Create Stellar Customer Experiences with Rich Media

Customer experiences have evolved tremendously over the years. Technology has made buyers smarter and more empowered; with online reviews and mobile Web access, customers know more about a company’s products, services, competitors and pricing than the organization may know itself. Today’s consumers expect tailored, engaging experiences and rich content delivered seamlessly across a variety of touch points.

Organizations that create a rich and consistent digital presence across many channels will thrive in this changing environment. The challenge is to extract value from managed content, optimize and personalize that content delivery, and maintain a consistent brand experience regardless of device or platform. In today’s customer-centric era, brands must deliver compelling and engaging experiences fueled by exceptional, rich content and a contextual understanding of their customers, all while adhering to established information governance policies and standards.

Many leading enterprises use rich media as an integral part of their customer experience strategy. Creating and publishing media is no longer exclusive to just ad agencies and television studios, and rich media has become vital to business today. It now plays an increasingly prevalent role in sales and marketing, training, customer service, corporate communications, licensing, and product packaging. The reason is simple: Rich media is engaging and effective.

Unforgettable Customer Experiences

In today’s business environment, where time is of the essence and the experience is what sells, your customers, partners and prospects want videos, pictures and interactive content because they want to see and hear your information—not just read about it. Fortunately, it is now easier, faster and more affordable to create rich media. As a result, there’s been a surge of rich media assets in companies across every industry.

This explosion of rich media and social feedback promises real-time intelligent marketing to digital workers. Today, everyone is a content creator and an individually targeted consumer. Realizing that marketing teams cannot, and should not, be solely responsible for the creation of all the content they need, digital marketers are turning to earned media, curating the best content from end-consumers themselves.

Engaging customers with rich media means your content must be relevant, contextual and rendered seamlessly on every device or channel. Concepts like responsive design free content creators from worrying about how the end user will view the information; the creator can see their content in ?real-time in multiple device renditions.

But it’s not just the aesthetics of the content that makes a customer experience come alive. It’s delivering each content type in the best format. With the rise in rich media, content creators need to consider the right form for the content. For example, a video may be the best way to capture a relatable customer story, but information such as a product list or contact details would be better delivered in text form on the website.

The problem with all this content is that the technology used to create rich media has outpaced organizations’ ability to manage it. Business leaders across industries are feeling the pain of trying to manage, control and efficiently distribute all of the new media they’re creating and receiving. And because systems and processes used to create and manage this rich media have typically developed on an ad-hoc basis, without the benefit of a broader enterprise strategy, they create risks and inefficiencies for large organizations.

These are just some of the challenges business leaders are managing in the face of the enterprise content explosion:

• Searching for or locating media files that are not text-based is difficult, often leading to duplication of efforts and costs.
• Converting and preparing media files for multiple uses—corporate websites, broadcast, YouTube, training videos, mobile apps for smartphones—is time-consuming and prone to error.
• Rich media has a ravenous appetite for storage space, putting pressure on IT to meet storage needs.
• New opportunities to engage customers via emerging channels, such as mobile and online services, are lost due to lack of resources to optimize existing media or campaigns.
• Every local region now scrambles to localize the corporate brand and messaging for their markets—potentially eroding consistency in the process.
• Maintaining control and security over a growing number of rich media assets, while reaching ever-wider audiences, is a complex problem.

Media Management Makes Media Work for You

Given the increased use and importance of rich media throughout your organization, it’s imperative that you have a plan in place to manage it. Otherwise, you’re leaving money on the table—in terms of inefficiency, missed opportunities and risk.

Learn more about using rich media to create unforgettable experiences for your customers at www.opentext.com/10steps.

OpenText Media Management

OpenText Media Management enables organizations to make money, save money and reduce liability in the following ways:

Increased media agility. Take advantage of emerging opportunities quickly using your existing rich media to engage, persuade, inform and entertain your audience. Video, rich media and personalized, relevant content can be created collaboratively, published seamlessly and shared ubiquitously to engage customers at every turn. Automate publishing and distribution processesto expand the impact of your creative media. Convert files, apply metadata, package assets and deliver those files to any destination with minimal effort.

Optimize digital workflow. Empower your stakeholders to work collaboratively for your benefit. Engage design professionals and business users with an appealing and intuitive user interface that allows them to work efficiently with all media, regardless of format and technology. Ensure that the right stakeholders are involved at the right time with easy-to-use and integrated workflows. Reduce lost time and effort by ensuring that media files can be found quickly and reliably. Eliminate silos by providing a purpose-built system to manage images, video, layouts and other media assets.

Ensure consistency and reduce risk. Maximize your investment in branding and media by ensuring consistent use of rich media assets across your organization. Comply with licensing requirements and legal constraints. Minimize risk of inappropriate or off-brand use of media.