DEPT® has scooped the award for Large Digital Company of the Year at the 2021 Digital City Awards for the second year running.

The judges were “impressed how DEPT® evolved and adapted over the past year. DEPT®’s people-first approach was admirable and the level of support showed for its people throughout pandemic was remarkable.”

In the past year, we have introduced Wellbeing Advisors into the business to help Depsters with their mental health, created next-level virtual events for our teams across the world, subsidised WFH equipment, and launched an internal Awards to celebrate Depsters’ achievements. The Lock-In virtual pub lets us unwind as a team and often features special guests for talks and quizzes. Meditation and yoga were hosted throughout the week, as well as internal ‘lunch and learns’ and ‘elevenses’ catchups to keep the team connected. We’ve also implemented a diversity and inclusion calendar to celebrate events and festivals, and encouraged Depsters to take part in Wellness and Sustainability challenges.

When the pandemic hit, DEPT® focused on helping its clients navigate through the disruption. We launched the DEPT® Talks Live series on YouTube to share our insight with the wider digital community, and spearheaded the DEPT® Lab, which offers free digital advice to anyone who needs it. We teamed up with Episerver to launch a service package for frontline industries, and worked with Salesforce to launch a quickstart commerce solution to build a fully-functioning e-commerce site in just three weeks.

Brian robinson, uk managing director of DEPT®, said: “winning this award for the second year running is fantastic recognition of DEPT®’s commitment to being a people-first business. We have ambitions to become not only the best agency in the world, but for the world too, and our people play an integral role in helping us to shape and implement our goals. This year has been challenging for everyone, and I’m extremely proud of our depsters.“

The Digital City Awards marks the end of the first week of the Digital City Festival.  As headline partners, DEPT® is hosting a range of events focused on creativity, technology and data. Check out our schedule here.

You can visit DEPT®’s virtual booth on the Digital City Network to meet the team behind the agency. We are super excited to be a part of this and we can’t wait to meet you! 

Forrester recently published its “Now Tech: Global Digital Experience Services, Q4 2021” report to profile 37 digital providers that are helping brands with digital marketing, commerce and customer experience initiatives.

In their report, Forrester analysts Ted Schadler and Frederic Giron define digital providers as “essential partners to building [your brand’s] digital experience.” And digital experience means quite a lot. It embodies the combination of creativity and technology; everything from strategy, to implementation, to marketing, to optimisation, and all that’s in between. 

From our perspective, the digital experience is just as essential as your brand’s digital provider. Maybe now more than ever. After all, during the first three months of the pandemic, digital advanced the equivalent of ten years. A year and a half later, the world is now more digitally literate than ever before. And it’s only getting more so. To make it in a digital world, businesses must develop digital experiences to both meet the current needs of their customers and to future-proof their brand.

When shopping for the digital provider that will best fit your brand’s digital needs, Forrester breaks their recommendations down according to size. DEPT® is relatively small in this standing, at about 2,500 employees compared to 25,000 at large providers. 

That said, what is the benefit of making your essential partner in creating digital experiences a comparatively small provider?

Forrester reports that, unlike the large and mid-sized digital counterparts, “Smaller providers generally don’t have the breadth or scale but may offer specialties that the bigger players don’t provide.”

Other major research firms confirm the value of a specialised digital experience. McKinsey notes that a highly personalised, individual approach to a customer experience – particularly when a brand’s customer base is in the millions – boosts customer loyalty and gives that brand a competitive edge that is hard to imitate. And Harvard Business Review observes that in a world where digital feels almost ubiquitous, “there is no satisfactory excuse for a poor digital experience.” In short, if a brand does not successfully meet or surpass a customer’s digital expectations, they’re quick to move on. After all, countless other brands are just a quick search away.

We can also confirm the value of the specialised digital experience because we are highly specialised. Because “small” certainly does not mean that pushing out amazing global digital experiences is beyond our capability. Whether it’s the unique AR filter & branded hashtag we created for ASOS that generated over 1.2 billion views in just three weeks, the Lovie-nominated virtual landscape we were tasked with creating for the Eurovision Song Contest, or our work for Philips’ “Right under your nose” campaign to raise awareness of men’s health issues, we believe that specialised digital experiences work really, really well.

Suites

‘Monolithic’ digital experience platforms (DXPs), often called suites, have historically been the leading choice, providing companies with everything they may need in a suite of applications. They provide a single platform for managing and optimising all digital content and campaigns, enabling businesses to tap into all digital aspects of their operations and create engaging touchpoints at every stage of the customer journey, from discovery to post-sales. But being locked in to a single vendor or technology has the potential to create limitations, and the complexity often requires businesses to hire team members with a specific skill set to build the experiences they need and want. 

Stacks

The recent, rapid acceleration of digital transformation plans has driven a dramatic increase in the volume of companies opting to implement more modular, headless technology ‘stacks’. Built on an open, API-first approach to software and adopting a best-of-breed methodology, many of these stacks use a cloud platform to provide scalability and secure integration. They aim to break release cycle issues as they use a software ecosystem that provides a flexible, open and future-ready architecture.

The growing popularity of headless technology stacks has led longstanding DXP providers to rethink and reimagine their products, which has seen many of them move away from the monolithic approach to offer a hybrid solution: composable DXPs. These allow clients to break free from the traditional constraints of platform lock-in, large implementation updates, and significant upfront costs. 

By no stretch of the imagination does this mean that monolithic architecture is unsuitable. As a package, this can still be the best option for businesses depending on their use case, requirements and points of differentiation; all of which are key considerations in making the best decision for your business and customer experiences.

A composable digital experience platform removes the challenge of platform lock-in and takes the centralised approach to the next level. It operates as the backbone of digital content, supported by a series of interchangeable building blocks, as opposed to the tightly coupled, all-in-one structure of traditional DXPs. 

These building blocks, made up of APIs and integrations, can be tailored around existing processes and infrastructures, allowing for faster change and differentiation in approach to deliver digital experiences as efficiently and effectively as audiences demand them. Some of the key benefits include:

Spotlight on Sitecore

As organisations across the world embrace agility, they need technologies flexible enough to adapt with them. Gartner predicts that “by 2023, organisations that have adopted an intelligent composable approach will outpace the competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation.”

Acknowledging this, Sitecore is one of the latest digital experience platform providers to offer a composable DXP solution in addition to its ‘all in one’ DXP; providing further evidence that composable is a compelling offer. Sitecore’s dual strategy allows businesses to choose whether to invest in the full suite offering, or a more agile, ‘best of breed’ solution.

Sitecore has acquired a series of companies to be able to offer this solution, including Boxever, Four51, Moosend and, most recently, Reflektion. These acquisitions equip it with best-of-breed functionality in customer data platforms, B2B commerce, digital marketing and retail analytics. DEPT®’s experts recently shared their thoughts on what this might mean for Sitecore and its clients. 

Defining your roadmap

When considering software solutions, and whether a composable DXP is right for your business, it’s imperative to consider your business needs now as well as in the future to ensure that your choice serves your business for years to come. 

Before shortlisting options, we recommend defining your business goals. It’s important to not define these purely from a sales or revenue perspective, but also consider customer acquisition and retention, customer satisfaction and loyalty, launching in new markets, and brand awareness. You can then identify the technologies and marketing channels that will get you there, and how each of them needs to deliver. 

It’s important to also consider the CX facets that differentiate your company, as well as the business areas that are likely to grow or need to adapt to meet your future goals. Following this, you will be able to map out the functionalities and tools necessary and compare potential solutions against your needs. This internal preparation will put you in the best position to embark on your composable DXP roadmap to choose and implement the right solution for your business.

Seek expert advice

The suite vs stack debate is certainly nothing new, and with supporters on each side of the fence pushing their preferred solution, it can be difficult to choose a side. And while composable DXPs provide more of a middleground, offering the benefits of both archetypal suite and stack solutions, it is yet another option to weigh up. 

That’s why it can be helpful to seek the advice of those who have extensive experience in implementing different solutions to help you make your decision. DEPT® takes an agnostic view; with extensive experience in implementing and optimising these technologies, our team recognises that every business is unique, and so their digital solutions should be too.

