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4 keys to digital ROI in the financial services industry
When it comes to engaging audiences via digital screens, the financial services sector has historically lagged behind other broad industry verticals.   

Why? Perhaps more so than any other industry, successful customer relationships in the FinServ space require a rock-solid foundation of implicit trust and a hypersensitivity to security and privacy. (We’re talking about people’s money here, after all.) Historically, these relationships have been largely built on interpersonal interactions — whether it’s the teller you talk to every Friday when depositing your check, the adviser a retired couple trusts with their investments, or the team developing an asset management strategy for a large enterprise.   

But times are changing, and the industry is catching on to macro trends that are shifting these paradigm and mindsets:   

“Check” and “teller” are words that millennials and gen Z-ers don’t even know.   

The once-clear lines differentiating a best-practice B2B digital experience from a B2C experience continue to blur.   

Highly individualized digital experiences are both table stakes and a solid proxy for the interpersonal interactions that used to dominate.   
 
Businesses that get digital personalization right are rewarded with measurable ROI: higher customer satisfaction scores, less churn, increased upselling and cross-selling rates, and reduced reliance on high-cost operations like brick-and-mortar branches. However, the path to personalization in this industry is no walk in the park. From legacy software to organizational silos to regulatory realities, the world of Financial Services is full of hurdles that challenge the industry’s digital dreams.  

Financial services firms looking to reap the benefits of personalized digital experiences need to consider the following:   
Take an ROI-driven approach to personalization 

Digital transformation isn’t cheap. And in financial services, we’ve seen a tendency to view digital as a cost center. That’s why we help our clients focus on their digital content strategy through an ROI lens. A properly architected strategy absolutely can — and should — turn your digital experiences into sources of attributable revenue.  

To accomplish this goal for our clients, Horizontal takes an experience-forward approach. This means we put the end user at the center of everything we do. Content strategy and personalization tactics purposefully match prospective clients with relevant products and value propositions, and we establish measurable goals for the outcomes we intend to achieve. Next, we test and measure. We consistently prove that the operational costs, strategies, and resources needed to create and manage personalized content can deliver net profits for our clients.  

If your firm is new to the world of personalization, it may make sense to start with a low-risk, low-cost approach that focuses on one audience segment and doesn’t require heavy lifting from a technology standpoint. If this foray is a success, it can convince leadership to take on larger personalization efforts down the line.  
Get your teams and technologies on the same page 

Many leading Financial Services brands have established their positions over the course of many decades, building on longstanding reputations of consistent, reliable performance. With those legacies come some common drawbacks: reliance on outdated operational silos, dated technology, and disconnected data.   

Customers engage with these firms through an ever-growing number of channels — making it difficult to pull together a 360-view of their content consumption. Plus, since the teams and technologies that oversee financial offerings are often isolated, business lines operate in a vacuum and banks miss out on opportunities to cross-sell and bundle products.  

These roadblocks are underscored by a growing sense of urgency. Since FinTech startups don’t have to deal with tangled legacy systems and organizational complications, they are able to achieve personalization on an accelerated timeline and cut into the customer base of traditional giants.  

To get a holistic view of their customers, banks must prioritize the construction of a central data repository, i.e., a CDP. Salesforce Data Cloud seamlessly aggregates and unifies data from multiple sources, enabling banks to build individual 360-degree customer profiles safely and securely. 

We help our clients connect their technology platforms and implement the organizational change management strategies that financial institutions need to unify their teams, integrate their data, and drive connected experiences.  
Content: It’s not just for marketers anymore!  

When digital was new, it mostly meant things like websites and email, and often by default fell under the purview of a marketing department. Today, we know that digital technology, data, content, and experience permeate all aspects of the enterprise. Successful transformation requires a holistic approach.   

Case in point: we work with a firm that offers financial instruments like insurance products in multiple states. Let’s say one of their product managers identifies an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage by adjusting a rate on a product from 5% to 6%. Today, making a single change to a single product requires dozens of steps and hundreds of people to adjust, review, approve and implement that change across the avalanche of internal- and external-facing systems, data stores, and associated documentation.   

By the time the rate change is implemented, the window of opportunity may be gone — and the firm could lose its competitive advantage to industry disruptors (FinTech firms) that can more readily turn on a dime.   

Fortunately, technology platforms like Sitecore’s Content Hub can drastically streamline this drawn-out process while maintaining and even improving compliance workflows and governance. With the click of a button, you can make a rate change once in Content Hub, and the change will instantly show up across every channel and piece of documentation for immediate review. This empowers FinServ firms to be much more nimble when it comes to launching, managing, and adapting products based on market conditions at any given moment.  
Unlock the power of AI 

Historically, enterprises have struggled to bring truly individualized experiences to life because doing so can be a lot of work: even the best technologies on the market require significant manual effort to set up personalization rules, crunch the numbers, re-optimize content, and so on.   

Today, artificial intelligence can accelerate your path to personalization by serving the best content to customers and helping you gain valuable insights on their behavior. AI might sound intimidating or overwhelming, but when applied properly through tools like Sitecore’s auto-personalization, it can be an easy way to crunch data and convert it into predictions and suggestions.    

