Not so long ago it was a common held belief that Digital Asset Management or DAM belonged in the same sentence as "customer experience management (CXM)", "omnichannel", "engagement" and "marketing automation".

Most often "creatives" created and handled assets through a DAM system and it was an easy connection to make seamless communications to provide triggers for engagement.

Then complexity happened!

For creative professionals to be productive (and thus have more time to do "engaging" things) they needed to be unhindered by the technologies they were dealt with. Too often they were wrestling with how the DAM handles creative files, collaboration and creative workflows. This also included the time spent searching for or repurposing assets. So much time was lost either sorting or managing assets that most companies need to fix this problem before even thinking of customer experience management, CXM.

Who's creating?

Complexity arrived in the form of coordination of different technologies, new channels, new asset types and new creatives.

Digital Asset Management is that type of technology that is closest to creative professional's hearts. Yet theoretically for many creatives a DAM is about as "un-sexy" as it can possibly get.

While it's true that creatives mostly work in applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, various photo processing and editing software, maybe even still Quark, and video editing software from AVID to iMovie — DAM provides a central repository where all those creative files can be created, stored, searched, collaborated on and managed.

The problem derives from the fact that the designers, who were the original "creative natives", are no longer the only ones creating complex assets. Marketers, social media managers, community managers, sales people and many others are now also actively engaged in the process of content creation, utilizing various assets and collaborating across multiple teams and continents to get that information or packaging material or brochure right.

Practically all people in the organization are conceiving, creating, iterating, getting approvals and looking for better ways for creative workflow, production and distribution opportunities within their DAM system. The times of a single designer exporting his PSD file into a nice, distribution-ready PDF are long gone, even for print-driven businesses.

And what if the creatives are needed for international or regional markets? How easy is all that to manage?

What is needed

What organizations are often looking for is an integrated global workflow process that is easy to use.

What a normal DAM system usually provides is an array of mainly disjointed tools and processes. A toolset or semi-integration with, say, Adobe for designers, an integration with CMS for content managers, different tools for collaboration and file sharing among marketers, measly if any integration with Facebook and twitter for social media managers, and often very little insight into the DAM system for other systems such as Salesforce.

Most DAM vendors, systems designers and implementers share the blame for failing to provide the necessary support designing and implementing creative workflows.

But in reality, what is needed is a system where there’s nothing insurmountable in designing and implementing your own creative workflows more efficiently on an international scale. Unique use of metadata in defining your assets brings new speed and efficiency at the very heart of the platform flexible enough for you to custom-develop any needed functionality.

Getting More Creative with Creative Workflows in an Intelligent DAM

While your goal may be better Customer Experience Management, it all starts with assets: the assets that live in your DAM and that multiple people touch in the creative flow. When you start by fixing the problem of ill-designed creative workflows, you start to eliminate duplication of efforts. Do you know how much time is wasted as the asset moves from internal designers to internal approvers to external agency and back?

Managing creative workflows, collaboration, governance and associated processes allow you to be faster and more agile. And that means the creation of more revenue.

Imagine how happy your marketers will be when they can respond better and faster to customers’ information needs and create personalized content? Do you have a creative workflow for that? What about customer service reps who can respond to customers with product issues much better and faster if they had access to proper assets or had built relationships between integral assets and had a way to modify and personalize those assets? Or be able to order a broken part much faster? Automating certain workflow tasks is closely associated with cost savings.

There are multiple opportunities for removing complexity from businesses that start with a truly functioning creative workflow with a platform for managing the entire creative and output process.

censhare enables organizations to manage the whole creative developing and production process and the planning of resources through its own specialized asset management and associated marketing resource management /collaboration suite providing a clear and easy way to manage multiple creative resources and projects.

What censhare offers is an all in one platform geared towards unlocking creatives from the burden of time consuming and often costly wastes in searching and managing the creative process. It allows easy management of assets and transparent creative workflows that delivers on an multichannel basis to provide the focus for real customer experience management.