Customers’ Expectations Have Changed. Can Your CMS Keep Up?

Agility is crucial to exceeding customer expectations.

The new world is customer-centric, and digital-first experiences were steadily becoming the future. With the global pandemic added to the mix, digital-first experiences are the present. Relevant story-telling and communication is the need of the hour. If your CMS isn’t agile, you will fall behind.

Your CMS is a customer experience engine

Digital strategy, UX, accessibility, security, and search-ability are all only as good as your CMS. It’s the fundamental tech building block of agility and customer experience. Its capabilities and ease-of-use impact agility and effectiveness across all the internal teams who touch it, directly impacting business outcomes.

Digital Strategy and User Experience

Enabling a modern, secure website alone doesn’t cut it. Put content, commerce, and community first. Your platform needs to support content strategies that create valuable experiences through optimized structures and responsive design.

Agility and Scalability

Teams need the right tools to be efficient, agile, and make a significant impact, whether it’s lead gen, conversion, online sales, or brand reputation. It begins with your CMS.

Accessibility

In 2020, accessibility is table stakes. Making sure your websites are fully engaging to the widest possible audience, regardless of ability, is good business and the right thing to do.

Security

The digital-first world opens the door to security challenges. Building your customer experience on top of a CMS supported by a community committed to continuous development is just good sense.

Search-ability

Even when running a lot of code, a cutting-edge CMS can simultaneously reduce load times, improving SEO and the overall digital experience.

The many business benefits of Drupal 9

Drupal is one of the world’s most popular Content Management Systems (CMS). Powering the back-end management for more than 1 million websites, it is a mainstay for thousands of businesses. Several features make Drupal 9 stand out in the modern digital marketing landscape. Some highlights are:

Headless Support

Drupal 9 can be used as a CMS only — integrating with another tech to display pages to the end-user. This gives you the option to run Drupal in the back-end and use other technologies that are specifically focused on optimized front-end flexibility and speedy load times.

Multilingual and Multimedia

Driving engagement with the top content on mobile is critical for any organization. Drupal 9’s core multimedia capabilities offer video, audio, dynamic images, and more across a global range of languages.

Structured Content

Drupal 9 delivers a modern and agile dev environment to build layouts and atomic design components instead of static pages. These quick, rapid prototype pages are an excellent way for marketing and content teams to generate content quickly with better authoring tools and higher visual accuracy.

Content Workflows

The demand for high-quality, interactive digital content is higher than ever. With so much content being created every day, Drupal 9’s workflows that enable and automate throughout all development phases are invaluable.

The time to act is now

Drupal 9 was launched in June 2020. It marks a new beginning for the platform with a host of key upgrades. Tech support for Drupal 7 will end entirely in November 2022 and Drupal 8 in November 2021. While it might feel like a long time away, it’s right around the corner from a tech adoption perspective.

For customer-centric organizations, holding off on the switch to Drupal 9 leaves the door wide open for multiple challenges across security, integration, and more. Hesitancy today will put your customer experience at risk tomorrow.

Need help evaluating your CMS? Nathan Gervais, Technical Director, recently published the white paper, Migrate & Exceed CXpectatons, with insights on the right questions to ask while identifying your unique needs and building migration roadmaps that fit them. Grab your copy now.

About the Author

Nathan Gervais, Technical Director, is fueled by his passion for Open Source technologies and building digital technologies that empower organizations to lead with a customer-first mindset. Since 2007, Nathan has combined his expertise in business solutions and CMS to create valuable digital experiences. At Appnovation, he leads a team of engineers to be innovative in their solutions-based approach that boosts performance measurement.