By thoroughly analysing your requirements, position in the market, future goals and budget, we can recommend the right architectural blocks to deliver the most compelling digital solution for your business. Get in touch with our experts today to find out how we can help you define or accelerate your digital roadmap. 

In 2020, UK online sales growth hit a 13-year high at +36.6% year-on-year. With e-commerce revenues growing worldwide, many new digital-native brands have entered the market, while existing companies have rushed to optimise experiences to compete for the attention of potential customers. With competition so fierce, premium digital experiences will be key to brand differentiation and securing sales in this new e-commerce landscape.

With smartphones and smart devices now virtually essential parts of daily life, users are more digitally connected than ever before. This raises consumers’ standards when it comes to their digital experience; the connected customer prefers experiences that are as beautiful as they are functional. They will simply disengage rather than wrestle with a poorly designed product. Here are some of the key considerations to help brands excel in experience. 

Importance of experience

The scope of experience optimisation is vast, encompassing both user (UX) and customer experience (CX), both of which carry significant value when executed well. With many online vendors offering the same products from site to site, it has become largely understood that CX is now more important than price; every $1 a business invests in UX is said to return $100, generating an ROI of 9,900%.

Strong CX and UX are focused on facilitating positive interactions that fulfil the customer’s needs, guiding them to purchase and keeping them loyal to products and brands. There is no single winning formula, as the best examples are tailored to individual audience groups. What is optimum for one type of user may not be for another, so the key is balancing variety and flexibility. To define a great experience, rather than assuming they know what customers want or need, companies need to get close to their users to understand how they interact with brands and technology and learn from these insights. 

Opening digital doors

COVID-19 and the resulting global lockdowns quickly changed online shopping from a valuable option to a necessity, forcing many new users into the market. It’s indicated that 75% of consumers who only first started using digital commerce channels during the pandemic will continue shopping online when things return to ‘normal’. Meanwhile, the needs and expectations of existing users shifted as they became more reliant on digital purchasing outside of their usual habits and preferences. 

The key to opening the digital doors to this wealth of new users and potential customers is for brands to take stock of behaviour changes to create digital experiences that meet their varying needs and expectations. What worked pre-pandemic most likely won’t work post. 
Customer journey mapping is one of the optimum ways to understand customers and guide them through to purchase. The exercise creates a visual representation of customers’ interactions with a brand, helping the company to step into its customers’ shoes and see the business from their perspective to understand their pain points and how to improve them. In addition, with customer journeys becoming more complex and difficult for brands to track interactions, it is becoming increasingly essential for companies to better collate, analyse and utilise the data that’s available to them. Customer data platforms (CDPs) make that possible. By unifying and utilising customer data sources to their full potential, brands can better understand their customers, access insightful information and act on it in real time to achieve better results from digital marketing efforts. 

By fully understanding customers’ unique journeys, needs and preferences, companies can implement meaningful UX and CX that is most conducive to business success; simplifying the buying process for customers, and increasing sales for the brand. 

Maximising brand interactions

Brand experiences are essential for developing customer loyalty. But with the pandemic putting a halt to in-person experiences, brands had to find new, digital means of delivering product advice, brand values and driving shopper engagement. 

The acceleration, accessibility and evolution of new digital innovations within the last 12 months has seen brands experiment more with digital technologies to reimagine experiences and engagement across multiple touchpoints. From creative AR campaigns and live video shopping, to leveraging data to deliver hyper-personalised experiences, brands have sought new ways to nurture users into loyal customers.

Lyst partnered with DEPT® to deliver the latter, creating a lasting experience for customers while gaining invaluable user insights that would help the brand shape future experiences. Together we developed a data-fuelled campaign, brought forward with award-winning creativity, that resulted in an interactive quiz for users to ‘Discover your Fashion DNA’, which enabled Lyst to gather lifestyle-oriented data to generate a better understanding of its users, based on their preferences. The success of the campaign centred around a value exchange; while Lyst learns more about their customers to increase relevance of product offerings, the user gets to participate in a fun and immersive experience to learn something about themselves.

Raising the bar

The landscape of how we buy and how we sell is rapidly changing. But the one certainty in this new digital reality is that consumers and buyers are looking for relevant and seamless experiences that extend beyond traditional physical and online stores. 

