We were delighted to recently attend and sponsor Fast Forward 2021 – Contentful’s flagship global conference aimed at bringing together the digital community to share and learn how to maximise the effectiveness of digital content.
This year’s event focused on empowering businesses to become “digital first, digital fast”. Here, we’ve summarised three of the key themes explored at Fast Forward and what we’re excited about as we look ahead to 2022.
1) Optimised experience doesn’t stop with customer experience
In the words of Steve Sloan, CEO of Contentful: “We have to meet customers where they want to be met – via digital channels” And while this may seem overt, there’s still a huge gap between the experience customers expect and demand from brands, and the digital experience they actually receive. The stakes are too high to provide a bad experience – after all, 32% of customers say they would stop doing business with a brand they loved after one bad experience, according to PwC.
While the spotlight has certainly been and, rightly so, continues to be on improving the digital customer experience, in the days of “The Great Resignation”, is it time for businesses to consider their employee, partner and supplier experience as diligently as their customer experience? And what role can digital play in enabling this?
2) A platform to meet you at every stage of your digital maturity journey
At Candyspace, we’re strong supporters of the MACH Alliance – a community of Microservices based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS and Headless providers. We’re proud to partner with headless content provider Contentful and headless commerce provider BigCommerce to enable our clients to build a best-in-class digital ecosystem.
One of the advantages of a platform built with a composable architecture, such as Contentful, is its extensibility. Many high-growth businesses need to balance selecting a platform that will support future growth, while minimising additional features they currently pay for, but aren't ready to use. An easily scalable platform like Contentful will grow at the rate of your business and in line with your digital maturity, ensuring you only pay for what your business currently needs.
3) Omni-channel and agile content and commerce
As we fast approach the festive period with Black Friday and Cyber Monday around the corner, there are still many businesses struggling to rapidly adapt their digital content. This is especially true of retailers who may, often at the last minute, need to list new products and pull campaigns. This problem is only amplified for businesses yet to unify their content and commerce offering, and still relying on siloed data in multiple – and often disparate – systems to manage their content and product listings across multiple channels.
To help retailers to grow online revenue more efficiently, cost effectively and with greater flexibility, Candyspace has built a connector between MACH alliance partners, BigCommerce and Contentful. Via a seamless integration, retailers can now connect their products in BigCommerce with their content in Contentful, enabling them to rapidly adapt to market changes and deliver the omni-channel buying experience customers demand.
Register for our Black Friday webinar with Contentful where we’ll explore the BigCommerce connector in further depth and the role of headless content and commerce in delivering omni-channel selling at scale.
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