The CX Trinity: Customers, Content, and Context: Musings and Observations on the Evolving Customer Experience

By Alan J Porter and Douglas Potter

Welcome to the CX Trinity, a look at how we talk to customers, the content we provide to them, and the contexts in which they consume it. CX is an abbreviation for customer experience and is often used as a hashtag in social media.

Trinity comes from the belief that any good customer experience is driven by a combination of three critical elements:

• Meeting the customer’s needs
• Delivering the right content to help the customer
• Understanding the context of where, when, and how the customer interacts with you

These observations are pulled together from 52 essays that originally appeared as blog posts on Alan’s Content Pool blog, LinkedIn, and the CMS Wire website. They reflect Alan’s years of experience writing, designing, and managing content for both large and small organizations. These essays have been collected, updated, and edited for this volume.

• Language: English
• Publisher: XML Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781937434755

Alan J Porter

Alan J. Porter is a recognized industry thought leader, balancing both tactical and strategic knowledge and a gift for storytelling. He is a regular contributor to various industry sources, webinar host, and podcast guest, as well as an in-demand speaker for conferences.

Book preview

Front cover. The title and subtitle above a drawing of the author in front of the earth.

CX Trinity

Table of Contents

Foreword

Moving towards intelligent customer experiences

Embracing change

The journey is just beginning

Being part of the solution

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The voice of the customer

The customer journey

Don’t just measure, listen

A new customer experience model

I. Customers

1. You Can’t Predict the Future, But You Can Prepare

1.1. Who can predict the future?

1.2. The times they are a-changin’

1.3. Find the opportunities in developing trends

2. Is B2B A Myth?

3. Is Your Website a Reflection of You or Your Customers?

4. The Fundamentals of Digital-Experience Project Planning

4.1. Let the experience drive the systems design

4.2. Digital-experience project planning

4.2.1. 1. Know your customer

4.2.2. 2. Follow your customer

4.2.3. 3. Understand your customer

5. Great CX Starts With Trust: A Boxing Day Parable

5.1. May the strongest man win

5.2. Trust and betrayal

5.3. Respecting your customers

5.4. Great CX = trust + empathy

6. Why You Should Deliver a Continuous Digital Experience

7. A Tale of Three Pubs: CX in a Culture of Assumption

8. Are Your Customers Shouting Into the Void?

8.1. Don’t ignore customers

8.2. Empathy first, followed by action

9. Not Another @#$&! Survey

9.1. Survey fatigue

9.2. Stop asking, start listening

9.3. Know the customer, help the customer

10. The Ghost Map, Social Media, and Listening Outside

11. When Personas Go Wrong, or The Search for Fluffy

11.1. Personas with too narrow a focus

11.2. It’s a marketing point of view

11.3. Customers are changing

11.4. Still part of the Sell and Forget model

11.5. How do personas fit with the continuous customer journey?

11.6. Was the kitten really necessary?

12. Is Your Voice-of-the-​Customer Program All Talk and No Action?

12.1. A hot and cold customer experience

12.2. Bland food, seasoned service

12.3. Stop asking and start listening

12.4. The what and why of customer experience

12.5. The start of a relationship

13. Are You Measuring Part or All of the Customer Experience?

13.1. Why do people do what they do?

13.2. Customers want answers

13.3. Take a holistic approach

14. Stop Using Customer Metrics to Live in the Past

14.1. Getting to the why (and why not) of customer behavior

14.2. Understanding intent

14.3. How can we help you?

15. The Future of Customer Experience? Ask a 3-Year-Old

15.1. Goodbye keyboards, hello voice?

15.2. Voice technology: like second nature

15.3. A final (surmountable) challenge

16. Redefining The Customer Journey

17. The Redefined Customer Journey: The Customer’s Perspective

18. The Redefined Customer Journey: Questions to Ask

19. The Redefined Customer Journey: The Departmental View

20. The Redefined Customer Journey: Measurement

