just make sure they find you. But then what? What happens once they get there? How do you keep them on your site? How do you make sure they come back later, how do you get them to start doing business on your site? How do you make your visitors fall in love with your site?

That’s Web Experience Management. It’s whatever comes after they’ve found you.

"Today, we are beginning to see the emergence of online knowledge marketplaces where you can sell your personal knowledge. You can see its roots in the crowd sourced Q & A trend that spawned sites like Quora, Aardvark, Stockoverflow and others. And sure, you can go to Google or Ask.com and get your questions answered for free."

-Jennifer Hicks, The Rise of the Knowledge Market, Forbes, June 27, 2011.

"Less and less, we're competing based on terms of functionality (open source CMS or not). Not features but ease of use, aesthetics, support, security, community, and documentation...will be critical differentiators."

- Dries Buytaert, "State of Drupal", 2007 Open Source CMS Summit and DrupalCon, Yahoo! Campus
 

This kind of stuff is just plain wrong.