How to choose the best CMS for customer experience managementA guide for both digital marketers and IT / developer teams

White paper // How to choose the best CMS for customer experience management

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Published 8/17. © 2001-2017 Sitecore Corporation A/S. All rights reserved. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand and product names are the property of their respective owners. This document may not, in whole or in part, be photocopied, reproduced, translated, or reduced to any electronic medium or machine readable form without prior consent, in writing, from Sitecore. Information in this document is subject to change without notice and does not represent a commitment on the part of Sitecore.

Contents

Choosing a web CMS is about more than content management ................................................................................................................................................... 2

The new requirement for today’s web CMS .............................................................................................................................................................................................. 3

From the digital marketer’s perspective: Important capabilities for your web CMS.............................................................................................................. 4

From the IT team and developer’s perspective: Important capabilities for your web CMS ................................................................................................ 6

A roadmap for choosing your CMS ............................................................................................................................................................................................................... 8

What’s next ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 9

About Sitecore ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 9

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Choosing a web CMS is about more than content managementWe’ve come a long way since the days when a content management system (CMS) was simply a way to manage and update the content on your website. Today, a web CMS is just one type of technology you need to consistently deliver an excellent customer experience. While your web CMS is a crucial component, you must look at it as part of a larger customer experience management capability.

Why the shift? It all starts with the connected, empowered customer who brings greater expectations and preferences about how and when he or she wishes to engage with a brand. In a recent study polling digital strategists and executives on what drives digital transformation, 55 percent pointed to evolving customer behaviors and preferences.1 Today’s customers expect a seamless, multichannel experience that anticipates their needs and wants. Companies that deliver this type of experience are building trust and loyalty that result in top- and bottom-line improvements, including greater return on marketing investment, increased conversions, higher revenues, and greater lifetime customer value. In fact, another study2 found that, for every dollar invested in customer experience, decision-maker respondents expect three dollars in return.

To achieve these business outcomes, companies are embracing the discipline of customer experience management and investing in the digital transformation that enables it. A customer experience management platform lets you drive consistency in the experiences that your customers have with your brand. And that’s where a web CMS comes in.

A web CMS helps you achieve that consistency and deliver great web experiences across all channels and in real time. The rest of the customer experience management solution helps you deliver that content and consistency across other channels, such as email, social, and mobile—even Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Because your web CMS must interoperate seamlessly with the components of customer experience management, the CMS decision shouldn’t be made in a vacuum. This paper highlights the criteria—both from the marketers’ and the IT/developers’ perspectives—that today’s organizations should consider when selecting a new web CMS as part of a broader customer experience management strategy.

“Web content management now constitutes mission-critical software to help drive successful communications with customers.”

— Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management, 26 July 2017

1 Key Drivers of Digital Transformation at Their Company According to Digital Strategists/Executives in North America and Western Europe*, April 2016.2 Customer experience and your bottom line, Sitecore® and Avanade, March 2016.

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The new requirements for today’s web CMSOne of the hallmarks of customer experience management is delivering a consistent experience across all touch points. That’s difficult to achieve if your content management capabilities are isolated in a siloed system. Instead, your web CMS needs to integrate and interoperate as part of a centralized platform for customer experience management.

A customer experience management platform—sometimes called a digital experience management platform—should unify channels, campaigns, visitor information, commerce, and performance measurement into one integrated marketing toolset. The web CMS serves as the core of the platform, enabling you to create, manage, and deliver the most relevant content for each interaction based on centralized customer intelligence. And because of this prominent role in delivering and managing an excellent multichannel customer experience, your web CMS must be much more robust, scalable, and flexible than ever before.

It’s also important to ensure your web CMS can seamlessly integrate with core systems such as your customer relationship management (CRM) software, commerce platform, ad-serving software, video streaming application, and any other system that would benefit from sharing customer data across the enterprise. As well, your web CMS has a role to play in enriching your customer data and enabling sophisticated personalization and targeting to deliver a more tailored, relevant experience, which improves long-term customer engagement.

