5 Challenges Your Business Faces Everyday & How AEM Can Solve Them
Did you know? “By 2020, customers will manage 87% of their customer relationships without interacting with humans” – Gartner
Customer expectations are rapidly escalating, technology is constantly changing, and businesses have to keep up with both. Choosing the right content management system (CMS) can be a key factor in successfully combating these challenges.
At Blue Acorn iCi, we’ve worked with a multitude of clients in a variety of verticals. Over the course of our experience, we’ve seen 5 challenges that clients face on a daily basis. These challenges occur because of the need to provide customers with on-demand information that is highly customized and compelling.
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) solves the problem of providing users with on-demand customized information with its personalization engine and the ability to rapidly push out content at the push of a button. In addition, AEM provides the ability to customize features and functionality according to your individual business needs.
5 Challenges your business faces everyday and how you can use AEM to help solve them:
1. Managing properties for multiple business units.
Clients often have a portfolio of properties to manage and maintain. Sometimes hundreds, even thousands of them depending on how many business units they have. AEM comes with a multi-site manager allowing clients to easily manage and maintain multiple sites. Multi-site manager allows clients to share content, perform system configurations such as storage space, and code across all of their sites. Setting up and maintaining new sites can be done with a few simple configurations.
2. Staying up to date and delivering evolving experiences.
We often run into the questions: How hard is it to maintain our site? Is it hard to upgrade versions of AEM? If you’re building your site according to Adobe and Blue Acorn iCi’s best practices, it’s much easier to maintain and upgrade. One of our best practices is to use as many out-of-the-box (OOTB) components as possible. This makes it easier to upgrade in the long term, since your site doesn’t have a wide array of custom components. Especially ones that Adobe didn’t build or support. AEM is evolving with each upgrade version and it’s important to keep up in order to deliver evolving experiences for your customers. Check out a recent blog post from Blue Acorn iCi on upgrades.
3. Tracking, reporting, and providing personalized experiences to users.
Fortunately, AEM has these services and tools built in, so there’s no need to install plugins. After a few configurations you’ll be able to check your site statistics, deliver personalized content to your users, and report back to your team which experience provided the biggest impact. If you have a pre-existing analytics platform you can integrate that as well. The infrastructure of AEM makes it easy to connect to API’s and services that can talk to other analytics, personalization, and reporting platforms.
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4. Creating workflows for multiple business units.
AEM contains OOTB workflows to help tailor toward a variety of business needs. If one of them doesn’t suit your needs you can create custom workflows as well. For a recent Fortune 100 client, there was a need to create a workflow that would send notifications to a variety of distribution lists in each step of the process. When a page was sent to a “staging” environment, the QA team would get a notification to review the page. After reviewing it, a notification would be sent to a manager for a final confirmation. Once approved, the page would be published and a notification would be sent to everyone who worked on the page notifying them that the change is live. This is just one example of how flexible AEM’s workflows are, and how it can suit a variety of business needs.
5. Providing user permissions for each business unit.
AEM has a robust user management system, making it easy to manage and maintain users. With the click of a button you can set user groups to only see content that is relevant to them, ensuring other business unit’s content isn’t accidentally deleted or modified. In addition, you can set different levels of user permissions. For example, an admin group that has permissions to add new users and publish content to the live site. An author level that can only send content to a “preview” or “staging” site. Helping to ensure that incorrect content never gets published to your site.
The web will continue to evolve, and there will always be challenges that clients face. The online customer experience is a key part to your businesses success. It’s up to you to provide compelling experiences to keep users coming back. At Blue Acorn iCi, we help with all aspects of the customer experience from design to development. Please feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions.