Our platform’s new capabilities, including app analytics and real-time benchmarks, will help you drive growth
As Chief Product Officer at Contentsquare, I’m laser-focused on ensuring businesses can build better digital experiences with our platform, and that our platform experience is addressing both their needs, pain points and desires and those of their customers.
I’m therefore more than a little excited to tell you about a major upgrade to our platform that’s dropping today, including an all-new platform feature, an updated product and new product offering and an update to our platform design.
We’re extending our platform’s capabilities to help our customers meet and raise the bar for digital customer experiences, while enjoying an even better platform experience themselves.
For a sneak preview of these new capabilities in action, check out this video demo of our upgraded platform.
In this article, we’ll look in more detail at each of the new extensions to our platform.
But first, let’s talk about the underlying pain-point that’s inspired us to upgrade our platform for our customers: The digital experience gap.
What is the digital experience gap?
At Contentsquare, we work daily with companies to make their digital customer experiences (CX) more human, engaging and profitable. That gives us a front-row seat for all the latest developments in CX.
From this vantage point, we’ve watched in recent years as what we call the digital experience gap—the gap between customer expectations around online experiences and the quality of experiences businesses can actually deliver—has grown ever wider.
Why is this happening? Well, the fact is that it’s really tough for most digital teams to keep pace with the evolution of tech and increase in customer expectations.
The tech landscape has never been so complex, with more devices, operating systems, apps, websites and social channels to adopt, integrate, measure and upgrade than ever before.
All these products, devices and channels produce a cacophony of digital noise. Many businesses are forced to implement tools to try and make sense of this noise—but the tools only further complicate things, and leave digital teams with more questions than answers.
Under these circumstances, finding the time, resources and clarity to optimize your brand’s digital experience to make it as slick, seamless, personalized and engaging as customers now expect can be a nightmare.
No wonder, then, that—as reported in our annual Digital Experience Benchmark report—one in three visitors to websites in 2022 came up against some form of frustration.
And no wonder that bounce rates rose 2% while conversion rates fell on mobile (where 65% of all traffic comes from) by -4.2%, contributing to an overall conversion rate decline of -3.1%.
But in spite of the challenges—and fierce economic headwinds—faced by digital teams, we see an enormous (and immediate) opportunity here for businesses who are able to close the digital experience gap—and extend the gap between them and their lagging competitors.
Contentsquare’s digital experience analytics platform is designed to help high-performing digital teams deliver the experiences customers are demanding.
In the midst of digital noise, Contentsquare brings invaluable clarity. Using our platform, businesses get a clear, comprehensive view of both the how and ‘why’ of their digital experience—and teams across the business can align around digital experience metrics.
And with today’s roll out of new platform capabilities, we’re extending that view and expanding our intelligent footprint to more devices.
Thanks to these new capabilities, Contentsquare customers will be able to surface (and share) more insights about their digital experience than ever before, and continuously improve that experience so it satisfies and exceeds today’s customer expectations—and tomorrow’s.
Optimize mobile experiences with CS Apps
One area in which many businesses are failing to meet evolving customer expectations is that of mobile app experiences, which are increasingly in demand across all industries.
According to a survey by Ericsson, 67% of consumers prefer using a mobile app to a mobile website.
Consumers love apps—but only those that meet the super-high standard of user-friendliness, speed and reliability that they’ve been trained to expect by apps like WhatsApp, Instagram and TikTok.
That can be a daunting standard of mobile app experience to live up to for any company.
CS Apps brings the power of Contentsquare digital experience analytics to bear on the app experience. It enables you to apply advanced mobile analytics capabilities (including Customer Journey Analysis, Zone-Based Heatmaps and Error Analysis) to get instant, invaluable insights into your app’s performance and your app users’ experience.
With CS Apps, our customers will be able to quickly surface opportunities and obstacles within their user journeys, reduce friction, maximize engagement and conversion, and ensure their app stands out in all the right ways in an increasingly crowded space.
Contextualize your performance with Benchmarks
Most analytics platforms enable you to measure your own performance—but only as compared to past performance and historical trends (trends which have been skewed in recent years by the ramifications of COVID).
Using these platforms, you might know what ‘good’ looks like for your brand—but you don’t know if that ‘good’ looks ‘good’ by the standards of your peers. And that’s the standard that sets expectations for your site visitors—and determines how competitive your brand is.
Our hugely popular Digital Experience Benchmark report is designed to help brands measure their performance against that of their industry peers. However, the Benchmark report only comes out once a year, and the data is retrospective.
To beat a benchmark that raises every day, you’ve got to know what the benchmark is every day. And that’s where an all-new and highly in-demand feature on our platform comes in: Benchmarks.
Benchmarks is designed to keep users abreast of current UX trends—and enable them to compare their brands’ CX performance against industry peers.
Using Benchmarks, you’ll be able to see at-a-glance when (and where) you’re matching, exceeding and falling behind industry standards.
This will help you align your team around common, prioritized goals that will help you catch up with and stay ahead of the competition. It also means you can get buy-in from your exec team, and show them exactly how well your investments are paying off.
Retailers: Share your performance with your partners with CS Retail Media
Retail Media Networks (RMNs) are a rapidly-growing channel for marketers and revenue source for retailers. McKinsey estimates that RMNs could represent as much as $100 billion in ad spending by 2026—in the United States alone.
But as this lucrative new channel grows, a gap has opened up between the retailers acting as RMNs and the brands they’re hoping to sell ad space to.
This is an information gap. Many retailers now hosting advertising (or aiming to) aren’t able to easily share performance data with brands. And that makes it hard for their brands and suppliers to justify spending on advertising, and to optimize their ads for a better return on ad spend (ROAS).
CS Retail Media is built to close this gap.
It enables retailers to share real-time performance data with brands and demonstrate ROAS—giving brands the visibility to improve the performance of their promotional investments.
Make your experience accessible for all—like we are, with DARA!
Digital accessibility is about making websites, tools and technologies accessible to the estimated 15% of people in the world population with a disability. And as a company, we’ve long advocated for it.
Our mission statement is to make digital experiences more human, and that means working to create experiences that are increasingly accessible to all.
We’re delighted, therefore, to announce that our own platform just became more accessible, thanks to a new, elegant, minimalist and accessible design system: DARA.
DARA stands for Design Around Real Accessibility. It’s a human-first system with an appropriately human name, and it starts rolling out this month with a host of accessibility-promoting features, such as:
Increased contrast
WCAG 2.1 compliant-colors
An evolved HTML structure that provides a better foundation
7 interface components newly accessible via assistive technologies like screen readers and braille keyboards
And this is just the start. DARA will continue to evolve through testing and optimization as we go forward to make Contentsquare even more accessible.
We’re closing the digital experience gap.
Want to join us?
The capabilities we’ve launched today are going to help both our customers and our company deliver better digital experiences for a wider, more inclusive range of customers than ever before. And we’re excited.
You too? Great: You can find out everything you need to know about all our extended platform capabilities—on our Summer Release page.
I am Chief Product Officer at Contentsquare.