Now that we’ve set the context for the importance of the web CMS for customer experience management, let’s take a closer look at the requirements you’ll want to consider when choosing the best web CMS for your organization.

The 360-degree visitor profile

To deliver great experiences, you need to understand your customers in context of their history of interaction with your brand. Which pages are they visiting, at what time and day of the week, driven by what search term, and using which device? Ideally, your CMS will capture this contextual information, store it in individual records, and use it to inform behavioral profiles.

How does this work? Profile management can be broken down into behavioral profiling and individual records management. Behavioral profiling leverages the real-time behavior of your visitors to deliver relevant content right away. For example, if a visitor looks at three different web pages related to safety information on children’s toys, the web CMS should surface additional content on how to prevent toy-related accidents.

Managing individual records involves creating rich customer profiles stored over the lifetime of the customer—which your web CMS should be able to support. These profiles collect and connect both implicit and explicit customer data, e.g., that which is learned by observing visitors’ on-site behavior, and that which they expressly enter into forms and fields. This data might include website visits, email opens and click-throughs, social network usage, data from CRMs and marketing automation platforms, and other data sources that enable a complete view of the customer.

Profile management capabilities not only support the ability to understand the individual customer but also enable you to segment your customers and prospects into specific audiences and personas. Segmentation can use similar attributes such as web pages visited, location, preferences, products purchased, and so on.

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From the digital marketer’s perspective: Important capabilities for your web CMSAs noted earlier, today’s marketers require a web CMS which offers far more than simply content management. Ensuring an excellent customer experience calls for a set of capabilities that range from enabling you to deliver powerful interactive features, to collecting and utilizing customer behavior for personalized interactions, to displaying content optimized for mobile devices. And all of this must be done not just before a purchase, but during and after the sale.

The following criteria take these and other requirements into consideration and can be used as a starting point for the marketing team’s evaluation of a potential new web CMS:

■ Easy-to-use interface: This remains a must-have for any web CMS. An intuitive, easy-to-use interface enables both marketers and content editors to add and edit online content quickly without having to know HTML. Plus, as they edit, they should be able to see how their changes affect the overall page—for instance, knowing that a revised banner title will require three lines instead of two. Casual users should be able to complete routine workflow tasks quickly and easily, while power users can utilize a more robust interface and set of functionality.

■ Real-time and predictive personalization and targeting: With a single view of the customer, your web CMS should be able to automatically sense and adapt to customer behavior in real time to offer the most contextual content and interactions. Look for features such as behavioral profiling and records management down to the individual level to help capture the 360-degree view into each customer’s needs and interests. Predictive capabilities are important as they leverage information known about a visitor (both real-time and stored within the customer profile) to predict what content and offers should be delivered to ensure a more contextually rich experience. Remember, personalization is about delivering the right information at the optimal time in the right context. Two other features to look for are geo-IP and device detection—so that your CMS can capture the geographic location and specific device your customers are using.

■ Omnichannel distribution: Your web CMS shouldn’t focus on a particular channel or order of channels. It’s not web-first, it’s not mobile-first, and there shouldn’t be a complete separation of offline interaction. It’s customer-first. The experience you provide must be consistent and seamless across all your channels, regardless of where the customer started. And the web CMS you select today must be able to support a “write once, distribute anywhere” approach to creating, managing, and distributing content across any channel—now and in the future (for how, see sidebar, “Achieving omnichannel distribution”).

■ Multilingual support and translation: If your organization has or will have international sites, multilingual and translation support should be on your requirements list. The web CMS should natively support content and websites in multiple languages as well as provide content editing tools that “speak” the major global languages your local, in-country marketing teams use. Also look for a web CMS that

Achieving omnichannel distribution

To distribute content across any channel, your WCM should fundamentally be able to separate content from the presentation of that content. This approach uses APIs (application programming interfaces) to publish content from the back-end management system to the front-end publishing system, or to apps, channels, and other devices (For more on Sitecore and “headless” CMSes, read our blog post “Sitecore as a true headless CMS.”)