II. Content

21. This Song Isn’t About You

22. Content Marketing Is All About Pain

23. Truth in Marketing is not an Oxymoron

24. How to be Arnold, Not Mary-Kate (or Ashley)

25. Do you know your Brand’s Origin Story?

25.1. Brand names with a story behind them stick.

26. Collaboration is the Pits, and it Can Drive Success

27. Enter The Jargon

27.1. When does jargon become acceptable?

28. Ditch the FAQ: Design for a Frictionless Experience

28.1. FAQs don’t make up for a poor site

28.2. So many pages, so little useful information

28.3. Your goal: a frictionless digital experience

29. Beer is Content … and so is Bacon

30. Signs an eCommerce Site Doesn’t Want Your Business

30.1. A lost sale in the making

30.2. A picture is worth …

30.3. A happy ending for the competition

31. Avoid Brand Disasters with a Visual Content Strategy

31.1. A flawed hero

31.2. Customers don’t care about your silos

31.3. Creating a visual content strategy

31.4. Delivering consistent experiences

32. DAMs Spread Across the Enterprise

32.1. DAM casts a wide net

32.2. Unexpected DAM use cases

32.3. From aerospace to HR

33. That Emotional Warning Light

34. Your CX Testing Isn’t Done ’til it Passes the Buddy Bob Test

34.1. Testing means more than click throughs

34.2. Don’t take it from the insiders

35. Beware the Content Fallacy

35.1. Content needs to be engineered

35.2. The six facets of content engineering

36. AI’s Missing Ingredient: Intelligent Content

36.1. Outdated practices hamper AI advances

36.2. AI needs intelligent content

III. Context

37. Should Customers Pay for the Manual?

37.1. Company A: documentation included

37.2. Company B: documentation sold separately

38. Let the Customer Experience Drive Your Technology Design

38.1. An experience problem

38.2. Focus on the needs of the user

38.3. Experience should inform design

39. Why Your Customer Data Platform Is a Failure

39.1. Derailed by data silos

39.2. Look at your company the way customers do

40. Don’t Dismantle Data Silos, Build Bridges

40.1. Navigating the shifting CX waters

40.2. Build bridges between systems of record

41. Do I Really Need 61 Apps on My Work Phone?

41.1. So many apps, so little time

41.2. How to sort through the noise?

42. The Connected Customer Experience: Beyond the Browser

42.1. Customer experience on the go

42.2. I’m not talking about the future

42.3. I’m talking here and now

43. So What Exactly is Omnichannel?

44. The Rise of Vinyl and What It May Mean for Content Delivery

45. Are You Delivering a Sunshine Experience?

46. Good CX Turns Bad in the Swipe of a Credit Card

46.1. How quickly good CX turns bad

46.2. Good CX considers customers and employees

46.3. Treat employees like customers

47. IoT May Change Customer Experience, But Not Like You’d Expect

47.1. IoT to the rescue?

47.2. IoT may travel an unexpected path

48. The Man from P.O.S.T.—​The Where to Prioritize Tech Affair

49. Are We Developing the Dickens of Customer Experiences?

49.1. Charles Dickens: omnichannel pioneer?

49.2. How do we reconcile the impact of agile on the customer experience?

49.3. The future of customer experience

50. From the Jetsons to Connected Buildings: Intelligent Workplaces

50.1. What once was science fiction is now reality

50.2. From assigned desks to intelligent systems

50.3. Where do we go from here?

51. Employees Deserve the Same Digital Experience as Customers

51.1. Digging through information silos

51.2. Employee’s disappearing patience for poor user experiences

51.3. Treat employees as you would your customers

52. Three Trends Shaping Today’s Digital Workplace

52.1. Trends in the digital workplace

52.1.1. 1. Exploiting information

52.1.2. 2. Enablement

52.1.3. 3. Mobile productivity

A. Conclusion: Just Six Words

A.1. Holistic

A.2. Frictionless

A.3. Seamless

A.4. Flow

A.5. Questions

A.6. Tasks

B. Topic Index

Glossary

References

Index

C. Copyright and Legal Notices

CX Trinity

Customers, Content, Context

Alan J. Porter

XML Press logo

Foreword

by Cruce Saunders, Founder of [A]

Digital customer experiences are always mediated through content. And customers bring their own individual needs and environments to those interactions. More precisely, customers bring their context.

