Crownpeak Customers Discuss DX, DQM & Digital Governance

By Gabriella Pirrone

May 16, 2019

Air Charter Service, Crownpeak, customer experience, CX, Digital Experience, Digital Governance, Digital Quality Management, DQM, Toyota, WCM, Web Content Management

Some of the largest enterprise companies use Crownpeak to create, manage, optimize, and deploy high-quality digital experiences every day. For your viewing pleasure, please watch our two exclusive customer interviews below that were recorded on-location at the 2019 Crownpeak Empower UK event. In the following videos, we discuss digital experience challenges, how businesses can achieve digital quality management, and how much privacy and governance can affect customer experiences.

Harry Gahley, Digital Marketing Manager, Air Charter Service

Air Charter Service (ACS) is an award-winning aircraft charter company providing private jet, commercial airliner, and cargo aircraft charters around the world along with personalized, on-board courier solutions. Leading the digital marketing department at Air Charter Service, Harry is a seasoned SEO and marketing strategist, and his passion for the company shined through while speaking to him. I started by asking Harry how the company began and to go into its history in a bit more detail.

“Air Charter Service is a global aircraft charter company. So, specializing in private jets, commercial jets, and cargo. Actually, the company started off doing cargo charters around the world. It’s all stemmed from cargo, and moving humanitarian aid and relief, and then shortly after that, they realized, ‘Well, hold on. The companies that we’re moving this for have to move these execs over from (point) A to (point) B, because of business meetings and so forth.’ So, we’re primarily an aircraft charter company. We have 24 offices—actually, now 25 offices—globally across the world, so everything from LA to Sydney and all the major cities in the world. We have about 500 staff across the world, and turning over in the proximate range of about 700 million dollars.”

Let’s be honest, who wouldn’t like their own private jet? Harry held a general session at the event on ‘scaling digital experience’. According to Walker research, by 2020, CX will become the key differentiator between brands instead of price or product. I was keen to learn from Harry what he sees as the most challenging digital experience to come?

“It’s a great question because part of my remit is looking at current technology—and future technology like you’re talking about—so the biggest challenge, I find, first and foremost, is a CMS system that allows you to deliver the best—or the greatest experience—to your end-users. I’ve worked with quite a few CMSs over time and some promise that they’re fully SaaS solution when they’re actually hybrid. We get to a point where you spend so much money trying to fix your current CMS, or current issues, that you’re not really bulking that infrastructure or that money that you’re saving on technology. Now, one thing that we’re looking at in the future is the future of voice. More and more now, we’re seeing people on Alexa, Siri, and Google. For example, we had a customer the other day was, ‘Hey Siri, how much is a private jet from Van Nuys to Vegas?’ Now, wouldn’t it be great if it can pull relevant content to your website? We looked at how do we get that and leverage that onto the top of Google? Looking at the voice search, I think that’s going to be our core focus over the next two­­–three years. Machine learning, at the moment, I think, is a little bit overhyped in the current state—I would say about five years down the line. I’m not sure if you saw a recent video created by this young chap about Mario. Do you remember the old Mario game where when you have to jump over to get the coin and the mushroom? They had this chap who went through and did a manual run through of the game, and then introduced machine learning and AI into it and then just ran it over time. And then you found, towards the end, Mario was just jumping across collecting all these mushrooms and all these coins in speed time, and completed the game. And you’re thinking, ‘Wow’. Now, for a customer, when they get to the point where they feel comfortable in that perspective—like I was watching that—I think that’s all five years down the line. At the moment, I think we’re still a bit early and I think customers and people just [think] it’s maybe too much information. And, you know, am I GDPR compliant? Have I got consent? So yeah, I think AI and machine learning, in about five years, will be the step.

Catering the experience to your customer is so important, and Harry agreed that customers need to be comfortable in order to gain their trust; especially when they are engaging with your online services, app, or just word-of-mouth.

Some of the most powerful world leaders are often transported using Air Charter Service. This even includes the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, whose onboard management center is valued at $500 million and holds the record for the largest number of airplanes and helicopters in a fleet with 68 and 64 respectively! I asked Harry how much is privacy and governance part of their customer experience, and I wanted to know how, exactly, are those two tied together?

