Editor's Note: Petr Palas, founder and CEO of Kentico software, lets his voice be heard to in this week's CEO Corner. In this article, he provides rebuttal to an earlier CEO Corner written by Agility's Michael Assad. Where Assad favors a "best of breed" approach and questions the validity of CXM, Palas believe the future is in fully integrated CXM solutions. Which CEO is right? We'll let you decide...
Customer Experience Management (CXM) is not just Web Content Management. It requires several additional components such as Web Analytics, Optimization, Lead Management, and others that need to be fully integrated and work together smoothly. Should you choose a selection of “best-of-breed” products to integrate? Or should you choose an all-in-one suite?
Deploying a successful CXM solution requires several components that need to work together smoothly. Depending on your needs, you may be looking for several items from the following list:
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Campaign Management
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Optimization (A/B testing, MVT testing)
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Personalization
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Lead Management, Lead Scoring, and Lead Nurturing
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E-mail Marketing
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E-commerce
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Customer Service Interaction
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Search
CXM buyers have to make a choice: which components do I need and where do I buy them? Shall I buy a single, all-in-one suite that contains everything, or shall I choose several best-of-breed products and integrate them? And what if I already have some of these components — should I replace them or integrate?
Let’s take a look at various decision factors and what impact they have on your choice.
Decision Factor #1: Functionality
With best-of-breed products, you may expect deeper, more advanced individual component functionality. These types of vendors have focused on a single, hopefully well thought-out component. With suite products, the components may vary in depth of the features and may not cater to some advanced scenarios. Still, it’s not a hard rule — some CXM suite vendors have invested in specific components to ensure they achieve functional parity with best-of-breed systems.
If your business demands advanced scenarios, the best-of-breed approach seems to be a win. The obvious question is: Do you really need all the advanced features in every area and are they worth the investment?
Decision Factor #2: Integration
In order to deliver on customer expectations, CXM components need to be fully integrated not only with your CMS which typically serves as a hub, but also with one another. For example, your E-mail marketing platform should be integrated not only with your CMS, but also with your Web Analytics, Campaign Management, Lead Management and Lead Nurturing components.
With a best-of-breed approach integration is a requirement. This means you need to answer the following questions:
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How do I integrate everything?
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How do I integrate on-premise and cloud-based services?
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Is the latest version of product A compatible with product B?
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What if one of the vendors changes their API or data schema?
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Do I need to pay extra for various connectors between systems or even for a system integration platform?
CXM is a real-time customer experience. Visitors of your website may not appreciate that they get personalized web content if the personalization relies on data that is synchronized every hour or, even worse, once a day. And real-time integration isn't always an option since calling external services to display the page may significantly slow down your website.
The all-in-one suite often helps to solve some of these issues. Still, it’s important to keep in mind that you will rarely find a single solution that provides for absolutely every scenario or replaces every CXM component, such as CRM. So even with the suite approach, you need to be ready for some integration — but this may be significantly easier as the number of components is lower.
If you consider that each component of the CXM solution may need to talk to every other component, the complexity of integration grows exponentially with every additional product. So your goal should be to buy as few products as possible.
Decision Factor #3: User Experience for Your Business Users
Deploying multiple products from various vendors inevitably leads to multiple applications that your business users need to access. This has its own difficulties and may easily jeopardize the success of your project:
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Different user interfaces lead to a steeper learning curve, lower productivity, and slower adoption.
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Users may need to sign in to each application using different credentials. “Which username should I use for XY?” is a question your administrators will hear all the time, unless you integrate the security information or implement single-sign-on authentication, which can easily become a major project by itself.
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As vendors tend to change their user interface with every major version, prepare for more frequent end user training.
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With any version change, integration testing is required.
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If the components aren't properly integrated, users may face complexities, such as copy-pasting data or identifiers between systems manually.
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It may be near impossible to analyze data across multiple components and preparing even simple reports may require going to several applications and aggregating data manually in Excel sheets unless you put everything into a single data warehouse.
In contrast, suite products tend to solve this more elegantly and provide users with a single, consistent user interface that can be accessed using a single login. However, make sure that you see all the components and how they work together before you make the purchase — some suite vendors rely on integrating third-party products (whether through OEM contracts or after acquisition of another software company) into their suite which often leads to similar issues as those encountered when integrating several best-of-breed products.
Decision Factor #4: System Maintenance
Similar to integration, system maintenance complexity grows significantly with number of products. For every product involved, you need to manage:
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Upgrades
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Security
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Backup
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High availability and performance
These factors lead to significantly higher cost of ownership for a solution built using multiple best-of-breed products rather than a single suite product.
Decision Factor #5: Price and TCO
When talking about money, there are six things you need to consider:
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Initial purchase price – the price of several best-of-breed products can easily rise to several times that of a single suite product.
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License costs predictability – most CXM vendors, whether best-of-breed or suite, won’t give you their full price list and you may not foresee all license costs you will eventually pay when you deploy the complete solution. With multiple vendors, each of whom has a different licensing structure and various per-user, per-server or usage-based fees, calculating the final price before going live is near impossible.
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Integration costs – as mentioned in Decision Factor #2, the complexity of integration is generally much higher for a solution based on best-of-breed products that need to be integrated.
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Development costs – developing a solution with multiple best-of-breed products may be much more complex due to architectures, APIs, or even application and database platforms they run on. At the same time, however, if you need more advanced functionality than is available in the suite products, you may spend more on customizing and extending the product for scenarios that are not supported.
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System maintenance costs – see Decision Factor #4.
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Hardware costs – again, it’s much more difficult to estimate overall hardware infrastructure costs when deploying several products. Also, running several best-of-breed products often leads to less efficient use of hardware resources and the integration between systems may lead to a significant performance overhead.
Decision Factor #6: Vendors
Let’s be honest, dealing with several vendors is a pain when combining several best-of-breed products. The fact that you have to talk to sales people, support people, and consultants from several companies makes the purchase and maintenance more complex. Moreover, when things go wrong, you don’t have a single company that is fully accountable.
Favoring an All-in-One solution
We at Kentico believe in the power of a fully integrated CXM solution. Thus, we provide a complete, all-in-one solution that provides you with everything you need to manage your website and get instant marketing results from your CXM investment. With Kentico EMS, you get everything you need, in a single, fully integrated product. We believe in transparency; providing all information about available features, offering a free trial, and displaying the price list on our website, so you know exactly what the product does and what it is going to cost you.
At the same time, we are aware that you may need to integrate our solution with products you’re already using, so we provide you with several integration options:
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.NET API
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REST API
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Web Services
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Kentico System Integration Bus
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RSS and XML feeds
We also provide ready-to-use connectors for Active Directory, Microsoft SharePoint, Salesforce.com, and Data.com.
By providing a single powerful solution, we help you make your CXM initiative more successful and cost efficient.
Want to learn more about Kentico EMS — the fully integrated CXM solution? See our website or sign up for one of our weekly Kentico EMS webinars.