Enhancing Experience through Drupal 9!
Upgrade to Drupal 9 and stay up to date with the rapidly evolving features of Drupal. There is something new in Drupal 9 for every user within the Enterprise, be it the Marketing, Content team or IT team. Upgrading to Drupal 9 gets you ready to transform the experience of your customers and use your content to engage and connect. Listed below are 5 ways to transform the customer experience.
- “Come Alive” Technologies for Delivering Personalized Experiences
- Delivering the content Wherever the Customers are
- Delivering content in a timely manner
- Delivering content that is Appealing to your audience
- Building out new Content Portals or Applications
“Come Alive” Technologies for Delivering Personalized experiences
Imagine that your homepage personalized itself based on the type of audience visiting your Marketing portal.
For example, say you have a college portal, the audiences you serve would include prospective students, incoming students, current students, alumni, teachers and parents - each of which is a distinct user persona and have different goals on a college portal.
For a prospective student, the homepage could talk about the school, info and stats that showcase the credibility of the college, and intuitive search tools that assist them to find the course of their choice. For an incoming student, the homepage could present a welcome message, and contact and support links upfront.
This personalization can be enhanced each time the user visits the portal, by capturing incremental information about the user and enhancing your knowledge about the user. The layers of personalization could be based on:
- The type of user
- The past interaction/transactions of the user on your portal
- Identifying the current need of the user
- The time at which the user visits the portal
- Language preferences of the user
- Location and Devices used
Delivering Personalized experiences ensures staying engaged and connected with your customers. The customers see only the content that is relevant to them or what they are looking for. To deliver personalization, the Content Management System (CMS) needs to handle large amounts of structured data along with some routing logic to deliver personalized recommendations.
Allied features in D9 or in Roadmap include:
- Support for integrations with AI/Machine Learning engines
- Support for structured data and tools like GraphQL
Delivering the content wherever the Customers are
Imagine you throw up assistive content to the user through the voice assistant that the user uses.
For example, say you are a financial services company and the user is using a calculator to identify the product he can purchase and the tool is not working. The user then asks his voice-based virtual assistant how to proceed with the tool and his virtual assistant is able to provide the answer. The same content is also available to the user by clicking the help icon or on the FAQ section of the portal.
Marketers want to provide their customers access to their content and tools on different platforms be it social, web, phone or any other devices that they can control. They want to deliver the content wherever the customers are. They are constantly evaluating and augmenting the channels in which they communicate. They also make sure their communication in the different channels is uniform.
Allied features in D9 or in Roadmap include:
- The capability for Drupal to serve as a content hub, ensuring that content is created once and published everywhere, by building Decoupled applications.
- User-friendly API builder interfaces and auto-generated API documentation make it easier to create new APIs and manage the Decoupled applications
Delivering content in a timely manner
Imagine there is a regulatory change or a sudden event that demands you to publish content on your portal that is of immediate importance to your customers. In this situation, the timing is very important. For example, during COVID, based on the government orders and lockdown rules the working hours and methods of operation need to be published on your company portal. This information needs to be published in a timely manner and needs to change with the changing rules and regulations.
Content teams have to cater to the dynamic needs of their Marketing teams. Creating and publishing content, building pages, campaigns, and micro-sites with minimal support from IT becomes the need of the hour.
Allied features in D9 or in Roadmap include:
- Improved Layout builder tool that can be used to add new content blocks, manage content positioning, alignment, style, and presentation to build out new pages.
- Easy to use content authoring experience, with the new Admin UI
- Consistent App like experiences, using modern JavaScript frameworks
Delivering content that is Appealing to your audience
Visualize sharing content in video and/or pictorial formats or byte-sized messages vs the traditional long content formats. For example, sharing a short 2-minute help tutorial on how to complete the registration process on your portal vs. a step-by-step FAQ page.
Today’s audience is able to relate more to Media content like images, infographics or videos. Also with the fast pace in publishing, managing consistent brand Media assets are important.
Allied features in D9 or in Roadmap include:
- Media module that assists in organizing the multi-media assets in a manner that renders easy reusability.
- A native DAM (Digital Asset Manager) that further enhances asset management.
Building out New Content Portals or Applications
You have a new marketing strategy and need to build a quick prototype. For example, you want to drive a separate local version of your product and you want to build a micro-site and mobile app to support this new content in the local language. You go ahead, prototype, run the campaign and then publish the results in your next business meeting.
Increasingly, Marketers are using No Code tools to build their immediate solutions or quick prototypes. This allows them to optimize the resources they use and brings better control over the solutions they build.
Allied features in D9 or in Roadmap include:
- User interfaces that will be easy for just anybody to roll out solutions, eg. Layout builder
- Installation profiles for common use cases. Installation profiles are pre-packaged Drupal implementations for specific requirements.
These will empower the Marketing team to roll out solutions to meet their immediate requirements or try out quick prototypes.
Over and above the listed capabilities for marketers and content teams, Drupal 9 also provides certain advancements that benefit the IT teams. The agility of the IT processes is an important component that would assist in delivering the above Transformations to the customer experience.
Don't be left behind, augment your digital presence. Transform the experience of your customers, upgrade to Drupal 9 now! Write to us and we can help you with a free audit to help you Identify what you can achieve with this upgrade to D9.
