Does Your Company Have CXOps?
By James Brooke, Amplience
Most businesses operate with numerous departments that have their own sub-cultures, objectives, and processes, culminating in them seeking to maximize their own performance and outcomes. For example, marketing and sales typically create campaigns and work out budgets. If there’s a separate eCommerce department it may be involved, too, but it’s more common for eCommerce to live in marketing or even IT.
Regardless of its location and structure, eCommerce is usually more hands-on in terms of platform ownership and actual content changes and oversight, while the responsibility for asset generation lives with brand and creative. While common, this is not an ideal model for agile content and commerce teams that need to be proactive and move quickly, particularly in today’s hyper-competitive retail environment.
Everybody wants a say. And for their say to be the winner. And they want to do their part in their own time, in their own way. Hence the waterfall approach to content – the drawn-out “throwing over the wall” from one specialized department to the next for weeks on end until something diluted and possibly irrelevant or of lesser value is finally ready and pushed live – often months later, which is far too late.
CXOps Addresses These Issues
For ambitious digital teams who want to create the most compelling eCommerce experiences, businesses should consider adopting and embracing a Content eXperience Operations (CXOps) approach.
What is CXOps? Essentially it brings together key stakeholders and resources from the various departments who are focused on digital content from ideation to publishing (and likely post-publish tracking and reporting) in specialized teams that leverage agile methodologies.
How is this different from what most retailers are doing today? CXOps makes the working group a permanent fixture of the organization and formalizes processes to be more agile. It’s no longer “we also need something for the website” but rather a concerted effort to compose a true omni-channel, omni-device experience that’s owned by the business group but leverages cutting-edge technology and expertly architected solutions.
The CXOps Structure
Ideally, CXOps would be part of a broader department focused solely on digital experiences and report up to a Chief Experience Officer or similar. Casting off the constraints of waterfall practices and the siloed, slow, inner-focused tendencies resulting from decades of print and traditional media, the CXOps approach embraces agile principles (tailored to content instead of development) and is focused outward, to the customer.
CXOps is the realization of true collaboration between numerous departments from both business and technology, harnessing the best of agile principles and development best practices and their application to content management and commerce.
With this approach, what used to take months now happens in weeks – even days or hours in some cases. Without development’s involvement, the business group retains ownership of the process. With increased flexibility and specialized teams, retailers can easily absorb any changing requirements from external pressures (competitor actions, supply chain issues, etc.) or internal pressures (strategy shifts, turnover, etc.).
The Time To Move Is Now
The traditional approach to content production is riddled with frustrations. As organizations mature, they are seeing the value in structuring themselves around commerce and content, embracing more agile principles, and enacting more agile practices.
To be truly agile and successful with CXOps, teams need to be empowered with tools that allow them to do the job that’s needed. MACH (microservices, API-first, cloud-native, headless) principles provide the flexibility to quickly upgrade and alter technologies to enable new ways of working or improve elements of the customer experience, at speed and with ease. This inherent flexibility is key, and it’s especially important in the wake of Covid as consumer behaviors rapidly shift, and the future feels less and less predictable.
Going agile is the human portion of the equation. It’s a shift in how organizations structure themselves and their work to move faster without sacrificing quality. This combination of an agile approach enabled by MACH technology principles empowers retailers to be proactive rather than reactive, always going after “what’s next.” The retailers that have already started their agile and MACH journey are the ones that will compete and thrive in the months and years to come.
About The Author
James Brooke is the founder and CEO of Amplience.