Say goodbye to guesswork — machine learning can auto-segment user clusters so you don’t need to spend hours on data analysis to manually create customer segments. Via tracked behavior data, Sitecore AI can predict which content is best for new visitors vs. returning customers — providing 1:1 personalization in real-time. AI can also automate tedious operational tasks, eliminate maintenance bottlenecks, shorten the time to campaign launch, and let marketers quickly adjust to campaign changes.  
The future of the Financial Services industry 
 
In many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the digital transformation that was already happening in the financial services industry. With a growing focus on Millennial and Gen Z customers, emerging technologies, and new FinTech disruptors to take into account, traditional banks and credit unions have been slowly but surely evolving for years. As the industry increasingly prioritizes digitization, getting personalization right can give you a massive strategic advantage.  
Want to learn more about personalization in Financial Services? Let's chat. 
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4 keys to digital ROI in the financial services industry

Accelerating business agility: How cloud development drives speed and success
“You can’t teach speed.” Al Davis, former owner of the Oakland Raiders. 
 
Yet speed is a critical factor to how businesses thrive, let alone survive. As customer demands increase in scale and market conditions existing in a near-constant state of evolution, speed is often the single-most important ingredient to your business’ operations. 
 
Cloud development can help businesses realize these essential speed gains by providing a faster and more agile development process. 

Recently, Horizontal formed a tiger team to build an immersive commerce experience using Sitecore’s composable stack that would be showcased at several Symposium DX events.  The challenge, however, was that we had only six weeks to complete — from inception to deployment. 

My first thought was “Whew! This is going to be a tight timeline!” But I was also somewhat at ease because we would be leveraging all cloud-based components. Here’s why: 


    Cloud providers offer a wide range of pre-built services that can be used to quickly and easily build applications. This eliminates the need for businesses to invest in and maintain their own infrastructure — saving both time and money. 
    Cloud providers offer a pay-as-you-go pricing model, helping businesses to control their costs and avoid overspending. 
    Cloud providers offer a high level of scalability, which means that businesses can easily scale their applications up or down as needed. This can help businesses to meet changing demand without having to make major investments in infrastructure. 

As a result of these factors, cloud development can help businesses to substantially speed up their development process — ultimately providing a competitive advantage by allowing them to bring new products and services to market faster. 

In addition to speed, cloud development also offers a number of other benefits for businesses, including: 

    Increased agility: Cloud development allows businesses to quickly and easily adapt to changing market conditions and customer demands. 
    Reduced costs: Cloud providers offer a pay-as-you-go pricing model, which can help businesses to control their costs and avoid overspending. 
    Improved security: Cloud providers offer a high level of security, which can help businesses to protect their data from unauthorized access. 
    Increased scalability: Cloud providers offer a high level of scalability, which means that businesses can easily scale their applications up or down as needed. 

Overall, cloud development is a valuable tool that can help businesses to speed up their development process and improve their bottom line. If you're looking for a way to improve the speed and agility of your business, cloud development is a great option to consider. 

Here are some additional tips for speeding up your cloud development process: 


    Use pre-built services and tools whenever possible. 
    
    Automate as much of your development process as possible. 
    
    Break down your projects into smaller, more manageable tasks. 
    
    Use a cloud-based development environment. 
    
    Collaborate with your team members effectively. 
    
    Test your code regularly. 
    
    Monitor your applications for performance and security issues. 

Want to learn more about cloud development? Our team of experts are here to talk. 
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Accelerating business agility: How cloud development drives speed and success

Creating experiences with inclusivity in mind
As marketers, we like to say, "a website should have no dead ends." As technologists, we promote future-ready, performant, feature-rich experiences. But even if you design and develop your site to perfection, your experience could still make someone with a disability feel unwelcome. If that gave you pause to consider how accessible your own experience is, the likely answer is “Not enough.”

As much as 15% of the world’s population has a disability that may prevent them from obtaining equal access to digital content. If you’re not designing and building experiences with accessibility in mind, you’re letting down a significant audience visiting your site. It’s not about targeting a marketing demographic — it’s about doing the right thing.  For example as of 2022, 78% of adults in the U.S. prefer to bank via a mobile app or website. If you’re not ensuring a fully accessible experience, your site could be preventing people from accessing their money when they need it.  
Let’s explore the digital barriers that exist for people with disabilities and review some tangible ways you can take a more comprehensive approach to supporting all users.

Why accessibility matters
The categorization of a disability includes a broader set of individuals than you may have originally considered. Do you have chronic pain? Do you struggle to pay attention? If yes, you likely meet the CDC’s definition of disability. Disabilities affect one in five U.S. adults and often include problems with sight, motor skills, hearing, or cognitive delays. Many of these individuals access the internet with the help of assistive devices. Welcome to the web accessibility movement.

The idea of making the world more accessible originally stems from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. It later extended to include disability discrimination via the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and now covers the internet and technology as a necessary point of accommodation.

Today, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are commonly recognized as the global standard when it comes to the digital landscape, but there simply isn’t a master list of requirements I can give you and send you on your way. Creating accessible experiences goes far beyond a one-size-fits-all checklist. (More on this later.)

Empathy is key

While I’m personally passionate about creating inclusivity in digital experiences, I want to point out that I’m not a certified Accessibility expert. Nor do I have a disability. However, I do have one key skill that’s important for everyone — empathy.

As you reflect on the accessibility of your own website, I highly recommend putting yourself in the shoes of someone with a disability to better understand their world. How? Use a screen reader or a voice recognition program for a day. Or simply unplug your mouse and try to navigate your favorite sites. These experiences will hopefully give you a more accurate picture of the difficulties facing someone with a disability.