Look for the best of both worlds—a CMS that’s part of a fully connected, integrated platform capable of delivering precise personalization, and the ability to easily disconnect that and distribute content to devices without inhibiting a personalized, contextual experience across channels.

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easily integrates with professional translation services to streamline the process of translating and publishing multilingual content.

■ Analytics: Basic web analytics paint only part of the picture of how well your web experience is performing—they give you a quantitative view of web performance. But to measure how well a quantity of page views is contributing to your bottom line, you need qualitative analytics that measure the value of those visits. Look for a web CMS that lets you set marketing goals (like webinar registrations or newsletter signups) and measure performance against those goals, or Value per Visit.

■ Testing and optimization: A/B testing (e.g., testing two different versions of content on a web page or email) and multivariate testing (e.g., testing combinations of content components on a web page) are essential features for today’s web CMS. They help you quickly understand what is working (or not working) with your campaigns and content and can help refine your personalization strategy. Testing provides the ability to refine your content continually in real time, optimizing the experience and improving engagement. You should be able to test one page against another, and test individual components of those pages so that you’re constantly optimizing every element of your site. Look for testing capabilities that can automate testing of content and layout changes as part of the content workflow, without requiring IT involvement or yet another vendor to add complexity to your marketing infrastructure. Better yet, look for test and optimization capabilities that let you optimize content for specific audiences—e.g., the web CMS can suggest alternative audience segments for whom poorly-performing content might do better.

■ Multisite management: When you’re managing more than one website, you don’t want to have to manually maintain and update each module of content that resides on all of them. Look for a web CMS that shares content, presentation, and modules with central management and monitoring functionality across multiple sites.

■ Enterprise-class search: Your web CMS should give visitors as well as content authors a flexible and scalable search engine to find the right content. Features such as customizable facets, automatic suggested fill-in of search terms, and spellchecking are must-haves. It should also incorporate a search-based interface that editors can use to search and maintain content.

Speed website production

Website production often follows a time-consuming linear process—content strategy drives UX which drives wireframes which inform page designs that dictate content and graphics creation and production.

When you’re evaluating web CMSes, look for those with tools that speed production without IT involvement. For instance, Sitecore incorporates a module called Sitecore® Experience Accelerator (SXA), which includes out-of-the-box components and page templates that enable parallel work streams. UX, creative design, coding, and content entry can happen simultaneously. Not only does SXA let you speed time-to-market but it also improves the quality of the work by incorporating best practices by default and allowing work streams to give feedback and validate each other’s progress.

Allowing authors to start entering content in a wireframe mode means UX and creative designers can work with actual copy rather than “lorem ipsum” text. With SXA components, you can easily change the web experience once it has been deployed without code changes or deployment—all within the CMS interface.

As you evaluate web CMSes, look for tools like SXA that support a more efficient and faster web production process.

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■ Flexibility to connect with other business applications: Insist on the ability to easily integrate any and all of your line-of-business applications such as customer databases and CRM, commerce, and ERP systems. Look for prebuilt integration with leading enterprise software packages. You should also look for the ability to connect to databases and web services without complex programming.

From the IT team and developer’s perspective: Important capabilities for your web CMSWhile marketing decision makers are focused on the CMS capabilities that help optimize the customer experience, developers and IT decision makers should evaluate solutions based on the underlying infrastructure, development tools, integration ease, and other features and capabilities that ensure performance, flexibility, scalability, and speed and ease of deployment for IT teams and developers.

Here’s a checklist of critical aspects for developers and IT to consider when evaluating a new web CMS:

■ Flexibility of deployment: When digital marketers are requesting quick deployment of new web instances, you want speed and ease—and that’s cloud deployment. Whether using a platform-as-a-service or an infrastructure-as-a-service model, you’ll want to look for automatic scaling and pay-as-you-go metering to achieve low total cost of ownership. For production servers, you might want to stay with on-premises deployment. Either way—look for flexibility in hosting options as well as in deployment options, so you can choose to host yourself, have the vendor host for you, or have a trusted partner manage your hosting.

