Brand management and engagement with customers is becoming more and more fragmented across multiple touchpoints. During a normal day, consumers typically interact with a broad range of media, from radio, TV and newspapers, to digital interaction channels such as websites, mobile web on our phones and PDAs, set-top iTV boxes and gaming platforms, as well as social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

It’s hardly surprising then that as consumers we’re faced with an inconsistent user and brand experience. Technological fragmentation often makes it hard for separate departments – let alone organisations – to recognise their regular customers.  At the same time, disconnects with content delivery can lead to growing customer frustration as multiple activities, interactions and preferences invariably fail to register and combine across all these different channels.

The continual need to repeat or re-enter details has always been a key frustration for customers. Research shows that when organisations consistently recognise a customer they feel appreciated and ultimately more loyal. However when the recognition breaks down, we all end up feeling just like another number.
The latest generation of ‘multi-touchpoint’ web content management solutions can start to remove this barrier and instead deliver powerful, consistent and engaging web experiences for every customer – with content and brand continuity across multiple channels. Multi-touchpoint content management will play a key role in reconnecting the user experience, particularly for organisations such as telecoms companies with their complex triple play offerings, or financial services firms that increasingly operate across multiple channels.

To achieve this, however, it’s essential to have the right infrastructure in place: it’s not enough just to deliver content – information delivery has to be bi-directional to allow organisations to offer more meaningful personalisation and contextualisation. It’s by combining personal preferences, social interaction activities, user ratings and clickpath data that today’s web applications can migrate towards more dynamic personalisation and context adaptation.

Such an approach makes good sense for customers, acknowledging their value to the business and using context-based personalisation to deliver truly relevant content based on their user profile, behaviour, the device that they’re using and their current situation. Because multi-touchpoint solutions retain details about user interactions from every online touchpoint, businesses can really start to speak to consumers in a more consistent voice, irrespective of the media or channel involved.

Enabling more cost-effective customer engagement

Multi-touchpoint also provides organisations with a more cost-effective way of engaging with customers, driving down the cost of managing and delivering digital content, and increasing conversion rates and revenues through more precisely targeted cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. It also means that separate departments will no longer need their own in-depth technical expertise to communicate across different touchpoints. Improved self-service applications will also empower customers to help themselves, either directly or through self-supporting communities.

From the marketing perspective, multi-touchpoint will be invaluable in improving the quality and consistency of brands thanks to its ability to support multiple channels and devices with a single core content offering. By also offering comprehensive social media integration with key networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, organisations can engage directly in discussions, make content freely available, and move towards a virtuous circle of engagement – with content informing user conversations which, in turn, stimulates new content.

Clearly this latest generation of multi-touchpoint content management is set to provide organisations with a powerful way to optimise their brand and return on customer engagement. Instead of treating multi-channel as a barrier to content delivery, multi-touchpoint effectively treats each interaction as input for a more sustained customer relationship, cumulatively gathering knowledge about the customer and engaging consumers in a way that creates added value for them while still delivering greater returns for the enterprise.

Rene is Vice President of Marketing at Coremedia.