You can’t afford to overlook accessibility

Still not convinced why it’s important to create inclusive experiences? Not only is prioritizing accessibility the right thing to do, it’s also a wise financial move:


    You risk losing potential customers if your website doesn’t accommodate users with disabilities. After all, your competition is only a click away.
    
    There are legal and financial penalties for non-compliance. The Department of Justice as well as other organizations target non-compliant experiences with an average 100 lawsuits per week in 2022 with many of those targeted financial institutions like banks or credit unions. 

Now that we’ve explored several factors driving the accessibility movement, let’s break down how we can make it happen.

Keeping up with standards and requirements

Our customers often ask us to design a website that meets accessibility standards or includes compliance principles. In these situations, we guide our efforts following the WCAG’s four pillars:


    Perceivable: This supports users who have difficulty with the senses of sight, sound, and/or touch — making them reliant on assistive technology.
    
    Operable: Making a site operable for users with motor difficulties includes allowing alternative interactions (like a keyboard), eliminating time limits, and assisting with navigation.
    
    Understandable: To ensure understanding, sites must be consistent, functionally clear, and instructive or explanatory to account for complexity.
    
    Robust: Finally, the site experience must be reliable to support recognized standards (like semantic HTML and CSS) that third-party browsers and screen readers can access without issue.
    

Horizontal has extensive experience in highly regulated industries where compliance and regulatory guidelines can extend beyond accessibility. In fact, we recently designed and launched a new website for First Tech Federal Credit Union with a 97% ADA Compliance Score — 28% above the financial industry average.

Every organization is different — and customizing specifications to your business is an important part of the process. Your roadmap also needs to be mindful of the fact that standards are always evolving. To successfully maintain compliant sites, flexibility and governance are key. WCAG 3.0 has been released in a working draft as recently as January 2021.

Design and build with inclusivity in mind

Becoming aware of the standards and tailoring requirements to your organization is just the beginning. Keep in mind — a compliant solution is just the bare minimum to adhere to legal compliance. Those looking to go above and beyond incorporate accessibility guidelines into their core operations, changing how they work across teams and functional areas. At an organization-wide level, this ensures compliance considerations are always at the forefront every step of the way.

To take it even further, teams that pursue an inclusive design approach embrace human diversity as a focal point to learn from, account for, and include as a part of the process. This can be achieved by putting real users and their needs at the center of your strategies and execution.

For example, if you’re beginning a broader strategy or design effort, an inclusive approach may include focus groups, contextual interviews, and/or usability testing for real-time user feedback that includes representative participants from a diverse user set. To learn more, Microsoft has a great source highlighting inclusive design principles, activities, and toolkits.

Step by step: Improving your existing site

Looking to make incremental improvements to your existing site? Start by outlining your organizational objectives and requirements for creating accessible experiences. Then, assess the current-state solution against its ability to meet these goals. (You can use third-party products to help benchmark and audit your experiences such as Siteimprove.) Your results can help balance brand and technical requirements while prioritizing how to improve accessibility over time.

Like any digital effort, it’s never “done.” At Horizontal, we recommend developing your process to keep accessibility at the forefront of your ongoing site enhancements, test strategies, and governance.

The right platform is a game changer

Product and platform innovation continues to make it easier to create accessible and inclusive experiences. As a longstanding Sitecore Platinum partner and a member of the advisory council in both North America and MEA, we’ve watched their product roadmap develop to include more compliance capabilities out-of-the-box.

For instance, Sitecore SXA provides keyboard navigation capabilities, the ability to skip links, and a built-in validation engine to enforce accessibility standards for alternative engagement and usability. SXA also supports WAI/ARIA standards for creating content with a minimum WCAG rating. We anticipate Sitecore and other software companies will continue to invest in compliance-ready product advancements that meet the defined standards and support the growing public demand.

Final thoughts on inclusivity

At Horizontal, our Experience-Forward philosophy puts users and their needs at the center of how we design and build digital experiences. This approach sets a high bar and forever changes the way we perceive what digital should be and how it should feel.

Taking accessibility and inclusivity into consideration is no different. It’s not a single feature you can activate or an item in your backlog you can mark as complete. It’s not a problem for one team to solve. For companies that want to get it right, it requires a fundamental shift in approach. It’s the human-centered inclusiveness that results in experiences that truly meet the needs of all users.
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Creating experiences with inclusivity in mind

Personalizing the banking experience
Across every industry, consumers are demanding a more personalized experience from companies, and banks are no exception. As financial institutions seek to build stronger relationships with their customers and improve their overall customer experience, keeping up continues to be a challenge. Sixty-one percent of banking executives say expectations for customer experience are continuing to rise, and nearly half (45%) admit they are struggling to keep up. In a fragile economy and amid mistrust of banks, retention is a top priority. Seamless, digital experiences are essential for building strong, lasting relationships with customers. Banks can enhance customer experience by providing personalized services, tailored products, and messaging that meets unique customer needs and preferences. This builds trust and loyalty, which is crucial since 75% of banking customers consider their experience the most important factor when choosing a bank. 
Barriers to personalized banking experiences
Despite this, meeting the ever-increasing demands of customers remains a daunting task, and the financial sector is not immune to this challenge. Surprisingly, while 86% of companies consider personalization crucial to their business strategy, less than half have put it into practice. The banking industry faces several difficulties in achieving personalization, and many institutions have relied on their website for digital branding and product display, forcing customers to do most of work, creating a frustrating experience. Let’s explore what the top challenges are and identify solutions to overcome them.   

