In its “Guide to Service Providers for Web Content and Customer Experience Management–Europe,” Digital Clarity Group officials map out strategies for pragmatic, actionable advice and guidance for decision-making professionals.
Organizations all over the world are struggling to develop content-driven strategies to keep pace with the multichannel experiences that today’s consumers demand, according to the report.
“Yet it is clear that very few of those organizations have the range of in-house resources necessary to implement those strategies; the rest will turn to external service providers for assistance,” the report says. “And they will find a market landscape that is fragmented and complex, with very little independent, objective analysis of the players involved.”
So where should executives looking for service provider partners in Europe even begin their search? What criteria should they use to evaluate those partners? For that matter, how should vendors identify potential service provider partners as they expand into new markets, and how can service providers themselves understand their competitors and potential merger or acquisition partners?
Digital Clarity Group’s guide, which includes months of extensive primary research surveys and interviews, conducted exclusively by DCG analysts, has yielded the only comprehensive guide to the European landscape of service providers–advertising agencies, digital/interactive agencies, marketing communications agencies, and systems integrators.
The 310-page report provides an overview of the service provider landscape in Europe, and introduces eight core competencies each organization needs to implement a holistic customer experience management strategy.
Scott Liewehr, President, Digital Clarity Group, offered some advice in the report in which he wrote this is an age of digital disruption – “a time when organizations are challenged to transform … or die.”
That’s not an overstatement in an era where household brands are both materializing and disappearing on a near-daily basis, he wrote.
“Technology is advancing at a mind-boggling pace, and innovative businesses are launching all the time, each raising the bar on consumer expectations just a tad higher,” Liewehr wrote. “The average business is massively challenged by the demand for near-constant transformation. In my view, these challenges are compounded by a myopic focus on technologies by all parties - vendors, analysts, and end-users in equal measure. No doubt, software is increasingly necessary for successful customer experience management, and selecting the wrong products can have a crippling effect. But, as we argue in the introduction to this report, more software only means that more emphasis must be placed on finding the right partners to implement and integrate the technologies and to assist with research, analytics, business strategy, and other services for a complete solution.”
In the world of web content and customer experience management, those partners come in the form of systems integrators, digital agencies, marketing communications firms, or ad agencies, referred to collectively as “service providers.”
“When we founded Digital Clarity Group in March of 2012, one of our founding principles was that we will not assist with technology vendor selections unless we also participate in the selection of the service provider partners,” Liewehr added. “We focus our service provider evaluations on their approach, their fluency with the technology, their empathy towards our clients’ challenges, and their ability to lead them through the numerous choices they’ll have to make throughout the relationship.”