CONTENT MANAGEMENT FOR CROSS-CHANNEL CUSTOMER COMMUNICATION

“I want the right information delivered to me, at the right time, in the way that is most convenient to me.”

This request from customers encapsulates the communication strategy at many businesses today--to communicate with customers in a consistent voice, with timely, relevant, and high-quality information, via a variety of delivery methods and channels. It sounds straightforward, but, in practice, it’s hard. Customer communication takes many forms, serves a variety of purposes, and involves multiple departments, from marketing and sales through to post-sale customer service. In a large company, coordinating customer communication across multiple departments--in some cases, different divisions--poses significant organizational challenges. When you compound those with the pressures of shortened product cycles, the need to reach global markets, and the complexity of communicating through a variety of media, it’s not hard to see why many organizations struggle to execute on their consistent communication strategy.

Content management technology promises to streamline customer communication, or publishing, processes. The technology market has elevated content management to the “enterprise” level, and there are systems that can grow massive in scale, several of which we compared in our series on enterprise content management. Yet any technology that purports to address communication across a large enterprise must stretch across the many touchpoints of the customer lifecycle and, at each of those, support communication to multiple audiences through multiple channels and media. As we set about updating our evaluation criteria and system reviews to account for changes in vendor product lines, we heard from customers that the challenges of supporting multiple channels--audience, markets, or media--were a particular source of pain for their organizations. Systems and processes that worked well for one type of communication--say, product documentation and support--were not as well suited to other types, such as pre-sale marketing or e-commerce catalogs. Systems optimized for one medium, such as the Web, resulted in redundant and labor-intensive work to support other media, such as print. Established workflow practices for preparing mass-produced formal communication pieces were proving too inflexible to support customer requests for more customized information. In short, the current methods of authoring, organizing, and delivering communication materials to customers--and the systems used to support those methods--were proving inadequate and hampering companies’ efforts to shorten time to market, reach new markets, and improve customer acquisition, retention, and satisfaction.

In looking at the current crop of commercial enterprise content management (ECM) products, we discovered that few of the leading ECM vendors were focused on the challenges of cross-channel customer communication. We found a gap between the medium-specific, one-suite-fits-all approach to content management being pushed by ECM vendors and the complex, diverse communication requirements of today’s businesses. How are businesses bridging that gap? In this article, we’ll begin our exploration of content management from a cross-channel communications perspective. Our focus will be on the content that gets published externally to customers and external stakeholders, because it is in facilitating this communication with suppliers, partners, and customers that content management systems prove critical to achieving the objective of delivering the right information, at the right time, in a way that is most appropriate to the customer. Our intent is to give business and technology executives a bird’s-eye view of the scope of the problem, a sense of how content management is changing, a framework for planning and evaluating new content-management technologies, and examples of technology implementations that address emerging cross-channel requirements. We’ll begin with an overview of what content management is and how it has evolved. Then we’ll examine the drivers behind the need for change and the requirements you should be thinking about for your next generation content management systems--systems that are designed to support cross-channel communication.

What is content, and why does it need to be managed?

“Content” is the information you convey in your communications. Typically, it consists of authored material--most often text, graphics, audio, and video --supplemented by data extracted from business applications, such as ERP or CRM systems. These content elements are assembled programmatically or by hand into finished communication pieces, or “content products,” which may be email promotions, printed brochures, online catalogs, training manuals, video advertisements, or any one of dozens of types of content products that businesses use to convey information about themselves to prospects, partners, and customers. When content products are made available to an external audience, we say that they are “published,” thereby distinguishing their final presentation form from various drafts and designs that may have circulated internally before their release outside the company. For the vast majority of organizations, today content elements are created in digital form, but depending on the type of content and its purpose, they are delivered to customers in both digital media (Web, CD-ROM, PDA, email, etc.) and analog media (print, broadcast, and, for promotion, physical goods, such as apparel).

Business Justifications for Managing Content

There are several sound business reasons for managing content:

* CONTENT HAS VALUE. First, as intellectual property, content has value as a business asset. CFOs struggle to pin numbers on the value, but the effort and care that goes into developing content is often a good indicator of the value your company attaches to the information. Consider your own organization’s spending on logos and brand images; the descriptions and photos of products in a catalog; or the documentation that helps avert support calls. These content elements and information products directly affect top-line sales and bottom-line profitability. Your sales and customer-service organizations depend on them, and your content helps shape customers’ and prospects’ opinion of your company and helps them buy and use your products and services. As intellectual property, content should be viewed as an asset, worthy of managing to protect and leverage its value.

* QUALITY REQUIRES FORMAL PROCESSES. Second, because published content is valuable to the company and its customers, care must be taken to ensure that it’s accurate and of a quality appropriate to the context and consistent with your company image and brands. Accuracy demands a review-and approval process that often criss-crosses departmental boundaries--from marketing to legal to finance and back to marketing, for example. Each department may have changes to suggest, and each of these changes must be made to the original content and re-circulated to the appropriate people for review and approval. Quality assurance means checking not only the accuracy of text, but also the aesthetics and effectiveness of the graphic elements and the content product’s design, whether that be a data sheet or a Web site. In the case of electronic content products, particularly Web sites, the usability of the navigation and accompanying programming (scripts and applications) must also be tested before release. If the content product is translated into multiple languages, each of those must undergo the same quality-assurance process. In addition, the current business and legal climate--and, in some cases, government regulations--demands that organizations not only put content through a formal process, but that businesses document and be able to verify that the information they release to the public did indeed undergo a formal review and that even the company chief executive can attest to its accuracy. For internal communications, ad-hoc processes may suffice. For published communication, formal processes are typically required, and systems that route, track, version, and audit the changes made to your content can help ensure that your standards of quality are maintained.

* AUTOMATION ALLEVIATES VOLUME BOTTLENECKS. As the volume of content and number of collaborators increase, so does the cost of keeping track of what’s going on and the potential for delays at various hand-offs. Storing digitally mastered content in a repository makes it easier to locate and retrieve, and it makes it easier to keep track of its status, version, and relationship to content products. If there are formal review-and-approval processes, then managing the content facilitates automated routing of material from one desk to the next via associated workflow software. When the system is tied to automated publishing, it also greatly reduces the labor required to create finished content products and to deliver them to partners and customers.

* MANAGEMENT MULTIPLIES RETURNS ON CONTENT INVESTMENTS. Content can be expensive to create; re-using it leverages the money you’ve already spent. A repository makes it easier to locate content, but to be efficient at reuse on an enterprise scale requires at least two other things: that the content itself be prepared in a way that lends itself to re-use; and, second, that you have in place a content-product platform from which you can manufacture new content products.

The rub is that our reuse and production requirements today are not the same as they used to be. To see why, let’s consider what a content-management system is, and how that definition has evolved over the past 30 years.

WHAT IS A CONTENT-MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (CMS)?

The answer depends, it seems, on who you ask. Some define it as a combination of knowledge and infrastructure. Some describe it as business rules and editorial processes. Others define it in terms of the roles, processes, and supporting systems that organizations use to produce, collaborate on, monitor, and publish Web sites. Our own definition of content-management systems: an integrated set of tools that support collaborative publishing processes. We use the term “system” here to mean technology--usually a combination of software products, middleware, and custom coding. In practice, as with most business application software--a complete system also includes the business rules, processes, and people that make the system work. Without these other components, a content management system, no matter how well built, will rarely live up to its potential.

Typically, a CMS is called for when one or more of these conditions are met ...