Organizational silos 

As banking organizations expand, they often adopt more traditional structures and processes that can create barriers between teams and business units. This creates organizational silos that particularly effect operations, tech, analytics, and UX teams’ ability to maintain a unified focus on the customer journey.  
To prevent silos and improve personalization efforts, banks should adopt a uniform KPI framework that focuses on the full customer journey, not just micro-journeys. All teams should understand personalization and their roles in it, with aligned goals and KPIs. For instance, team members should use data to identify actionable insights across all digital touchpoints. 

Outdated technology  

Legacy banking platforms struggle to meet customers' demand for real-time applications and services due to outdated software and programming, resulting in limitations. Although these platforms continue to support core banking services, they are failing to keep up with clients' needs for speed and advanced functionality. The move to upgrade software and tech platforms is often avoided because it is seen as too costly and risky, as even minor disruptions can have catastrophic effects.  

Fragmented data 
Perhaps the biggest challenge is the ability to organize data for personalized experiences. Achieving a single view of the customer is crucial for successful personalization, but can be challenging due to data unification, activation delays, and concerns about data quality. A lack of a unified technology across teams can hamper effective personalization efforts. In many businesses, different teams utilize various tech stacks, such as marketing automation, CRM, and analytics, leading to a lack of knowledge on how to utilize personalization technology.  
Cashing in on customer experience
Learn how to transform the banking customer experience with omni-channel personalization.
Finding the opportunity  

Customers demand consistent interactions across all channels, making omnichannel capabilities a necessity for meeting their expectations. In today's competitive landscape, banks can set themselves apart by optimizing offer speed and effectiveness through the adoption of new technologies and processes. This enables them to leverage personalization to enhance customer relationships across various business lines and delivery channels. Banks can stay competitive by providing the personalized, omni-channel experiences in the following ways:  

Personalized Onboarding Journeys 

Personalized onboarding journeys are critical in building customer loyalty because they allow banks to create a positive and lasting impression on their customers from the very beginning. It sets the tone for the rest of the customer's relationship with their bank. A well-crafted onboarding journey makes the customer feel like they are in good hands and that the bank is truly invested in their success. This sets the stage for a long-term relationship. 

Additionally, it can help customers feel more confident in the bank, and themselves. When someone is given the tools and information they need to succeed, they are more likely to feel confident in their ability to use a product or service effectively. 

To achieve initial customer retention, banks must focus on a key milestone - the moment customers experience the actual benefit of the product or service. This transition from product application/completion to product usage is critical for most banks. To ensure customer satisfaction and prevent churn, banks need to simplify every step of the process. For instance, sending follow-up messages to educate customers on next steps after applying for a loan is an effective practice. By keeping customers engaged in a streamlined onboarding journey, banks can foster trust and loyalty. Prioritizing customer onboarding is a strategic approach for banks to establish a foundation for lasting customer satisfaction and retention. 

Life-stage customer journeys  

Customer lifecycle journeys are essential for banks as they provide a framework to understand and optimize the different stages of a customer's relationship with the bank. These stages include awareness, acquisition, onboarding, engagement, retention, and advocacy. By identifying areas where customers may drop off or disengage, banks can implement strategies to improve the overall customer experience, increase satisfaction, and build deeper relationships with customers.  

Personalization plays a key role in tailoring communication and offers within each stage, creating the 1:1 relationship that customers demand. To design personalized customer journeys, banks can develop customer personas based on demographic and behavioral data. These personas help banks understand their customers better and enable them to deliver relevant and personalized experiences at each stage of the customer lifecycle. For example, a customer nearing retirement age may receive cross-selling offers on retirement and investment options, guiding them towards the next phase of their relationship with the bank.  

Overall, prioritizing personalized, omni-channel experiences, is essential for banks to establish lasting customer satisfaction, retention, and success in today's competitive banking landscape. Want to learn more about creating a personalized banking experiences? Our team of experts is here to help. 
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Personalizing the banking experience

Making action easy with connected patient experiences 
The Healthcare system is worn thin in the wake of the grueling COVID-19 pandemic. There’s no shortage of perspectives on how to revolutionize care teams, connect technology to patients, and reel the system back to safety. And yet – this situation demands urgent action, starting with a patient/member-centric approach to behavior change. 

Let’s tackle health inertia in a people-first use case: closing gap(s) in care by end of Q2 2023.  Waiting for systemic change will be too late. Providers, payers and health plans alike can take simple steps to engage these patients in their own care, right now.
Here's a key insight: 
People are skipping primary and preventative care at alarming rates - down 10.3% since before the COVID-19 pandemic. That means high-cost cancers undetected. Diabetes undiagnosed. And cardiopulmonary diseases advancing on unsuspecting people. Gap in care closure was already a key component of value-based care. Now getting patients into primary care for screenings and vaccinations is even more critical. But with so many healthcare customers more comfortable on their couch than in their physician’s office, how will we create action?  
"More than 40 percent of U.S. adults delayed or avoided medical care in June 2020, according to a weekly report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now, nearly a year-and-a-half later, pandemic-induced delays in preventive care and routine screenings continue to exacerbate patient care gaps." 
 
Here’s our opportunity: 
Let’s say our goal – across payer and provider teams - is to accelerate all patients to pre-pandemic levels of primary and preventative care. Quite simply, our patients need to know it’s in their best interest, and our system must support action with ease. 
First, we’ll start by identifying patients or plan members with a lapse in primary and preventive care.  

