Customer experience is rapidly becoming the primary business differentiator, overtaking price and the product. As a result, to remain competitive, businesses turn to new ways to improve their customer experience. This includes turning to what is called a content supply chain (CSC) platform with powerful digital asset management (DAM) at its core.
In this guide, we’ll explain how a CSC with a powerful DAM at its core covers the entire digital customer experience to ensure your messaging is smooth. To make the interaction with your content unique and personalised from start to end. To differentiate your business from the competition even more.
Table of Contents
What we’ll cover:
- What the role of CSC and DAM in modern customer experience is.
- How CSC and DAM help overcome common customer experience challenges.
- How to use content supply chain and digital asset management to improve customer experience.
It’s a lot to cover so, let’s dive in.
What is Customer Experience?
I admit that, at first, the term – customer experience (CX, for short) – can be quite difficult to grasp. For one, it’s a broad term, covering all experiences and impressions a person has with a brand.
When we talk about customer experience, we consider all touchpoints, every interaction a person might have with a business, and so on. Not to mention that we think of the experience as a continuum, starting at the moment when someone discovers a brand, through their engagement with it, a purchase, and even what happens afterwards (i.e., customer support, and more.)
In other words, customer experience is a huge and holistic concept that describes how a customer feels during their relationship with a brand.
Finally, it’s also something every customer notices. It is based on their experiences, after all. And it’s not something any brand can overlook.
- Customer experience is directly linked to customer churn and attrition.
- CX affects purchasing decisions too.
It’s no surprise that so many companies turn to survey methods like Net Promoter Score and other research methods to evaluate their customer satisfaction and experience, draw necessary conclusions, and make plans to improve their results.
Unfortunately, these often aren’t enough to solve many of the common customer experience challenges.
Luckily, that’s where a content supply chain platform with powerful digital asset management (DAM) comes in.
How Does CSC with A DAM Fit into Today’s Customer Experience Challenge
Digital asset management is a process of creating and approving, managing, routing, and delivering highly personalised digital assets and making them easily accessible to stakeholders.
Overall, with content supply chain, you:
- Reduce operating costs and ensure that creative teams no longer waste time trying to locate correct versions of whatever assets they need.
- You secure your digital assets as well, making them accessible to the right people, and preventing any unauthorized use.
- Finally, you boost the potential value of your assets.
But these are the benefits of DAM in general terms. To see how DAM can help you boost customer experience, let’s discuss the common challenges brands face when working on their CX.
Silos
When different departments become separated and work independently in silos, resolving customer issues becomes a slow process. For one, silos prevent a quick information flow. Departments can’t access each other’s knowledge, and struggle to access information and documentation other departments possess.
Consider a marketing department tasked with having to run a multichannel advertising campaign at a large apparel company. This nationwide campaign would present the new clothing line to customers through digital channels as well as some print ads in relevant magazines.
To complete their work, the team would need to collate together information from several different departments – product, advertising, marketing, and even sales. Only with that knowledge would they be able to gather all necessary assets and begin creating content.
But with departments working in silos, accessing the information and relevant files might prove challenging, leading to delays and errors in production.
Lack of customer centric vision
This is a more strategic challenge, yet it’s also one that can cause serious issues when trying to improve customer experience.
Without that customer centric vision, it’s almost impossible to envision the different ways where good and bad experiences happen. Not to mention, instill that desire to improve on the challenging ones.
Lack of such vision also manifests itself in slow issue resolution times, inconsistency across marketing and communication channels, and more.
Challenges with unifying brand experience across marketing channels
In a nutshell, building customer experience is all about setting a certain standard and sticking to it. Unfortunately, this can be hard to do when your marketing collateral doesn’t present a unified story.
- Think of ads targeting customers early in their buying journey that depict advanced use cases for the product. More likely than not, such visuals fail to engage the person in the context of their problem.
- Or print ads feature visuals that are no longer relevant due to product seasonality. Apparel brands often struggle with this problem, displaying out of season items in their advertisements.
Unfortunately, such mistakes are easy to happen without a system to unify all brand assets, and organise them so that the right files get used in marketing collateral.
Personalisation
Personalisation is one of the most effective ways to make customers feel more valued and inspire brand loyalty. For digital brands, this often means engaging customers with relevant visuals and information.
Again, doing so becomes a challenge when relevant digital assets remain scattered throughout shared hard drives or are difficult to find in cloud storage systems.
How CSC with DAM Helps Overcome All These Challenges and More
The content supply chain with a digital asset management allow organisations to store, manage, and distribute all of their digital assets. On top of that, these systems feature capabilities that make it easy to complete creative projects faster, review and approve work, and even, personalise customer experiences.
Here are just some such capabilities that you can expect in content supply chain platform.
