Digital content fulfillment: User experience will determine the winner
Buying Experience
The boom in the eCommerce is through serendipitous discovery, social recommendations and frictionless ordering. Retailers like Amazon have leveraged behavior mining algorithms, social analytics to derive product recommendations. The buying process is instantaneous (potentially just a single click in both iTunes and Amazon). In contrast to this, publishers have replicated their brick-and-mortar models of pre-defined product bundles, static recommendations for cross-sell and up-sell options resulting in a poor customer experience
The buying experience needs to simple, transparent and user personalized.
Entitlement Experience
Once content is paid-for the entitlement needs to be seamless and near instantaneous. Presently, there are device, format specific rules that are complicated for customer to follow or keep track of. Premium publishers prone to dealing with institutional buyers need to provide robust entitlement management self-service capabilities. This will enable administrators to transfer, revoke and suspend entitlement for users to manage costs and enable their workforce through appropriate content products
Access Experience
User-registration is the single biggest barrier in letting customers sample content and also converting non-paying consumers to paid customers. Identity management is sometimes siloed across content products integrated through mergers or acquisitions. I have seen users get agitated in dealing with CSRs resolving access issues. Rather than dictating credentialing modalities, Publishers need to integrate with universal authenticating mechanisms like Facebook Connect, OpenID authorization to make access seamless without compromising on understanding user.
Publishers need to deploy solutions that offer their digital native customers a best-in-class experience to keep them in their native market place as against purchasing through 3rd party retailers.