    For payers, this means referencing current and historic claims data. For providers, it’s data that should come from your EHR.  
    
    
    You’ll want to look at the data in aggregate, as well as have correlative demographic and location-based intersection points.  
    Then, if you’ve not already done this for previous marketing work, determine what anonymous member ID you can use to keep PHI secure. 

Second, be intentional about the path-to-action for the customer. 

    Build your text or email campaign with a click-to-act strategy: land the customer on a concise experience that frames the desired actions (a primary care visit, any possible gaps in care in an authenticated and HIPAA compliant manner). No upsells or distractions here. 
    Starting with an outbound call center? Fill the service representative’s terminal with the same, actionable information. 
    If a patient or plan member already has a care provider on file, highlight that information.  
    Better yet, create a set filter feature on your provider-finder that launches with providers taking new patients, within a reasonable radius to the customer’s typical location. And showcase the top three to five. Our attention spans have gotten shorter – more scrolling means less action.  
    Build or license interactive tools that make it easy for the customer to schedule their care.  
    The health system needs to rebuild trust with this audience. Use a journey-building tool in your marketing operations to efficiently send automated follow-ups based on a patient’s interaction with your digital toolset. 

Third, plan on price transparency messaging.

    Confirm by customer segment and insurance plan what precise primary and preventative care are covered. Over 40% of Americans have skipped out on care (routine, for illness and otherwise) because they were worried about the cost. Clarify what’s covered and dispel their concerns. 


    If you’ve got an uninsured segment for whom you can’t confirm costs, consider a referral to your state health office and/or exchange, instead. 

Even in the first launch, plan on basic audience segmentation and message testing 

    For example, you may want to target those without primary care in two years differently than those who only skipped one. You’ll think about Medicare and Commercial plan members differently. And so on. 
    Keep it simple at this stage. Just get one or two variables to test for each audience segment. We’re just building the muscle for content personalization at scale.  
    Get multiple content options through your legal and compliance teams upfront, so you can test and evolve more rapidly once in-market. 

Use CX strategies to measure the impact of your work internally.  

    Can we measure the impact to scheduled visits?  
    Can we measure the impact to closed gaps in care? 
    What other patient feedback can we gather? 

Evolution

Gaps in care has always been a challenge with health equity at the heart. While primary care visits are down as noted earlier, middle class white women have been the first to return to their annual well-care appointments. Health plans and providers will want to think creatively about the strategies for non-white, lower-income audiences in subsequent phases.   

By starting with the end in mind, we will build a concise platform that puts the customer and their health at the center. Stitching together the right data points, we can send messages that are relevant, provide secure experiences that are actionable – and can create paths to value that are measurable.  Interested in learning more about how you can make action easy for your patients? Our team of experts are here to help!
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Overcoming roadblocks to digital transformation in the CPG industry 
Recently, Deloitte published a digital maturity curve and outlined where a large contingency of CPG companies fall on the spectrum. Generally, what they found is that most CPG organizations are either passively digital or exploring digital. Which boils down to a slow progress into operating the business and customer experience with digital as a pillar to the model. Comparatively, the CPG industry is slightly behind other industries with harnessing customer data and deriving insights from them to influence buying decisions.  
Competitive encroachment from digital-native DTC brands 
Interestingly is that many organizations that are prioritizing digital, have developed roadmaps with identified initiatives to modernize their martech stack, digital capabilities and internal processes; but have yet to realize those plans and brought them to bear. So, what’s dragging CPG companies and slowing them down from moving the needle on getting closer to digital transformation? 

Progress in the CPG industry has been impeded by various challenges, one of the major ones being legacy software platforms. The opportunity cost to diverge from these platforms is often deemed too great. Siloed teams also hinder progress, as individual business units operate too autonomously, without tapping into enterprise systems and platforms to enhance marketing and customer touchpoints. This mentality is coupled with the belief that the war of customer conversion is won on the shelf, whereas in reality, digital plays a significant role in wallet-share, influencing buying decisions, and being the end-to-end journey for DTC CPG brands and products. 
A case for innovation  

75% of CPG shoppers…used digital channels in their most recent shopping journey to become inspired, browse research or select a brand. (Deloitte) 
A quarter of CPG shoppers that used brand websites or mobile apps to browse or research before or during their most recent journey also reported spending 108% more than shoppers who didn’t. (Deloitte) 

Brands with the strongest omni-channel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their CPG customers, in comparison to 33% of companies with weak strategies. (Harvard Business Review) 

One brand that has recently been recognized for its innovative use of digital is Colgate-Palmolive’s Hill’s pet food and nutrition brand. The brand’s key strategy is creating relevant emotional engagement with customers through personalized digital engagement: 

Their website balances specialized product (‘science-based pet nutrition’) content with tailored preferences and recommended products for ‘my pet’. 

Hill’s leverages analytics, along with 3rd- and 1st-party data to interact with customers during digital touchpoints. 

They lean heavily in e-comm – recently relaunched packaging with an e-comm first design. 

Their focus on elevating digital capabilities has helped accelerate growth with net sales for the Hill's Pet Nutrition business expanding by 14.5%, and organic sales growing to 18% (YOY, FY21-22).  (Consumer Goods Technology) 
Where Sitecore XM can help 
To aid in helping CPG enterprise companies help achieve results like Hill’s is adopting and incorporating a purpose-built digital experience platform like Sitecore XM.  

