Many enterprises we’ve spoken with have discovered that great digital customer experiences matter to their customers and ultimately have tangible bottom-line benefits. If you’re involved in delivering and executing great digital customer experiences, you’ll want to access Forrester’s new TechRadar report that digs into the diverse, rapidly evolving technology ecosystem that supports this strategic business imperative. My colleague David Aponovich recently wrote about the importance of these technologies. When sourcing these technologies, keep some of these key findings in mind:

  • Delivering contextual experiences is the holy grail for most organizations. This deeper level of personalization something organizations continue to strive for in order to deliver more relevant, adaptive, and predictive experiences to the customer. Technologies supporting contextualization dominate this TechRadar’s Growth phase.
  • Organizations need technologies that create business value out of a glut of data. The reality is that good content strategies rely on data to provide customer insights. Companies that effectively harness customer data, product data, social media data, and other information to create and deliver contextual cross-channel experiences will experience brand differentiation, customer loyalty, improved online metrics, and cross-channel revenue growth.
  • The technology to manage experiences is maturing, but many organizations continue to struggle. These data and content management tools (think web content management, digital asset management, and product information management) enable information workers to create and manage digital experiences and/or their associated content and data. While the management component seems less sexy than the contextual counterparts, many organizations struggle leading to increased process inefficiencies, content recreation costs, and inconsistent content and data across channel silos.
  • Business users and marketers need capabilities, not just technology. It’s tempting to think about sourcing and delivering digital customer experience-related tools like you think about back-office enterprise technologies like enterprise resource planning, email, or human resources management systems. But business users responsible for digital experience strategies need to quickly adapt to changing customer needs. Part of the burden, therefore, rests on the business to articulate their strategies in terms of what capabilities they need to help support its activities and goals.

If you’re helping lead the charge into digital customer experience, or if you’re pushing your organization to get there, this report will help everyone understand what you’ll require to make the shift. And if you’re already on this path, we’d love to hear your stories in the comments section below.