Use Business Scenarios to Differentiate Omnichannel Content Platform Vendors

In the nascent Omnichannel Content Platform (OCP) marketplace, where customer need has outpaced vendor response, the scenario-based approach RSG recommends for evaluating technology offerings becomes particularly relevant. One reason: given the newness of this category, the historical and technical origins of the vendor is doubly important, resulting in real sweet spots—and real gaps. Business scenarios will put those in sharp relief and help you gauge alignment with your strategic priorities.

So What’s an OCP?

In concept, an OCP acts as a single source of truth for a highly-curated set of core, reusable enterprise assets, including text, data, and rich media—with all types treated as first class objects. This is a foundational service that enables omnichannel orchestration and personalization at scale by managing and trafficking a modular subset of enterprise properties of all formats, e.g., video, audio, textual, data, image. You can read more about where an OCP might fit in your stack here

Key Questions

To some extent, an OCP is a hybrid of content and digital asset management technologies. But to provide the foundational omnichannel service demanded by today’s enterprise organizations, more is required. We evaluate by asking four key questions.

  • How omnichannel is it?
  • How does it model information and manage data?
  • How shoppable and connectible is it?
  • How well-provisioned are governance, intelligence, and analytics?

I’ll post more about this later, but today let’s take a look at the fundamental business-focused approach to differentiating OCPs.

Identify Business Scenarios

At RSG we never identify the “best” technologies in any particular category, rather we help you the technology buyer identify the “best fit” technology for your situation.  So foremost we evaluate OCPs in the context of these nine important customer journey scenarios. Which ones are most relevant to fueling real-time personalized customer experiences at your organization?

OCP Scenarios according to RSG

Marketing Asset Management

This scenario seeks to understand how well the OCP supports the consistent and dynamic use and reuse of modular marketing assets, such as logos, standard blurbs, demo videos, email designs, and so on.

Advertising Asset Management

This scenario addresses how well the solution handles the kind of creative assets used for advertising, for example structured text ads, promo codes, images, print ads, and so forth.

Sales Collateral Management

This use case examines how well the solution provides easy access to organized and up-to-date sales support assets, like price charts, data sheets, specs, and brochure templates.

Services and Support Information Management

This scenario evaluates the OCP in terms of its support for the material needs of customer service teams and self-service portals, including demo A/V, manuals, scripts, training widgets, and more.

Customer Communication Management

Here the focus is on support for assets used to feed customer success and loyalty teams, activities, and systems.

Learning Asset Management

To what extent does the system manage modular content components and assets necessary to feed learning programs needing everything from bite-sized, just-in-time content to full-courses?

Product Information Management

This scenario reviews how well the solution accommodates product information, such as SKUs and specs, and in what range of media format.

Digital Experience Optimization

How well does the OCP manage the content components that feed the broad array of digital experiences, from apps and websites to social media?

Micro Experience Optimization

A scenario to examine whether and how well the OCP manages assets feeding micro experiences—typically pluggable interactive widgets.

What You Should Do

It’s possible that your key business scenarios could represent hybrids of or extensions to these use cases. It’s also possible that in a true omnichannel strategy for a diversified enterprise, they may all seem pertinent. Yet I’ll encourage you to focus on your highest business priorities. It will help you avoid everything’s-a-top-priority paralysis.

RSG subscribers can use our “RealQuadrant” decision tool to match key business scenarios to the right vendor short lists (log in for full results).

If your firm does not yet subscribe to our Omnichannel Content Platform research stream, you can still download a sample OCP vendor evaluation.

 

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