Sitecore XM Cloud is a flexible, enterprise-level software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based content management system (CMS). Its strength lies in giving marketers and content authors ease-of-use through its visual authoring capabilities, while providing back-end developers the flexibility of development (including headless architecture). Which means, if your CPG organization is a house-of-brands, each brand can leverage global templates and components for 80% of their features, functionality and page builds, while allowing for 20% of customization to offer that higher-touch aspect to reflect individual brand uniqueness and nuances.  

Key benefits of the platform include: 


    Data insights: With its embedded visitor analytics, XM Cloud can provide visibility into user engagement at a page-level, along with activating personalized page variants for different target audiences (e.g., users looking for dermatology resources versus those needing oncology information). Internal teams can get insights out of the system to make better data-driven decisions in support of improved patient satisfaction. 


    Speed-to-market: Being SaaS-based, XM Cloud doesn’t require heavily involved and time-consuming upgrades, as all platform updates are conducted automatically. Meaning it would not slow down internal teams from ensuring content and resources are always delivered to the right audiences. Additionally, with the built-in visual authoring capabilities, non-development resources can easily update content on the website.  
    Page performance: Because it’s SaaS-based, it can deliver high-performance (page speed) for web experiences. Helping to ensure information and resources patients are looking for are delivered within milliseconds (and avoiding costly calls directly to care administrators, when a task could have been done online). 
    Security: XM Cloud is always up-to-date, scales on-demand, and meets rigorous controls so organizations can power their global, content-driven digital experiences with confidence. 
    Scale: Sitecore Experience Manager Cloud’s SaaS and composable nature allows you to easily scale up and down your project based on business requirements. If your business grows, you can add modules, or remove tools you are not currently using. 

If you’re exploring avenues to modernize and ways to get to the next level of digital maturity – ultimately ‘being digital’ – we’d love to help.  
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Overcoming roadblocks to digital transformation in the CPG industry 

How a customer data platform meets patient needs and delivers business outcomes 
A customer data platform (like Salesforce Data Cloud) can be embedded to bring all the member and patient data and insights from each corner of the enterprise into one centralized accessible repository, aggregating it and, more importantly, unifying it into a golden record for each of their constituents. Now when a patient sets up an appointment with their care provider, the network can quickly identify who they are, what they have been seen for in the past, and tie back to any medical records and/or physician recommendations.  

From there, the provider can confirm if the care is already in-network through their employer’s insurance program (saving them on the cost of care). And if systems are connected in the right way, the patient’s prescription can be sent to the pharmacy via an automated system vs. having a care provider needing to “key or call it in” as the CDP can pass that information from EPIC directly to the preferred pharmacy.  

 

In this scenario, the CDP served as means to not only bring the patient’s data together, but also bridge the divide within the organization’s departments and business units created over time through the enterprise’s market growth strategy of acquisition. Now individual team members, regardless of the business unit (prescriptions, care, member services, etc.), have access to 360 member and patient data to minimize any points of friction as their constituents manage and pay for healthcare.  
 
At Horizontal, we believe that connected patient experiences stem from connected data. If you want to learn more about how we can help in your digital transformation, reach out! 
As members and patients traverse the vast network of offerings from finding care, receiving care and paying for care, the sheer size of the company has led to disconnected departments, functions and systems of the enterprise organization, making it very difficult to navigate which part of the system members should go to for what and when. To make matters worse, patient and member data lives in multiple places and isn’t easily accessible or shared across business units, with no single source of truth.  
A B2B2C integrated health payor and provider system offers its insurance members a wide swath of services, from preventive care to condition/disease treatments to prescriptions and medications. The company has grown dramatically through an aggressive acquisition strategy, bringing various health care networks into the fold along with adopting their capabilities, systems and patient/member data. 
Use Case: Unifying patient and member data by creating a single source of truth with a CDP 
Addressing individual health needs and delivering on business outcomes is particularly crucial in the highly regulated and often complicated journey within the Health and Life Sciences (HLS) sector. 

A patient’s experience with the healthcare system starts long before they even need care, and their journey continues long after clinical outcomes or interactions. Patient loyalty can erode if they find it difficult to engage with a provider at any point in the journey. Thus, ensuring when patients go from finding care to getting care to post-visit compliance to paying for care – it all has to be seamless and cohesive, across touchpoints, channels and devices. 

But we know it’s not easy. The COVID-19 crisis and the U.S. Health care system’s response to it have created seismic shifts in the health care industry. Challenges prevalent prior to the crisis have been accentuated, causing drastic changes in the care continuum and operational best practices.   

One solution to creating a seamless experience for patients is implementing a customer data platform (CDP).  The use case below illustrates how implementing a CDP drives both operational and organizational alignment in support of creating a personalized omni-channel connected experience – putting patients at the center of the care continuum.  
5 challenges healthcare organizations face with patient data
Drowning in data
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Solution
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How a customer data platform meets patient needs and delivers business outcomes 

Learn how to leverage the power of patient data to deliver a seamless and connected healthcare experience with Salesforce Health Cloud and Sitecore XM Cloud
Harness the power of patient data with Sitecore and Salesforce
Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) Cloud is a flexible, enterprise-level software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based content management system (CMS). Its strength lies in giving marketers and content authors ease-of-use through its visual authoring capabilities, while providing back-end developers the flexibility of development (including headless architecture). 

