Cathy McKnight on Building your DAM Customer Experience House

In this episode of Inside censhare, filmed at our customer, partner and community event, ecosphere days 2018, I chat with Cathy McKnight, co-founder and VP Consulting at Digital Clarity Group. Cathy had just stepped off stage having wrapped up our day 1 agenda with a great presentation “Getting your Content and Customer Experience House in Order” (which you can download here).

The reason I like chatting to Cathy and why her advice resonated with our audience, is that she is not one of these analysts that works in the theoretical, ideal world that sounds oh-so-easy on paper. She is a hands-on strategic consultant working with clients every day and her advice and best practices are forged in this environment.

In this video, you get a flavor of that. Cathy is not a fan of the view that simply adding more technology will solve an organization’s customer experience problem. Instead, she argues that, like building a house, it requires a holistic set of skills, people and materials working towards a well architected vision and that the team is probably the most important part of this mix.

By the way, Cathy has shared this view with us before, saying that:

"Even with the world's best technology, a mediocre team will only be able to deliver a mediocre implementation."

As Cathy shares in the video, she advocates a no-silo approach, in which content, data and processes are managed consistently and seamlessly across a business but argues against the claims of a “one size fits all” DXP (Digital eXperience Platform) being the solution to do this. A DXP is not a platform you buy from a vendor but is an internal program of consolidation and integration of the right technology mix for that business.

"There is not a single solution out there, that can do everything for you… yet organizations are still looking for that golden ticket, that one throat to choke... it can’t happen that way, you have to build a solution to meet your needs."

A lot of nodding from me on that one, as it’s something I too recently explored in an article for CMSWire and Cathy goes on to talk about the maturity of the industry and that many organizations still have a long way to go, to deliver on the promise of customer experience that has been talked about for a decade or more.

It’s always great to catch-up with Cathy and I am delighted to be able to share our conversation here. I hope you enjoy the video.