As Alan describes throughout the essays in this book, the CX Trinity emerges from this dynamic interaction of customer, content, and context. And this perception is exciting because it’s the basis for a much bigger shift underway everywhere.

Moving towards intelligent customer experiences

For every retail experience, customers expect a counterpart e-commerce experience. For every customer service interaction by phone, customers expect an easier, more effortless online path to resolution. For every interaction with a salesperson, customers expect a coherent and usable online education and interactive sales funnel. For every offline process, there’s an online counterpart. And, as customers, we all interact more with companies and experiences that feel smarter and more effortless.

We naturally gravitate towards smooth interactions that require less of our mental effort and time to engage. So, brand publishers need customer, content, and context to come together and assemble what [A] calls simply Intelligent Customer Experiences.

In this new era we are building, we need to give customers:

A coherent and holistic set of interactions across many journeys and touch-points stemming from within an organization.

Highly relevant and streamlined interactions that come to meet them within their context, at their point of interest and need.

Experiences that cross channels and devices seamlessly

The dawning of this new era of intelligent customer experiences makes incremental progress every day. The world is evolving to meet the needs of a growing and diverse population, all interacting and engaging across many devices in real time. Enterprises must pursue a major shift in the way knowledge moves around their organizations. We must get conscious about how content travels across departments, through systems, between creators, designers and developers, and into an ecosystem of devices and channels that is constantly and rapidly changing.

Embracing change

Every organization facilitates customer interactions that include digital communications in at least one channel. And some organizations engage customers across many content types and many channels. Keeping up with many channels is hard enough. Then we have to somehow make it all relevant to individual customers and groups of customers.

The personalized and fluid nature of this evolving reality has quickly rendered the old ways of dealing with static knowledge obsolete. The expression of an organization’s products and services, support, resources, communities, and all forms of engagement, all rely on knowledge expressed as content, coming together in the customer’s context.

The journey is just beginning

Even though customers have been at the center of digital experiences for more than two decades, in many ways all of us are still at the beginning of a journey. This next decade will realize a complete transformation in the nature of customer experiences and the way they are created.

This slow-burning transformation calls us to evolve our thinking and our collective action:

We need to move beyond the static page-based and channel-based thinking that defined the digital customer experience up until now.

We need to shift our thinking towards integrated, context-rich customer experiences built from a common, shared set of intelligent content.

We need to aim for intelligent content that automatically assembles into customer experiences, driven by all the contextual data that businesses are so fastidious at gathering but not yet accomplished at using.

To get there, CX teams and enterprise publishing and knowledge teams need to embrace the complexity of this new era of engagement with the strategy, engineering, and operations necessary to make the complex look and feel easy and seamless to the customer.

Being part of the solution

During his tenure at [A], as head of content intelligence strategy, Alan Porter had a unique vantage point to observe the forward edge of this transformation through the lens of engagements involving many of the world’s largest and most complex enterprise publishing environments. These clients cumulatively serve many billions of customer interactions every month across well-known digital properties.

As we collaborated together with these clients, we discovered and co-created the patterns, processes, organizational designs, and architectures that have helped shape how content gets acquired, managed, and delivered into customer experiences. These substantial CX publishing transformations all focus on creating content systems to support new interactions between customer, content, and context.

The transformations of content supply chains rely on lots of moving parts working together. And in every transformation, there is a champion. Someone who knows the issues today and sees the future. Someone who sees the new world of customer experience and who drives the vision for the changes needed to support that new world. And then, there are many