For patient experience stakeholders it offers the following benefits:  

    Data insights: With its embedded visitor analytics, XM Cloud provides visibility into user engagement through embedded visitor analytics and personalizes page variants for different target audiences to improve patient satisfaction.  
    Speed-to-market: Because it is SaaS-based, XM Cloud offers quick implementation with automatic platform updates and easy content updating with built-in visual authoring.  
    Security: XM Cloud is always up-to-date, scales on-demand, and meets rigorous controls so organizations can power their global, content-driven digital experiences with confidence. 


    Scale: With its Cloud SaaS and composable nature, Sitecore XM allows you to easily scale up and down your project based on business requirements. If your business grows, you can add modules, or remove tools you are not currently using 

Connected data = connected experiences
Salesforce Health Cloud, Sitecore XM Cloud, paired with a CDP , and a sound customer patient and member journey strategy, can help organizations come to a full understanding of their patients and what drives them — while creating immersive 1:1 personalized connected experiences at scale.  

By implementing connectors and integrations between the two platforms, organizations can synchronize patient contact data. Through both APIs and custom integrations, your organization can realize seamless flow of patient and member data in support of providing holistic connected care.   

Is your organization rallied behind the importance of a connected patient journey? If so, you’re already winning half the battle. The other half is having the right systems in place, fully integrated within your technology stack and a partner to enable it. Horizontal can help guide you on the path of bringing connected experiences to life for your patients by using Salesforce and Sitecore. Our team is ready to help you realize your ambition of crafting healthcare experiences people love. 
Salesforce Health Cloud is a CRM system that manages doctor-patient interactions and records. With it, you can access a wide range of clinical and non-clinical data from multiple sources in one place, providing your organization with a complete picture of each patient. 

For patient experience stakeholders it offers the following benefits: 

    A 360-degree view: Providers have up-to-the-minute details of patients, including appointment history, current conditions, specialists attending to patients and medications, all centralized in one place without having to change screens or swap devices to access this information.  
    Scale & compliance: Health Cloud gives providers the ability to get patients their medicine more effectively through fulfillment tracking, patient sign-ups and shepherding prior authorizations. 
    Management of the patient journey: Health Cloud automates workflows and offers pre-built templates for omni-channel engagement, allowing providers to connect with patients throughout their journey from acquisition to retention.  
    
    Collaboration: Health Cloud allows care teams to assign ownership of health tasks or exchange secure and private messages between other health professionals, patients or members – and they can access those messages on any device.  

It’s no secret that in today’s world, great brand experiences lead to lasting and fulfilling patient and member relationships. This sensibility is why we believe in our Experience-Forward philosophy of putting people at the center of everything you do.   

Unfortunately, connected healthcare experiences tend to be the exception, not the norm.  Health and Life Sciences (HLS) organizations struggle to serve patients effectively due to competing priorities and challenges in managing patient data, making the process overwhelming for providers and patients. 

Despite these types of challenges, health networks’ digital experiences are still being held to greater standards, and organizations can no longer use the excuse of the pandemic when delivering less-than-desirable care management experiences. To stay competitive today, personalized patient journeys need to be a core tenet of organizational alignment: one that galvanizes teams and departments to lock arms with the common goal of realizing exceptional patient and member experiences.  
A healthy dose of patient data 

Marketers have the never-ending job of trying to keep up with patient and member expectations, let alone exceed them. One of those expectations is providing a cohesive patient experience that is seamlessly threaded across channels, devices and touchpoints as they traverse through the care continuum.  

To deliver on this, it is important to focus on leveraging the data behind every interaction. A data-first approach can avoid isolated and fragmented databases, leading to clear and consistent information for patients and avoiding confusion and frustration. By using real-time data, healthcare providers can quickly identify and address any health issues or concerns, leading to earlier interventions and improved outcomes.

When organizations have a single source of truth they can meet expectations by providing: 
An integrated tech stack is critical to bringing this patient and member experience to life by ensuring bi-directional flow of patient data. The right technology can enable and activate a better, holistic care journey, while following patient privacy and compliance requirements. 

Of course, simply adopting technologies alone won’t drive world-class experiences, but it is the foundation of a connected patient journey. Ultimately, it comes down to identifying and employing technology platforms that marry back-of-house operations with the experiences your constituents engage with daily.  

The good news is Salesforce and Sitecore have made the expensive and time-consuming trial-and-error period of finding the right mix of technology obsolete with their suite of integrated digital experience, support and service and marketing tools, all powered by patient data and analytics.

Bring connected patient experiences to life with Sitecore and Salesforce 
Salesforce Health Cloud
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A seamless path to centralizing digital content operations 
Since Horizontal Digital started its Sitecore Content Hub learning path about two years ago, we have heard one question asked repeatedly from digital marketers living in cities like Dallas, Minneapolis, and Juneau. 
 
“What do I do after the DAM?”  

DAM refers to the digital asset management module that most clients get first when they buy Content Hub, which has an acronym-rich vocabulary that is confusing for even us “experts” to understand. So, we were relieved to hear at Sitecore Symposium that the software company is simplifying its licensing approach to make everything about Content Hub’s offerings easier to understand. 

It starts with a DAM 

Most people who work in the Sitecore ecosystem already know Sitecore DAM, the core module of the cloud-based Content Hub. It gives marketers a “central source of truth” for content marketing assets that include images, videos, documents, fonts, 3D files and more. The intent is to give creators, designers and developers a “one-stop shop” for all the files they need to do their jobs day in and day out. 

