What a year for us at Kontent.ai! In July 2022, we had the absolute pleasure to announce that Kontent.ai had raised $40 million in growth capital from Expedition Growth Capital and became a fully fledged standalone company.

With the investment and my stepping into the role of Chief Executive Officer, our main mission was clear: to continue to support organizations with our leading modular content platform while being a company built on trust and driven by customer feedback.

For this reason, I recently visited key customers across the globe, including UNICEF, ABC Triple J, Arthrex, MillerKnoll, and LA Bos to connect, listen, and take in their candid feedback. What are their goals and ambitions for the future? What are they satisfied with? And where does Kontent.ai need to step up and improve?

In this blog, I’d like to share valuable insights from these innovative organizations that I believe every enterprise can benefit from.

What forward-looking organizations are thinking about

The customers I spoke with are not only delivering remarkable projects but also face the intricacies of content management at scale daily, and there’s a lot to be learned from them. Here, I’ll share some practical insights that were common across the board.

Our customers are well aware that excellent digital experiences are non-negotiable these days. Let’s take a look at some of the ways they connect with their audiences in meaningful ways.

UNICEF Australia, for example, facilitates providing crucial aid to children living in areas affected by poverty, conflict, or natural disaster by purchasing from their virtual charity gift store, Inspired Gifts. In the world of mainstream music production, ABC Triple J is elevating independent music artists via a streaming platform that helps them gather a community of followers. To thank friends or customers in a fun and personal way, Prezzee is on a mission to make customized and easy-to-use gift cards via their eGift card platform.

To launch their projects and maintain success in the long term, our customers support their large marketing teams and tackle complex content operations by, for instance, implementing workflows. Other capabilities, such as advanced asset management, are also hugely valued as teams grow and scale. For our customers, keeping processes moving and hassle-free ensures that their customers get consistent content on time – with perfectly optimized visuals across channels. 

They also leverage best-of-breed integrations with favorite services, such as Shopify, Salesforce, or CommerceTools, for a modern tech stack that can grow with their needs and help them meet the ever-evolving customer expectations.

Having a solid content model is also a common pattern among forward-looking enterprises, which is essential to highlight, as many organizations may find building an effective content model challenging. What is it, and why is it so important? 

Content models structure content into highly reusable and presentation-independent components. With that, enterprises can speed up content creation and support omnichannel delivery to give customers seamless experiences across various touchpoints. By bringing business and engineering teams together to discuss their project needs and having a solid content model are the key criteria that set innovative organizations up for long-term success. If you’d like to get more insight, feel free to start with an introduction to content modeling.

Enterprises want to grow knowledge through local user groups

It was exciting to see just how enthusiastic global organizations are about local user groups and the opportunities they would bring. Everybody would love to participate, making it clear that there’s an interest in expanding knowledge, and learning best practices on effective content operations, AI, or website management from the “headless” community. Within local user groups, the members can connect to share experience, grow their skillsets and expand strategic insights while learning how to use the product better at the same time.

In addition to that, enterprises welcome strategic roadmap discussions and are very candid about the types of capabilities they want or the types of capabilities they would like to start using. As the digital landscape and customer behaviors continue to evolve, it can be a challenge to anticipate every change. We see that our customers do have a finger on the pulse of their customer needs, goals, and areas of growth. So, when vendors can offer their customers practical insights about the roadmap and share their future vision of the product, it allows both parties to grow together.

Strong support and local presence make all the difference

Not only do organizations want to learn from each other, but also from their vendors, whom they can trust. How can enterprises guarantee their position as a reliable resource and, in parallel, ensure everyone will get the most out of their product? Our customers are aligned on the answer.

According to them, the winning combination for success is comprised of three key elements: a strong product, dedicated customer success management, and a net of trusted implementation partners.

With strong local support, enterprises can really expand the value adoption of a product. A full range of customer success services, such as foundational guidance, regular business reviews, accessible e-learning, and 24x7 chat support, means that the customers don’t lack assistance at any point of their journey and ultimately get the most value out of the product.

Here, I’d like to take the opportunity to thank some of our wonderful Customer Success Managers. A big shout-out goes to Thomas Murphy, Martin Turena, and Frankie Lui for organizing these customer visits and always providing such professional support.

Another way our customers get the most out of their tech stack is having a strong implementation partner in their corner. Partners should be experts that teams can trust and maintain strong relationships with. Solid implementation partners will be customer-centric, have a proven track record, profound industry knowledge, and expertise in your product. Location is another essential factor in selecting a partner, as a local presence can make all the difference in understanding the local market and ensuring the project will resonate with it. We’re proud of our community of global partners – feel free to check them out here.

Here’s to many more customer visits in the future!

Our customers are delivering stellar digital experiences at scale to connect with their audiences in impactful ways, and there’s a lot that can be learned from their practical insights.

I am excited to conclude that our customers are seeing success using our modular content platform and are happy with our level of support. I appreciate the overall positive spirit in which our discussions were held and am very grateful for the valuable insights and our customers’ openness and candid feedback. 

All teams at Kontent.ai, including customer success, professional services, partner management, and product development, take and apply feedback seriously, so that Kontent.ai can continue to be a valuable solution for our customers to tell their stories that change the world.

I am already looking forward to seeing more of our customers at some of the upcoming events. An excellent opportunity to meet presents itself in less than a month—at Kontent.ai Horizons in New York on November 17, 2022!