Hey Enterprise, 2008 called, It Wants Its Content Workflow Back
With the advancements in modern web development, websites that consist only of CMS-editable static text and images are a reminder of a distant past. This especially holds true for large-scale businesses who want more from their enterprise presence on the web. Customer relationships online have changed, and enterprise needs to change with it. Customers are now tech savvy and they want more, they want it faster, and they want to do less work. Data has become centralized, with content now originating from many sources outside the CMS as well. Gone are the days of Internet Explorer. Visitors are connecting from phones, fridges, tablets, apps and applications that all want to share the same content.
These requirements have created the need for websites that specifically address the growing requirements of enterprise solutions. From providing visitors with truly personalized and timely information, to presenting employees with accurate analytical data that shapes decisions, an enterprise website does so much more than function as a simple billboard.
It provides all stakeholders with a holistically-designed digital experience.
That promise of a digital experience drives the need for enterprise websites to sustain their growth at an exponential pace. Today, we’ll go through a few aspects to understand what the enterprise digital experience holds, why it matters, and how our experienced team at Crowd Favorite can help implement it for you.
What Can a Digital Enterprise Experience Do for You
Technology is changing faster than most enterprises. We are sure that you have come across the articles, the blog posts, the excited person at a conference giving a talk pushing the latest and greatest solution. There are hundreds of Javascript libraries and frameworks, multiple server platforms, competing code repos and various platforms to help your business achieve its goals – each heralded as the trendiest solution out there.
While the basic functionalities of an enterprise website are now widely known to anyone who is remotely familiar to this segment of web development, the depth and breadth of enterprise services is enough to surprise even those who keep themselves acquainted with the latest updates in this space.
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Here are some of the most crucial use-cases of enterprise web solutions, and how they can contribute to the overall functionalities of a business.
The Marketing and IT Department Process Dance
In today’s typical large-scale business, corporate web properties are created and managed by a collaboration of two very important departments, Marketing, and Information Technology. While IT handles the website development, maintenance and uptime aspects, and is judged on those key performance indicators (KPIs), Marketing is responsible for the front end content, information delivery and the return on investment (ROI) through user engagement.
While both departments have the same goal in mind, in most cases the workflow process for each of the department goals can be very different. If a marketing or application website is complex, and the site was not planned with the required touch volume before it was built, conflicts and deadlocks over servicing and content delivery are often encountered, with the marketing department asking for frequent technical updates from the IT department, which oftentimes either cannot deliver on the requested demands or becomes unable to focus on the larger business information technology needs, and never has time available to innovate on Technical Strategy projects .
This leaves our Marketing department clients often feeling like they are wearing handcuffs, with their reactions and creativity limited by bandwidth and redtape. This IT bandwidth limitation creates a bottleneck, and when something tied to Marketing needs to happen it then becomes last minute and flagged as urgent, inducing chaos, stress, and inefficiency.
Bringing Together the IT and Marketing Departments’ Goals
This is where enterprise digital experience steps in and acts as a bridge between these two crucial segments. New digital tools are moving past an off-the-shelf CMS experience, such as moving from fixed templates to flexible designs and front end page building, to empower Marketing departments with an intuitive interface, yet secure, powerful, and scalable content management system (CMS). The Marketing department can now have the flexibility to move at the speed of their creativity, working on a stable platform that is easier to manage by their IT department. The IT department are now freed up to focus on innovating, supporting, analyzing data and making development decisions based on research and analytics. An enterprise digital solution not only addresses the demand for frequent changes and updates to the site by moving a new, deeper level of content innovation power to the marketing department, while also ensuring that any detrimental server issues can be identified and addressed right away.
This particular case was experienced by Crowd Favorite during its work for Lexus, Toyota’s popular luxury automobile brand. On the project, we helped Lexus by resolving one major roadblock between the company’s IT and marketing departments by deploying a website publishing system that allows non-technical marketing staff to fully create and deploy live mini sites, with a full content management system and real-time VIN database access.
Providing Customized Experiences Across Different Regions
One of the biggest challenges that enterprises face with their online representation is customization in service delivery across regions. While this can be addressed in the real world by deploying on-the-ground employee training programs, premises customization and design as well as cultural adaptation according to specific regions, doing so is not so easy in the virtual world.