“Massively. Especially in the industry we’re in. So, if you’re talking to highly well-known individuals, you’re talking about VIP clients, governments—they would talk about digital trust. So, when they’re using your services, whether it be the app, whether it be talking to the service people, us guys—when you hold that much information on these highly networked individuals, on these type of companies for all these people, you need to make sure that they feel trusted, that it’s handled correctly, that you’ve got the necessary process in place.”

Emanuela Tasinato, Project Manager, Toyota Motor Europe

You are likely all familiar with Toyota, the world famous vehicle manufacturer, but did you know the original Toyoda began as a textile weaving business in the late-nineteenth-century? Pretty cool!

As a Crownpeak customer, Toyota utilizes its solution to achieve excellent levels of quality and compliance across its European websites. To ensure this type of quality standard—that includes content localization—meets all of their requirements, I started by asking Emanuela some of the common challenges they’ve faced by managing these standards for each market?

“Quality is part of the DNA of Toyota. So, of course, this is not only referring to the quality of the cars, but we wanted to have it reflected in everything that we show towards our customers, including our website. We have developed a series of digital standards that we share with our market, so we have a central website, and we have forty-six websites that cover about thirty markets in Europe with several languages. In this set of standards, we explain to the markets everything that we expect from them when it comes to building a website that we define as excellent, in terms of quality, and of course, that translates, as well, in a set of checkpoints that we use in the Crownpeak tool. The way that we do it—of course—we start from a set of checkpoints which are recommended by Crownpeak, then we integrate with additional checkpoints that we believe are important for Toyota. Then, we go to the markets, and we explain what is expected and why this is important, especially. And then we also make sure that these checkpoints are reviewed on a regular basis because, of course, the internet is changing all the time, so we have to make sure that the checkpoints stay relevant and up-to-date to continue delivering quality experience towards our customers.”

Indeed, we can agree that the internet is always changing and evolving. Toyota prides itself in achieving a minimum level of compliance to ensure accessibility and to satisfy customer needs, but how can a business achieve DQM within their organization? I asked Emanuela to go into more detail.

“For us, because we work with a central website which is then localized into forty-six websites (so we have quality on different fronts), we need to make sure that what we deliver from our end, towards the world markets, has already built-in quality—which is quality in terms of content, and also quality in terms of code so that nothing that we deliver towards the world markets, whether it’s code or content, is causing any quality issues. As well, of course, we work together with our world markets to make sure that they are on-board, and they check their quality dashboards on a regular basis, and we report on them on a monthly basis to see how well they are doing. And, I have to say, that they are very, very committed in trying to achieve zero errors. We get to see a lot of questions—especially towards the end of the month—everyone wants to make sure that the report looks really, really good. And then, of course, we have a yearly event, as well, just like this one—but the Toyota version—and then we give an award to the market that achieves the best results in terms of digital quality. What is also very nice to see is that it’s not always the big markets which are winning this award, but very often, it’s the small ones. It could be Latvia or Slovenia, and what is good to see over there is that it doesn’t matter how big your market is, or how much your marketing budget is. It really depends on how much effort you are willing to put into the project and how much you really believe this is important. Let’s say; the first spot is available for everybody.”

Founded in 1937 and with over three hundred and forty thousand employees, sixty-nine manufacturing companies, and five regional headquarters, you can definitely say that Toyota is a growing company. I was interested to hear what the challenges are that Emanuela has seen throughout her career in the organization.

“For us, one might think that the challenge would be having to work with so many markets, but actually, the challenge, very often, is internal. Because we have content providers—which can come from anywhere in our head office—sometimes it’s difficult to find the owner of a certain page or a certain section of the website and persuade them, basically, to comply with our digital checkpoints. This is especially true for, say, legacy pages that might have been there for years—that still need to be there, but no one is really sure to who they belong to. So, for us, this is actually, at the moment, this is the challenge. It’s more internal than the world markets.”

Ending Notes

I always enjoy speaking with customers at events because it gives us a clear understanding of how the companies utilize platform capabilities, and they also get to share their successes and triumphs with us. Every customer is unique in their own way, so it’s always fascinating to hear their stories.

Besides these two customer interviews, we gathered a few partner interviews from this event, as well. Make sure you check back for those coming soon!
 

Gabriella Pirrone

Gabriella is the Digital Marketing Assistant for CMSC Media. She brings a wealth of knowledge from not only a CMS perspective but also content, SEO and eCommerce. She enjoys everything social media and staying ontop of the latest trends in the digital marketing world.