■ Developer productivity: Look for a CMS that streamlines development and maintenance with easy-to-use tools, controls, and capabilities. Your web CMS should enable different roles to work with the tools with which they’re already familiar. For backend developers, that might mean Microsoft Visual Studio; front-end developers may want to use their own tools or work with Creative Exchange for easy import/export of templates and themes; while web application developers might want to work in React. Regardless, your web CMS should support development tool choice.

■ Roles and administration: A good web CMS will provide a sophisticated permission management system that allows you to grant rights to users, groups, and roles for ease of administration and control right down to the field level if required. Also look for versioning, workflow, publishing, and other governance features.

■ Integration: Look for a solution that includes pre-built integration with leading enterprise software, including the ability to connect to databases and web services without complex programming. You’ll want a web CMS that uses open standards such as OWIN, OData, JSON, and XML and that incorporates a framework for exchanging content data among systems. As well, make sure you ask vendors about integration with relevant, current versions of third-party technologies today and how the vendor optimizes extensibility for future releases. Finally, keep in mind that there’s a difference between integration and connectors—the

Connecting content and commerce

As a digital marketer, you want to be able to work with merchandisers to surround product details on your website with helpful information—specs on the latest Sony 36-inch LCD TV with an article on the difference between LCD and LED, for instance. If your content and commerce systems are disconnected, or your web CMS can’t easily integrate with your commerce system, this is impossible.

Tight (some say “native”) integration between a web content management system and a commerce platform is the only way to ensure the experience you deliver is seamless and relevant throughout and beyond the commerce transaction. For more on why this is important, read our “The new power couple” ebook.

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former is flexible and customizable but may require some development work; the latter is rigid, ready-made, but might not meet your specific requirements.

■ Design flexibility/customization: The web CMS should be flexible and easily customizable, with tools that let designers create and update site experiences without coding.

■ Security: In addition to a permission management system for granting rights to users, groups, and roles, your web CMS should support deployment that is secured by default and external authentication and authorization systems like Active Directory without requiring extensive coding and integration efforts. Also, make sure your CMS can use your organization’s choice of third-party systems to authenticate users (e.g., Azure AD, IdentityServer, OpenID, and Oauth).

■ Scalability and performance: It’s essential to understand the performance and scalability implications of any web CMS you’re considering. To keep maintenance and ownership costs low, choose a solution that will let you deploy multiple websites on a single system. You might also want flexible deployment options—the ability to mix on-premises installations with cloud in a hybrid approach, for instance (see earlier section, Flexibility of deployment). And for greater scalability, choose a web CMS that can leverage the cloud infrastructure to rapidly deploy and scale servers to handle increased website traffic and enter new markets—without requiring additional investments in hardware.

■ Support for responsive design and mobile devices: Look for native support for multi-device output, with features such as device previews to enable optimization of content, site layouts, and renderings.

What NOT to buy

While making a list of the must-have capabilities for your next CMS, you may also want to make a list of what NOT to buy. This will help save time, money, IT resources, and more than a little aggravation down the road. Here are seven pitfalls to avoid:

Too complex: Unexpected integration problems will sap time, money, and IT resources, making it hard to deliver the benefits you were promised. Some big systems work with other tools made by the same company, but “don’t play nice” with other popular tools you may need.

Too simple: Systems that seem very basic probably are. Some are built around a single database or core functionality, making it hard (or impossible) to use them with other systems you may already be using or may want to use down the road.

Price: Watch out for regional variations, increases stemming from updated systems, or pricing based on vendor perceptions of what you can afford.

Add-ons: At the demo, find out what the system can do right out of the box. If not, you may find out too late that you need to buy add-on products to meet your goals. Strike a balance. Avoid paying for things you don’t want, but preserve the flexibility to build the system that meets your needs.

Duplication: Recent acquisitions have left some bigger vendors with capabilities that overlap with each other or with systems you already use. Don’t buy the same features twice, or three times.