Content Hub
At the heart of a content supply chain is its DAM functionalities. The core feature being the content hub – A single place to house all your company’s digital assets.
With the content hub, you can store thousands and thousands of digital files – images, videos, documents even CAD files. Because of this one thing alone – having all digital assets in one place – you’ll break silos between departments, and allow everyone to quickly find and access whatever assets they need.
With the content hub, you can:
- Quickly identify all your organisation’s assets
- Organise those files into collections, folders, etc.
- Create flexible node structures and asset collections to find any file in an instant.
- Define relevant asset types and categorise your content based on a variety of formats and use cases.
- Bulk upload files or fetch them automatically from any connected source with a powerful content ingest service.
- Keep track of your content, regardless if it’s social media or a commerce tool.
- Define who should be allowed to see and access what – even down to specific metadata fields, and more.
Metadata
Metadata works similarly to a database table – It allows you to add meaning to your assets, organise them, and make them easily searchable through its different characteristics. Metadata uses itemised fields to store a specific piece of information that describes a particular aspect of the asset.
You can see quite a lot of metadata information attached to the file – its name, asset type and availability, usage instructions, status, language, license information, and more.
All this information is fully searchable, meaning that with metadata, you can always find the most relevant asset.
FURTHER READING: Find out more about metadata and metadata mapping from this quick guide to DAM users.
Creative collaboration
The content supply chain’s collaboration capabilities are another feature that will help you break down silos, bring everyone together, and complete projects not only on time but to a much higher standard.
These capabilities allow you to use agile task management, bring in all tasks, files, and teams together, and manage entire projects in one single place.
This means that everyone involved will not only be on the same page, and able to communicate with each other. They will have full access to all assets and information they require to complete their tasks.
With collaboration tools, you can:
- Manage each project from a single location
- Get everyone on the same page regarding the status of each project
- Boost teamwork and complete projects faster
- Manage all project files from a single location
- Bring all tasks and files together
- Use Kanban board to move projects towards completion, and more.
Workflows
Creative projects often follow a similar path. Be it designing a new ad or processing product photo shoot results, you usually follow a predefined process. Workflows in a content supply chain allow you to systematise every aspect of your creative process, from briefing, through production, to reviews and completion.
As a result, you ensure that projects move forward faster, collaborate more efficiently, and reduce potential errors and omissions.
With workflows, you can:
- Define task transitions and how freely team members can move tasks around.
- Assign clear responsibilities to allow only relevant users to approve and forward tasks in specific stages.
- Set up automations to adjust due dates, assign or unassign users, restrict task creation, and so on.
- Create personal templates for a variety of different projects to start the work faster.
Online Proofing
Before publication, any creative project must be reviewed and approved by relevant shareholders. Unfortunately, typically, this process involves chasing feedback, long emails chains with revisions, and overall delays in production.
The content supply chain’s online proofing capabilities allow you to manage the entire feedback and review process from a single place, collect comments, process revisions, and get to the sign-off much quicker.
With online proofing features, you can:
- Notify relevant shareholders about projects they need to review.
- Use annotation tools to leave precise and actionable feedback directly on assets.
- Create consistent proofing workflows to automate the process.
File Sharing and Routing
As the only content supply chain platform, CELUM offers industry-leading integrations that help you safely share files across departments and with third-party vendors. Other integrations will help you route content to relevant channels – social media, your website CMS, etc. – to ensure that it reaches customers fast.
Delivering Personalised Content That Excites
How we market changes at the speed of light. Current consumers are not just expecting a seamless, holistic, omnichannel marketing strategy, they want the content you deliver to them to be highly targeted to their needs and interests.
But how do you do that with the already huge amount of content that you are creating? Easy.
With CELUM Portals, you easily showcase assets to specific target groups to optimise content experiences. Be it colleagues, vendors, partners, or direct to the customer, you can wow them with an exceptional content exploration experience. And that’s what’s going to drive the results you need in today’s market.
Why use CSC when boosting customer experience
Building customer experiences largely depends on the right content reaching customers through the right channels. Naturally, this means that the content needs to be created first, and then, routed wherever it needs to go.
In the section above, we’ve shown you how a content supply chain (CSC) helps solve various challenges you face with content production. Here, we want to reiterate several benefits of incorporating a content supply chain into your customer experience projects.
And so, CSC…
- Ensures brand consistency. With a DAM system, the potential for teams using wrong or outdated files is nonexistent, resulting in a much stronger and the most up-to-date brand image across all channels.
- Brings consistency to your marketing communications. Similarly, with teams using the same files across all projects, your marketing communications become unified and consistent across all campaigns and projects.
- Reduces mistakes in content production.
- Allows for better content personalisation.
