The Digital Experience Paradox

Digital experience to engage and attract customers is a top priority of enterprises across all industries. To succeed in a digital world, your company needs to - so you are told - deliver amazing experiences at every interaction. As Paul Greenberg points out in his CRM 2020 Watchlist, “CX and customer engagement are now standard to the thinking of companies,” yet as we enter a new decade, we’re facing a paradox:

While investing in digital is a necessity for enterprises to compete, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to compete effectively in digital. Your digital spend is spiraling out of control, often in pursuit of delivering experiences only for experience’s sake, and an ROI that is hard to quantify. 

What is leading to this paradox? Let me start with the basics. Your website and digital presence are the soul of your company today. Most prospects and customers would rather interact with you digitally and learn about your products and services than interact with a person directly. Episerver’s B2B digital experience survey shows that the top three ways B2Bs can make it easier for business users to work with them online are: pricing on websites, self-service functionality, and easy scheduling with a salesperson. And, on the B2C side, you should forget about making anyone pick up a phone.

Engaging intelligently with customers across channels is imperative, given that your customers ultimately determine the way they want to interact with you. Attribution of digital efforts to your sales activities is challenging though, and even pure digital direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands are struggling with ever-increasing marketing costs without turning a profit. 

On top of this, competition has never been more acute. Growing organizations want to be able to play with the “big boys,” but are handicapped by sub-optimal web platforms. Digitally mature organizations are setting a new standard, but you don’t even know where to begin, and time is running out. If you’re selling online, you need ecommerce capabilities, but good luck because the almighty Amazon seems ready to pounce with its superhuman sophistication, algorithms, and intelligence. So, you need AI in your platform too. All this, and you haven’t even addressed security and scalability.

The most important question to ask yourself is, “are your customers actually buying experiences?” Do you need to provide amazing experiences even if your customers didn’t ask for them? Are your expenses just funding new floors in your vendor’s sky-high tower? Your alternative is to get a functioning website but never know who visits it. No one seems to be offering solutions that are right for growing businesses. All solutions either seem too expensive or under-powered for your needs.

This is where Episerver comes in. We care about your business, not about growing the size of our offices or towers (if we had towers ;-). We are humble and hungry like you. We want you to deliver to your customers the experience they actually want, not experiences for experience’s sake. We believe the answer to the digital paradox is true customer-centricity. This is why we at Epi combine leading content and commerce capabilities into one platform, and embed AI and content automation capabilities throughout to allow for 1:1 personalization, all purpose-built for your needs and powered by the cloud. With it, we fulfill our mission to empower every brand to compete on digital, and to intuitively build customer-centric digital experiences. We want you to be able to deliver the experience your customers actually want, not what those in the tower say they demand.

How are you addressing the digital experience paradox?