5 Signs It’s Time to Upgrade Your Enterprise Content Platform

Forrester, a leading analyst firm, predicts 25% of brands will improve the quality of their customer experience in 2021.

The surprising part? How those gains are made.

According to Forrester’s customer experience predictions, the majority of customer experience gains enterprises realize come from “finding and fixing problems, often in their back-end systems and processes.”

Content is at the heart of a digital customer experience. Addressing infrastructure problems in the content creation lifecycle helps enterprise marketers create more effective content at every stage of the customer experience journey.

If improving the quality of your digital customer experiences is a business goal this year, answering five questions can tell you if it’s time to upgrade your enterprise content platform.

1. Are there unnecessary steps in your content creation process?

Getting to market quickly is essential to delivering timely and relevant content to your audience. Unfortunately, many content platforms lack the flexibility that modern teams require. Consider how long it takes your team to move a piece of content from ideation to implementation across your channels. Is it easy for creators to bring life to your brand vision, or do you wait days for simple website updates?

Choosing an enterprise content platform that suits the needs of both your creators and developers shortcuts the content creation process by empowering everyone on your team to get their jobs done quickly.

For example, one WordPress VIP customer reported a 60% improvement in time to publish after adopting the WordPress block editor.

“We’ve probably employed 300 people in the last three years and a large percentage of those have actually used WordPress before. It’s an easier system to use,” said Joel Davies, Head of Operations at News UK.

That ease of use translates into real business value when it leads to decreased training time and higher quality content.

Is it easy for creators to bring life to your brand vision, or do you wait days for simple website updates?

2. How much time are your developers spending on basic maintenance?

Creating innovative digital customer experiences requires technical talent. Yet in most of our conversations with prospective customers, we find their developers and engineers are spending most of their time maintaining infrastructure instead of contributing to business goals.

Talk with your technical leaders to understand where your developers are investing time. Are they free to execute your product roadmap, or are they bogged down in performance improvements and software updates?

“Using WordPress VIP means that my team can focus on being creative and innovative, rather than spending time worrying about architecture,” reported the VP of Technology of Hachette Book Group.

Promoting creativity and innovation on your technical team will not only have a significant impact on your bottom line, but can also improve employee satisfaction and retention. All that from an enterprise content platform? We see it happen every day.

3. How strong is your site performance?

Speed and performance matter in your digital customer experience. One Google study found that as page load time goes from one second to three seconds, the probability of a user bouncing increases 32%. From one second to five seconds, it increases 90%. High traffic should be a cause for celebration, but for many enterprises, it’s a cause for concern: will your site shine on your biggest day, or will it crash when you need it most?

Peace of mind is one of the biggest benefits for WordPress VIP customer FiveThirtyEight, who served 1.3 billion pageviews the week of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Through it all, WordPress VIP’s server time stayed flat at 144 milliseconds, delivering a lightning-fast experience for every visitor. Instead of worrying about performance or uptime, their team could focus on delivering content to readers all over the world.

“Using WordPress VIP means that my team can focus on being creative and innovative, rather than spending time worrying about architecture.”

Ryan Pugatch, VP Technology, Hachette Book Group

4. How easy is it to publish your content across multiple platforms?

One of the biggest challenges in consumer expectations is the “always-on” mentality. Your brand needs to deliver exactly what your customer is looking for, where they want it, when they want it, across an ever-growing number of platforms, channels, and devices.

To meet that demand, smart enterprise marketers adopt a “create once, publish everywhere” approach. Even then, it’s not easy to build a cohesive brand experience across every channel.

Rachael Trost, Product Manager at Accuweather, knew content was a key competitive advantage for her company, but her legacy CMS stunted her ability to reach their audience. So she turned to WordPress VIP to support a decoupled (or headless) WordPress setup connected to the REST API. “The headless implementation has been fantastic … to serve articles, videos, landing pages, various alerts, things like that,” she explained in a presentation on decoupled WordPress.

Are there channels you’d like to use to connect with your customer, but aren’t sure how? Instead of the one-size-fits-all approach of many digital experience platforms, your content goals are better served by an agile content platform enhanced with customizable plugins, integrations, and APIs to meet audience needs.

You should never pay for anything that doesn’t positively impact your revenue growth.

5. Are you paying for anything in your enterprise content platform you don’t need?

Each year, marketers are asked to do more with less.

So take a long, hard look at the cost of your current enterprise content platform. Of course, assessing your total cost of ownership can be troubling, even humbling—you might be paying too much for services you don’t use or need. Or underinvesting and limiting your growth and flexibility because your platform offers little more than hosting.

The majority of digital experience providers fall in the first category: bundling expensive solutions into what essentially becomes shelfware, or locking you into a vendor ecosystem where the answer to any problem is “Buy this new product.”

Instead, WordPress VIP works with each customer to assemble the best enterprise solutions, experts, and global agencies from the large open source community to address their unique long-term growth goals. While an enterprise content platform is always an investment, you should never pay for anything that doesn’t positively impact your revenue growth.

A better digital customer experience in 2021

As you look ahead to this year’s growth goals, remember that the biggest improvements in your digital customer experience will be made from the ground up.

Take a moment to ask yourself: “Are my content tools agile, giving my creators and developers the freedom and flexibility we need to scale engaging digital experiences? Or am I locked into pricey marketing clouds that create unnecessary obstacles for my team?”

Modern digital customer experiences require a flexibility that is hard to find outside the enterprise WordPress ecosystem. If it’s time to rethink your enterprise content management infrastructure, remember: no one does content better than WordPress, the software powering 30% of the Fortune 100. And no one does enterprise WordPress better than WordPress VIP. Get in touch to learn more.