Homogeneous: Just because your IT staff has always built on the same system doesn’t mean you have to. That may make it easier for the IT staff, but it could tie business managers into a dated approach that limits their choice of applications going forward. Discuss your changing needs with your CIO ahead of time.

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The web CMS should automatically detect the visitor’s device type and serve optimized content for that device.

■ Multisite and multilingual support: Select a webCMS that supports any number of domains mappingto different web properties, as well as flexible sharingof content and code between sites. Ensure that thesolution enables many-to-many language support toavoid creation of extensive new data structures whensupporting different languages.

■ Technical support and training: Evaluate thebreadth and depth of the vendor’s support andtraining offerings to make sure they deliver the levelof support and education your organization hascome to expect. As well, look into the health and sizeof the development community, completeness ofdocumentation, and availability of a knowledgebase.

A roadmap for choosing your CMSOnce you have your own list of important marketing and technical capabilities for a new web CMS, you can create a short list of potential solutions. With that short list, you’ll want to put one or more web CMSes to the test to see which one best suits your organization’s needs.

The following best practices provide some guidance on how to gather hands-on experience, third-party objective information, and product know-how to inform your decision. Think of it as a roadmap for choosing your new web CMS.

1. Bring marketing and IT together: The entire team,including marketing, content editors, developers,and designers, should participate in comprehensivedemonstrations. While the initial meeting includesthe entire team, allow different groups ample time tohave their own sessions with the CMS vendor wherethey can ask questions, that address their business ortechnical requirements.

2. Try it before you buy it: Request that the CMSvendor install a clean/out-of-the-box version of itsproduct for your development team. Demo systemsare highly configured and don’t necessarily give youa clear view of the complexity of the product. With aclean installation, your organization can see how easyor difficult it is to get started.

3. See it in action: Ask the web CMS vendor to builda simple website from scratch for your developmentteam. This will reveal what functionality ships withthe product, as distinct from customizations that mayhave been included in the demo system.

4. Attend vendor training: Strongly consider sendingyour developers to the web CMS vendor’s technicaltraining class or, better yet, enroll them in an onlinecourse if available. They will gain a clearer perspectiveof the product’s capabilities and shortcomings,potentially saving your organization significant timeand money in the long run.

5. Tap the developer community: Determine if thereis a vibrant developer community around the CMSyou’re considering and then tap into it for furtherinsight into the product.

6. Talk to other customers: Ask the vendor forreferences of customers in your industry. Speakwith those customers to gain insight into real-lifeexperiences with the product.

Finally, if your budget allows, or if you already retain their services in your organization, ask an analyst with a leading firm such as Gartner or Forrester to provide insight into web CMS vendors. As renowned advisory services for technology and its implementation, these firms can help you understand which solutions are appropriate for your business requirements.

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What’s nextIt might be helpful at this point for you to review what various analysts have to say about web CMS vendors today, as follows:

■ Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Web ContentManagement, July 26, 2017

■ 451 Research’s Market Insight “Sitecore contextualizesdigital experiences across commerce jouney,”June 8, 2017

■ Ars Logica’s “Compass Guide to WCM,” Q3 2017

For specific questions about the Sitecore® Experience Platform™ and its CMS capabilities, you can reach us via:

■ Email: sitecore.net/contact-us

■ Phone: sitecore.net/phone

■ Chat: sitecore.net/chat

■ Or request a demo here.

For further information about Sitecore’s technology, visit Sitecore Documentation, our vibrant developer community, or check out Sitecore training to book an online or in-person training session.

About SitecoreSitecore is the global leader in experience management software that enables context marketing. The Sitecore® Experience Platform™ manages content, supplies contextual intelligence, automates communications, and enables personalized commerce, at scale. It empowers marketers to deliver content in context of how customers have engaged with their brand, across every channel, in real time—before, during, and after a sale. More than 4,900 brands—including American Express, Carnival Cruise Lines, easyJet, and L’Oréal—have trusted Sitecore for context marketing to deliver the personalized interactions that delight audiences, build loyalty, and drive revenue.