This article was co-authored by Roger Connolly, Chief Product Officer, Sitecore.

Anna: It’s no secret that manufacturing is changing. Simply having a great product isn’t enough to differentiate from the competition. Sales growth now depends on manufacturers not just providing an exceptional offering but delivering these alongside standout customer service and frictionless digital experiences.

With Gartner predicting that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will be on digital channels, it’s not surprising that forward-thinking brands are adopting a Total Customer Experience approach. Customer Experience (CX) refers to impressions formed during and after interactions with a brand – including products and services. But CX is more than what happens before, between, and after specific touchpoints. With Total Customer Experience, the aim is to influence the emotional connections that customers form throughout the whole buyer journey.

Let’s explore why Total Customer Experience matters, how manufacturers can differentiate, and what approach Avanade takes to make exceptional experiences a reality.

What’s preventing today’s manufacturers from achieving total customer experience?

Roger: Manufacturing businesses are navigating an ever-changing and often unpredictable market. From rising costs and new technologies to sustainability targets and supply-chain challenges, the need for decision-makers to prioritize customer experience and reclaim their competitive advantage has never been greater.

It’s impossible to ignore how much the landscape has changed – forever – even in the last five years. This disruption prompted organizations to implement self-serve and personalized experiences, and make digital trust of their brand a priority in the long term. In an MIT Technology Review survey, 62% reported that their responses included improvements to internal messaging and communication systems. More than half enhanced digital channel integration and support to remove friction from operations and raise service levels.

So, what holds manufacturers back from achieving total customer experience?

Anna: While there isn’t a single challenge that unites C-suite executives, there are common themes. High expenses for building and maintaining commerce platforms, the inability to scale them at speed, and a growing number of customer channels and low sales conversions are all notable problems. By unifying and streamlining communications, the difficulties of an increasingly complex buyer journey can be overcome. This allows manufacturers to achieve their strategic ambitions of boosting organizational agility and efficiency, adapting to changing buyer behaviors and strengthening customer relationships.

Work with Avanade to achieve total customer experience

Anna: Avanade can help you achieve your strategic ambitions and deliver Total Customer Experience that stands out. We combine our skills in advisory, experience design and technology to design your customer experience (distributor, customer, partner, etc.) and deploy a Sitecore digital experience platform (DXP) tailor-made for your business. By connecting your customer data with core business process information, we ensure seamless data flow and insight-driven decision-making. And with in-depth Microsoft expertise, we integrate your Sitecore DXP into the Microsoft ecosystem, enabling you to work with a familiar tech stack, while reducing costs and eliminating risk.

We use an approach that centers on your business, ensuring we can deeply embed exactly what your manufacturing brand needs. The resulting solution empowers you to streamline content, personalize experiences and elevate commerce. This keeps you on course to realize your strategic objectives, from strengthening customer loyalty and increasing revenue, to improving automation and marketing efficiency.

We provide this expertise to manufacturers across three Total Customer Experience solutions. Helping to modernize your customers’ interactions with your brand through personalized digital experiences, life-centric omnichannel content and centralized oversight of digital assets.

Roger: The Avanade Content Velocity partner solution equips you with the tools and expertise needed to modernize your content strategy. Through Sitecore Content Hub, you can unify your entire content management and delivery lifecycle across all channels – helping you create loyalty-driving experiences while reducing time to market and costs.

We can ensure seamless integration of Content Hub with the Microsoft ecosystem, including Azure to extended cloud capabilities and collaboration tools such as Microsoft 365. We can also support alignment with other Sitecore components such as Sitecore Personalize, which uses live customer and business context to provide uniquely tailored experiences, and Sitecore CDP (Customer Data Platform) to activate customer data for a deeply personalized experience.

Anna: Using our Content Velocity offering, we helped one world-leading agriculture and construction manufacturer create a more responsive, engaging digital journey across its numerous brands and markets. This resulted in a 30% increase in conversions, as well as 24% more website visits and 20-30% better website performance.

Platform modernization guides you to a modern, cost-efficient and high-performing digital experience platform (DXP). We upgrade your legacy DXP with the power of Sitecore’s best-in-class technology, so you can transform your customer experiences to exceed every expectation.

Our work enabled one global manufacturer in the sustainable energy industry to create significant cost savings and increase web creator productivity by 790%. In addition, page load speeds increased by 79% on desktop and 390% on mobile.

Branded commerce empowers you to maximize sales and build deeper, more trusted customer relationships through valuable customer insights. With Sitecore Commerce Cloud, we’ll embed commerce throughout your business – ensuring you can meet customers where they are and at the right moment, maximizing revenue across all channels.

Roger: Sitecore Commerce Cloud offers businesses the choice to combine or use standalone versions of its key components: Sitecore OrderCloud and Sitecore Discover.

Sitecore OrderCloud enables manufacturers to consolidate the management of all their commerce channels into a single managed marketplace. It is now fully integrated with Microsoft Fabric – an end-to-end, unified analytics platform that brings together all the data and analytics tools you need to proactively improve customer satisfaction and business operations.
Sitecore Discover uses AI to identify buyer intent and personalize product search results, merchandizing and recommendations on a 1:1, real-time basis.

Start building your brand-defining difference

Anna: Our experts are ready to discuss your manufacturing business’ pain points and customer experience goals. Over a 45-minute session, we’ll immerse ourselves in your world and share relatable customer stories to highlight how we can help transform your business.

Book your meeting.

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