Successful, interactive experiences are essential to standing out and competing in this new landscape, and brands must continue to raise the bar to understand customer needs and meet them in the right place, at the right time, with an optimised experience tailored to their preferences. 

The effects of the pandemic have demonstrated how quickly user needs and behaviours can shift. If your business needs advice in creating agile digital solutions to respond to these shifts, get in touch with our team of experts today. 

Contentful’s new take on content as a service (CaaS – a sub-group of SaaS) simplifies the set-up and deployment processes, allowing developers to get started faster and spin up solutions that reduce businesses’ reliance on technical teams.

“Contentful is programming language agnostic, meaning teams can work in their preferred language and businesses moving into the model can keep content as it is without having to migrate data, for example, as they move from an HTML site to a React single-page application (SPA),” commented Andy Blyth, Technical Architect at DEPT®. 

He further adds, “Contentful is constantly adding new features and functionality, allowing businesses using the service to evolve with the latest technology. Tagging has recently been released, grouping pages or objectives by characteristics or usage, which creates content classifications and eases the process of organising various components and multimedia files for editors.”

Chris Eccles, Technical Architect at DEPT® describes a Contentful project currently in development: “We’re working with an online learning provider that also performs English language tests for university, professional or migration applications. Contentful is populating the platform and we’re using its new web app, Compose. Setting up structured and reproducible fields is straightforward and the content management interface is the most intuitive I’ve ever seen. It uses a page-based model to streamline the process of adding and publishing content at scale, giving editors clear and flexible templates to quickly deliver uniform digital experiences, and in this case, across all of its programmes and courses.”

Contentful’s uncluttered interface experience helps reduce the level of intimidation and complexity for the user with simple logic and drag-and-drop features. Its ability to integrate with more no-code and low-code (NC/LC) tools means people from cross-functional teams have the ability to offset business demands for development, automate processes and accelerate digital transformation.

Making the move to microservices via integrated headless solutions like Contentful creates the foundation for growth, however that may relate to your business. It’s easy to look at a new piece of technology and relate to case studies that highlight how it helped other companies increase volumes of sales, but growth is more dynamic and often involves changing workflows, governance, supporting technology and even security needs. 

Overconfidence in a system’s ability to scale, without taking into account growing pains and unforeseen complexities can block innovation and lead to technical depth. In today’s ever-changing landscape, it’s difficult to predict what the future will hold, therefore, creating a solution built for change will underpin any avenue.

Over the years, DEPT® has supported various companies with the successful application of Contentful. We collaborated with global shipping container supplier CARU Containers on a digital transformation project that involved building a new B2B online store fuelled by Contentful and Salesforce. 

The new website was launched across ten countries as part of the refreshed CARU brand. Content pages were created to tell the story of the company, the employees, and each product. Additionally, there was content for social sharing and digital advertising: whitepapers, listicles, infographics and interviews. Content was displayed dynamically and adaptive to the language and country of each visitor, allowing one site to match up with an international audience. This content suite gave CARU positioning on LinkedIn, Google Ads, Microsoft Ads and the Google Display network. During the six month period of analysis and improvement, conversion grew by 400%, a sizable improvement that any company would be happy to see.

Content was also a key ingredient in transforming the 2021 Eurovision Village into a 3D Virtual World. The Eurovision Song Contest was streamed live, alongside additional DJ sets and performances and fresh content was served up daily throughout the nine-day festival. DEPT® integrated Contentful as the CMS, enabling a partnership agency to interact with guests and communicate updates in real-time, such as changes to the line-up.

We’ve also collaborated on projects for leading seafood supplier, Sykes Seafood; B2B travel company, Cartrawler; the Global Psoriasis Atlas; student discount platform, Totum; and the world’s number one chemical distributor, DigiB.

To stay ahead of the competition, agility and adaptability is a must. If your company has already implemented a headless stack but isn’t maximising its capabilities to their full potential, or is still weighing up the options, we’re here to help.

Contact us to discuss your digital landscape and how Contentful may be able to fit into it, perhaps by enriching your product information management (PIM) solution with marketing content or translating content in a mobile app.