How Can Automated Tag-Driven Experience Management Help Me?

Oliver Heyden

Sep 12, 2021

What is Automated Tag-Driven Experience Management? What is it good for?

In a nutshell, it’s about the power of metadata tagging and enabling smart, personalized customer experiences to drive customer satisfaction and loyalty. But what does this mean, exactly? We will explore this in detail by presenting several out-of-the-box and custom use cases that leverage CoreMedia Content Cloud.

First, Let’s First Look at a Few Definitions

A standard Digital Experience Platform (DXP) will allow marketing teams to create content, steer the approval and publication process, and roll the content out to multiple channels. So far, so good.

CoreMedia Content Cloud, being an advanced DXP, adds on top of these standard capabilities, a powerful tag-driven approach to metadata management and customer experience management (CXM). But again: What does this mean?
Simple use cases can probably be done by any modern DXP, content management system (CMS), or digital asset management (DAM) system: You can add metadata tags to content like articles and stories, and then the customer sees the list of keywords below the content, enabling them to navigate to pages that show more content related to that metadata tag and reflects their interests.

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Figure 1: An article with tags enabling customers to explore topics further

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Figure 2: An automatically assembled digital experience based on the tag “Jeans”

This is common CX functionality.

CoreMedia Offers More

You can insert metadata tags anywhere into the customer experience, including banners, imagery, and more. Take a look at the screenshot below: When a customer hovers over a teaser picture, the metadata for that content item pops up automatically, enabling the customer to navigate directly to the content items related to that particular keyword. This is a totally new CX concept - allowing a customer to explore your site, shop, or whatever digital experience is active - in their own way.

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Figure 3: An article with tags as overlays for any story teaser

Think about it: this opens up entirely new customer journeys. And thanks to the automatic page assembly capabilities of CoreMedia Content Cloud, all of these tag-based pages that we call Topic Pages do not require any manual intervention from business users. This follows the general CoreMedia automation philosophy: let the system take over dull tasks that can be automated and free the business user up to focus on creative tasks.

Control and Customization

But it goes further. There is always a situation where the automation rules need to support some exceptions. To address this, CoreMedia Content Cloud enables marketing to control and customize the content and layout of these automatically generated Topic Pages. Let’s face it: automation is great, but in real life, there will be some tags that are more important than others, so you need the ability to create a customer experience that overwrites the automated standard.

Here’s how this works: simply open the Topic Pages app within CoreMedia Studio and override the automatically applied page layout and header content, creating a manually curated page like the example below.

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Figure 4: Overriding the standard Topic Page (step 1): Click on “Create Manually Edited Page”

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Figure 5: Overriding the standard Topic Page (step 2): Adapt the standard header content and layout

Publishing Content Fast

So far, so good. But this is still just the beginning. Now let’s look at some more sophisticated examples of metadata-driven customer experience management and automation.

One of the key requirements today is that marketing must be able to publish news and updated content to their customers within seconds. This is exactly what CoreMedia Content Cloud was designed for. Business users can create content and push it out immediately to all channels, including pure content-driven customer experiences, headless experiences, or experiences that are tied into other systems like eCommerce or other transactional systems.

Think of an urgent update or breaking news (or basically any content): with CoreMedia Content Cloud, you simply apply metadata to any content item to flag it to be shown on certain areas within the experience at just the right moment. This can be a ticker in the header or any other form of an alert. Whenever you need to get your news out quickly, just create the content, tag it and publish it - CoreMedia Content Cloud will make sure that it’s shown immediately. This is near real-time customer experience management.

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Figure 6: The ticker front-end module: “Breaking News”

This underlying metadata technology is an integral part of CoreMedia Content Cloud and can also be used in an eCommerce automation scenario to connect content to specific product detail pages (PDPs) or product listing pages (PLPs). Simply tag some content with a product ID or Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) and it will be displayed right next to the product or category where you want to have it.

Tag Hierarchies and Taxonomy

But there’s more. Metadata is organized into a hierarchy, including parent tags, child tags, and siblings, which build up a taxonomy tree. Content Cloud is smart enough to leverage this hierarchy, which again creates automatic tag-driven customer experiences based on the concept of content inheritance.

