Gilbane Conference 2016, Day One: Delivering a Comprehensive CX

How to deliver a comprehensive customer experience was the major theme on day one of the Gilbane Conference 2016 in Boston. Though experts from various organizations approached the topic in different ways, they agreed that businesses need to focus on crafting a unified vision for their brand that translates into real results for users.

“It’s not just about content anymore, it really is about the experiences. It’s a missed opportunity if you’re not focused on how do you deliver to the right person the right content in the right place at the right time on the right device…and because of the amount of competition that’s out in the marketplace today for peoples’ minds, you’ve got to be first,” said David Gang, CEO of Perfect Sense. “With an on-demand world, content and the way that people are consuming it is all over the place, so the focus on right content, right place, right time is more and more important.”

But the model for conversation with customers has changed, he said. “We went from this concept of one-way conversation to two-way conversation; [now] it’s no longer two-way, it’s multiple ways, because your content gets amplified by somebody looking at it and that gets sent out to their network.”

Loni Stark, senior director of strategy and product marketing for digital marketing business at Adobe, discussed how the goal of digital transformation has shifted to consumer experiences. “When you look at what different technologies were used for before, they were basically used to automate a paradigm that was built in the industrial revolution that was really centralized on producing product,” she says. “What’s different now is that this is now changing what companies need to optimize for. Instead of optimizing for just production, it’s optimizing around digital experiences.”

Differentiating between developing stories and creating an overall narrative is essential for businesses to succeed in this day and age. Deb Lavoy, CEO of Narrative Builders, clarified the relationship between the two. “A story is an instance of a narrative in a context. If you have a really good narrative, you can tell a thousand stories with it, and that matters because you have to tell lots of stories. You have to tell stories to your market, to your customers, to your employees, possibly to your investors, to your regulators, to any number of people who are somehow stakeholders in the ecosystem, in the community, around what you do.”

And she said that stories can change based on their context. “If you have a strong underlying narrative, those stories will be different for each situation and for each audience, but they’ll all be based on the same fundamental truths…so they’ll naturally start to cohere to one another. If you build a narrative and it’s good and you get people to buy into it, they’ll see things as you do and they’ll start to tell their own stories.”

Related Articles

Gilbane Conference 2016, Day Two: Forging a Human Connection

Personalization and video marketing can help create valuable relationships with customers.

2015 Gilbane Conference Day Two: Companies Must Personalize Content for Global Markets

Analysts and executives shared their approaches to global customer experience management, including shaping messages for—and gathering insight on—local markets.

Gilbane Conference 2015: Understand Customer Reactions, and Deliver Content Accordingly

Marketers must keep customers top of mind when working on their content strategies.