Tuesday 2¢: Is There a 'C' Missing in Customer Experience (CX)?

Welcome to the Tuesday 2¢. It’s Tuesday, the weekend is a distant memory and it’s time to let off some steam and give our 2 cents on a hot industry topic. This week Ian Truscott asks where the content went in customer experience?

A few of us were at the Forrester CXEurope 2017 Summit last week. It was a really good event which facilitated plenty of good conversations with Forrester analysts and some really good speakers.

But, it seemed that content was conspicuous by its absence.

I don’t mean there was no content, there was plenty, I mean there was no content about content.

There was so little in fact, that the few mentions of content in the presentations got a big “whoop” on Twitter.

Like this from @CrowhurstStella:

As a sponsor, we were the only content management vendor there. The other vendor stands were beseeching folks to “operationalize feedback to drive change”, “get actionable feedback”, to “unlock the power of data” and lots of other very worthwhile customer experience endeavours. But nobody (aside from us) was really talking about content.

The analysts who were available for 1:1’s came from a plethora of CX practices. Although I had some lovely conversations (one that I referred to in last week’s rant), I saw none of the usual folks who focus on any of the multitude of content management niches such as DAM, PIM, WCM (pick your acronym), and I saw none of the London content management crowd.

That’s not to say I was friendless, wistfully wishing to be somewhere like the old boys reunion of content professionals that is the Gilbane event, for example. Oh no, the bustle on our stand showed that there was plenty of interest in content management.

I enjoyed the conference, so this is no criticism of Forrester, but I wondered if I can draw a conclusion from this (admittedly) limited data point and wonder if content is being forgotten in the world of Customer Experience?

Or, is it that a content driven customer experience is now called Content Marketing and rather than the Customer Experience crowd forgetting about content, maybe the cool content crowd has left behind Customer Experience?

I don’t care for either conclusion. The very lifeblood of customer experience is content and the very lifeblood of good content marketing is understanding the customer – these things are intertwined.

Evidence of this was our standing room only, guest speaker session “Mind the Gap in Omnichannel Experience”. Presented by one of our partners. Rüdiger Pläster, Managing Director, ORT Group, the session shared how the management and orchestration of content was foundational in Rüdiger's work with various well-known brands (or, to be precise, he said “a bullet proof CMS”).

I asked in the title: do we have a 'C' missing in Customer Experience? My 'C' being Content. Well no – there is no CX without content.