For example, simply tag a content item with a product category like “dresses”. This content can now be shown for all product detail pages (PDP) within this category. And, of course, as we have seen above with the Topic Pages, business users can overwrite the default by just tagging other content with the specific term “dresses”. These will then be considered either additionally or exclusively.

CoreMedia Studio, the business user interface of CoreMedia Content Cloud, has built-in support for managing taxonomy trees. New tags can be added to the tree, they can be moved via drag and drop and they can even reference external taxonomies. It is also possible to have multiple separate metadata taxonomies - see the examples below for standard “subject” taxonomies as well as “location” taxonomies.

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Figure 7: “Subject” taxonomy managing within CoreMedia Studio

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Figure 8: “Location” taxonomy managing within CoreMedia Studio

These metadata taxonomies can also be used to create self-refreshing lists of dynamic content that can be placed anywhere within the customer journey. Examples include editorial use cases such as “show me the five most recent articles from our author Michelle” or “show me all videos about fashion trends in London”. These automation rules can be created easily with just a few clicks within CoreMedia Studio and then be placed within the customer experience. You can see the rules configuration for the two examples mentioned above in the next two screenshots.

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Figure 9: Dynamic tag-based rule creation: “Show me the five most recent articles from our author Michelle”

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Figure 10: Dynamic tag-based rule creation: “Show me all videos about fashion trends in London”

The important aspect here is this: once these rules-based tags have been set up, they will be updated instantaneously whenever new content is created that matches the criteria. This is based on the underlying real-time, event-based architecture of CoreMedia Content Cloud.

It’s Really That Simple

Create the content, tag it, and all rule-driven lists are updated automatically in real-time, regardless of where they are placed within the customer experience.

But there is more to it than that: the content is independent of its layout module. So, if the business user decides to change the visual appearance, which is defined by a different layout module, they would simply change the selection of the front-end module, publish this change, and the new appearance will take effect immediately.

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Figure 11: Selecting a new front-end module from the list of available widgets

Out-of-the-box support for tagging content with publicly visible authors is also available. Simply add the author to a story and the content automatically appears on the author’s page:

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Figure 12: The standard experience for an Author page, showing automatically generated content

As a final example, here’s how you can leverage metadata to create interactive customer buying guides, guided information drill-downs, and more. Imagine a three-step customer buying guide that looks like this:

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Figure 13: A buying guide – step 1: Select your style: Casual or Elegant?

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Figure 13: A buying guide – step 2: Select the gender: Male or Female

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Figure 13: A buying guide – step 3: Finally select the product category: Dresses, Accessories or Shoes

The result could look like the page shown in the next screenshot: Remember, the results are driven dynamically, just by tagging the original content with metadata. The rest happens automatically.

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Figure 13: A buying guide – step 4: The best matches based on tags

Flexibility in Creating - and Adjusting - CX

It’s all about flexibility in creating and adjusting the relevant customer experience: the rules for creating a buying guide or for any other metadata-driven interaction are not set in stone. They are configurable for an advanced user in the flexible CoreMedia Studio settings configurator. You can see an example of the three-step process in the following screenshot. It’s basically just a few simple tags with some metadata.

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Figure 14: The dynamic tag-based configuration of the buying guide example

The only remaining question is: How does a business user actually add a metadata tag to a content item? There are several easy options:

based on manual input (including type-ahead support)
based on suggestions created natively by CoreMedia
by leveraging suggestions provided by third-party services that recommend tags based on heuristics or artificial intelligence (AI)

You can see examples of these options in action in the following screenshots.

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Figure 15 – Example 1: Tagging of content based on manual input (including type-ahead support)

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Figure 15 – Example 2: Tagging of content based on suggestions created natively by CoreMedia

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Figure 15 – Example 3: Tagging of content based on suggestions by third-party services

Stay Ahead of the CX Curve

These are all just examples. With CoreMedia Content Cloud, you are free to configure or customize your own extensions to provide tag-based customer navigation, interactive applications, and AI-based tagging. And, of course, tagging is also the basis for solid customer experience insight analytics, improved search, and personalized experiences. Tag-driven customer experiences are designed to enhance the customer experience, improve customer satisfaction, ensure loyalty, and make every customer interaction more relevant.

The future is now. Stay ahead of the curve and talk to us to learn more about how CoreMedia Content Cloud supports your ability to deliver personalized digital experiences – quickly and at a global scale.