Once in Content Hub, the assets can be used in many different ways. You can create optimized images for a variety of use cases and connect the DAM to various other systems in a company’s digital marketing ecosystem. 

All companies need a digital asset management system and strategy, if you ask me. But once you get all your digital assets in one place, the real fun begins. 
After the DAM: What’s next? 

After you consolidate your marketing assets in one place through Sitecore DAM, your marketing world really opens, but that also means you need a way to navigate through it all. 

    But before you do anything, we recommend you ask yourself a few key questions: 
    How is marketing content prioritized & managed? 
    How are content elements reused across campaigns? 
    How would you categorize your content creation workflow? 
    Do you have a single source of truth for content engagement reporting? 
    How do you test content? 
    What content, marketing and technology team members are involved? 
    What KPIs will be used to measure success? 
    How do you measure and report on success? 

Once you have asked (and hopefully started to answer) those key questions, you should be armed with enough information to talk about extending your Content Hub licensing. Let’s start by talking about content operations, which is of interest to anyone who runs digital content/marketing teams. 
Meet Content Hub Operations 
Content Hub Operations combines the Content Hub modules content marketing platform (CMP) and marketing resource management (MRM) into one bundle. 
For those of you unfamiliar with these modules: 

    CMP allows organizations to use Content Hub as a place to centralize their content operations. That includes social media and content publishing, strategy, calendaring and more. 


    MRM allows resource management and project management from Content Hub, which enables project managers and resource teams to do their work from Content Hub. 

The goal is a software ecosystem that facilitates omni-channel management and personalization strategy in an “atomic content age” for teams wanting to fully embrace centralized digital content operations. Atomic content is content that is structured for digital distribution in a headless delivery world. What is the formula for atomic content? 

							  Ct ÷ Md + Bl + Re = Infinite Content Possibilities 

In other words, content types (Ct) that are broken down into metadata fields (Md) and infused with business logic (Bl) and relationships (Re) give marketers and developers the foundational elements to build great digital experiences whether you are creating a website, kiosk, streaming TV service or whitepaper in a headless delivery framework. 

With Sitecore Connect, Content Hub already ties nicely to Sitecore XM and XP, where editors can retrieve assets from Content Hub in an integrated editing environment. 

When you layer on top Sitecore Content Operations, you add the ability to create structured content types with associated metadata and relationships so that digital marketers can consolidate their workflows in one place and developers can use that creative output to power digital experiences. 

As importantly, companies can ensure only brand-approved assets are used in digital marketing efforts, which is one of the business benefits of centralized content operations. Remember when KFC changed its logo from “Finger Lickin’ Good” at the beginning of the pandemic out of fear the fried chicken lovers would spread COVID? Can you imagine doing that sort of enterprise slogan change without some sort of centralized digital distribution system to control it all? 

Experience Edge for scalability in headless
“Experience Edge makes Content Hub data available in the cloud using distributed data delivery platform with a GraphQL endpoint,” explained Sarvesh Jain, a Sitecore developer and technology lead at Horizontal Digital. In other words, Content Hub makes it possible for developers to take the API-driven output from Content Hub and use it in digital delivery.  

Benefits include: 

    Scalability - Publish content to a highly scalable content delivery network (CDN) 
    Reaches customers across all channels - Publish Sitecore content to any device or channel (watches, phones, tablets, voice-controlled devices and so on) 
    Integrates with any platform - All applications can make application programming interface (API) calls and consume content from GraphQL endpoint 

Creative automation solution 

Creative automation is the process of tying graphic assets and digital data together to create smart templates, which allow companies to produce graphic assets like PDFs at scale. In Content Hub, smart templates are driven by CHILI Publish, one of the nation’s top creative automation providers. 

The end goal is to empower companies by: 

    Allowing designers to stay creative 
    Allowing non-designers to produce professional graphic assets at scale without design assistance 

Under Content Hub’s Print license, CHILI Publish is available in an inline editing experience that allows brand-approved assets from within Content Hub to be exposed within Smart Templates. When you combine those assets with data from Content Hub, the presentation options power outputs that include websites, PDFs and more. The two integrated software systems together power Smart Print Templates that editors can use to create localized publications for regions and languages. 

There is set up involved, so you will want to work with an implementation partner like Horizontal Digital on your initial proof of concept to make sure your teams can learn from the ground up in the right way. 

What about Content Hub One? 

If you work in the Sitecore ecosystem, you have probably heard about Content Hub One, a new product built on top of the Content Hub platform. It is a headless and lightweight content management system (CMS) with some content lifecycle management abilities with a lightweight DAM included. 

Developers can leverage a rich set of software development kits (SDKs) and APIs supporting popular front-end frameworks, enabling enterprises to build cool things quickly, which is the point of all this digital stuff anyway. 

It lacks the other modules that Content Hub includes but can be considered by companies that want a lightweight and straightforward headless publishing solution with trained teams willing to take a leap into headless with a supporting strategy to get there. 

I use the word “strategy” with intention. Building modern digital experiences at the enterprise level requires coordination, creative aptitude, and the ability to technically execute with long-term enterprise-level support. So, if you ask your digital teams what "headless” means and they come back with responses like “horseman?” you should talk to a partner about the road ahead. 

Without the right strategy at the get-go, we promise it will be a bumpy ride.  
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