By deploying backend enterprise solutions that identify, customize and deploy region-based and customer segmentation solutions, businesses can ensure that they are providing a digital experience to their customers that is tailored to their needs. This is possible due to the collection of real-time analytical data that specific enterprise components can source from different platforms, as well as the highly adaptable content delivery services that come with them.
Crowd Favorite tackled this issue head on while collaborating with DirecTV, the popular satellite service provider that is run by AT&T. By building a multisite instance that leveraged a centralized repository of information, we were able to provide DirecTV with enterprise solutions that empowered the company to cater to different customers in the 42,000 US mailing ZIP Codes through customized marketing sites, each of which provided slight adjustments to the centralized content based on customer location and/or market segment.
Managing Massive Amounts of Data
Any large-scale firm would be able to empathize with the pain that comes with managing the abundance of information that is captured, processed and handled by its employees and systems on a daily basis. This agony could grow two-fold when said information has to be delivered to customers in order to keep them up-to-date on what exactly the business has been doing to differentiate itself from its competitors. Managing this data in a way that lets an enterprise not only mold it into a form that is easy to understand for customers but also keeps track of it for future use, is something that can feel impossible to manage on most online platforms.
In the case of Janus Henderson, the challenge was the requirement to manage and support thousands of financial data points in compliance with regulatory disclosures in a solution spanning three sites, with hundreds of products and funds that had per product / per site rules.
Crowd Favorite created a data management tool that integrated external big data directly into read-only dynamic blocks, dynamically adjusted depending on visitor types, fund types and product types. This complex, robust big data integration was then paired with a very easy-to-use content editor for the Content and Marketing team, allowing both fixed and editable blocks on complex funds that had to be FTC compliant. This deep content integration allowed the Content team to improve efficiencies, saving hundreds of resource hours monthly.
Another challenge that we have readily addressed through an enterprise digital experience solution, was how to help massive Customer Service teams manage large amounts of web content through a customized editorial process.. With content management systems that are designed to handle large-scale data parsing and an abundance of pages, an enterprise website could manage the required data with it being a matter of clicks on a highly-intuitive interface.
This was effectively demonstrated when we addressed a similar issue for Tucson Electric Power (TEP), an energy provider with high amounts of data, broken links, and poorly managed information on its website. The issue was resolved through a WordPress-based, enterprise-level content management and delivery system customized for an editing process by its large Customer Service team, which turned the management of information from being a daunting process to a walk in the park for TEP.
But That’s Not All That an Enterprise Digital Experience Could Achieve
Above are a few examples of how an enterprise digital experience tool could address the most grueling issues faced by businesses in this day and age of content delivery and data processing. (And a few chances for us to share some of the work we’ve done with some awesome enterprise clients!) But that’s not all that an enterprise website could do for its stakeholders. When built the right way, a customized enterprise Digital Experience Platform should integrate seamlessly with your existing digital infrastructure. This readies your marketing automation for the future of globalization in terms of service provision and customer communications.
With that, enterprise level, customized digital solutions also ensure that stakeholders have access to acquire and process high-levels of analytical data regarding user behavior and process on your website. This helps MarTech departments and data scientists develop strategies that ensure the long-term success of your business. This all being said, this barely scratches the surface of what an enterprise digital experience could have in store for you. In order to truly understand the possibilities that enterprise web solutions bring to the table for your specific organization, contact us here at Crowd Favorite to learn how we can help.
Crowd Favorite Has a Holistic Approach Towards Enterprise Solution Delivery
Crowd Favorite specializes in building bespoke solutions for enterprises all over the world, no matter how specific their needs.
With services including, but not limited to, web application development, database optimization, JavaScript development, Open Source web application development, and Digital Strategy Crowd Favorite has experience handling all the requirements needed to optimize your business via a Digital Enterprise Experience .
If you already have enterprise solutions that you want to bring up-to-date, Crowd Favorite can help in that regard as well through their code audit, code refactorization and digital maintenance services.
Whether you need to find a provider to start your journey toward an enterprise digital experience or if you want your current experience to run more smoothly, don’t hesitate to reach out to us today.
