August 2020 Summaries

At DFDS, they transitioned their content from a legacy CMS to Contentful, adding more localized sites and languages, resulting in easier management of their enormous amount of content across locales and channels. They developed a well-structured and intuitive content model with user experience experts, developers, and editors involved, optimizing for simplicity of code, editorial experience, and visual consistency. The model allows for reuse of similar elements, while leaving flexibility for variations. By separating presentation from content, they can take advantage of reuse, resulting in advantages such as visual consistency, reduced content volume, long-term maintenance, and faster time to market. However, the journey was not without challenges, including complexity, cost of transition, working with third-party translation providers, and adjusting the content model. Despite these, adopting Contentful has enabled them to continually reuse content, organize it into manageable chunks, achieve faster time-to-market speeds, and decreased long-term maintenance.

The benefits of chatbots are evident, and most brands are developing expert bots that provide specific solutions to reach customers. A company used Contentful to power their web products and wanted to build an FAQ chatbot. They developed a proof-of-concept using Microsoft Azure functions and knowledge base, which uses Contentful webhooks, Azure cloud functions, and Microsoft's knowledge base service. The content model is kept simple with a single content type holding question and answer pairs, as well as an internal title for editors to have as a reference. Webhooks are used for publish and unpublish events, triggering cloud functions. An entry and test workflow can be created by publishing and unpublishing it and checking the webhook payload being sent. A QnA service is created using Microsoft Azure portal, and APIs are used to add, update or delete information from the knowledge base. Azure functions are used to develop and deploy serverless applications, and a new project is created with two functions: publishWebhookHandler and unpublishWebhookHandler. These functions push content into the knowledge base using webhooks coming from Contentful and remove content from the knowledge base when it's unpublished. The solution allows for building intelligent chatbots that can train on customer interactions, measure sentiments, and improve FAQs.

Direct-to-consumer businesses have transformed from being seen as cheesy infomercials on late-night TV to being considered tastemakers and innovators, driving a shift towards digital experiences that market, sell and build their brand. DTC brands often start with a digital-first mindset, engaging customers through various channels, gathering feedback, and building loyalty by fostering an open and transparent communication cycle. This approach offers consumers transparency, which is valued at 73% of consumers willing to pay more for it, and brings brands closer to their customers, allowing them to develop a deeper understanding of their audience. By adopting a digital-first strategy, DTC brands can build relationships directly with customers, create a community, enhance the customer-brand connection, and drive business success by being authentic, customer-centric, and true to their mission and values.

A large enterprise must adopt a content management strategy to ensure scalability, quality, and speed across distributed development teams. A modern practice that addresses these challenges is a continuous integration and deployment pipeline (CI/CD). To create a scalable content management strategy, a company can use a CI/CD provider such as GitHub Actions, and integrate it with a content platform like Contentful. The key to autonomy in content management is keeping the content types right next to the interface, allowing different consumers of the interfaces to own their migrations. By using versioning, teams can reuse and maintain autonomy while creating enterprise-grade Contentful app pipelines. However, there are technical limitations imposed by the pricing structure of Contentful, such as a cap on the number of environments per space type and content types that can be created.

The digital-first era is a movement towards businesses interacting more with customers online, prioritizing their digital offering first, and adopting a mindset that technology should be part of the foundation rather than an afterthought. This shift is driven by the increasing accessibility and convenience of digital experiences, making it easier for customers to engage with businesses in person. To meet this new reality, leaders must commit to making their services and products as digital as possible from the outset, designing for today's products but also considering the unknown products of the future. A commitment to a digital-first mindset requires investing in customizable and extensible technology that can be adapted to new workflows and digital experiences, enabling businesses to prepare for whatever is next and stay ahead of the curve.

GraphQL is a flexible and specific query language that allows developers to ask for exactly what they want in a single query, reducing the need for response parsing and additional tooling. The Contentful GraphQL API provides a strongly-typed schema, enabling applications to run faster with compact queries returning small responses. This flexibility benefits both developers and users, allowing organizations to work in a more agile way and quickly access content from multiple sources. To celebrate its general availability, Contentful has released a free-to-watch course teaching the basics of GraphQL and how to integrate it with React and the Contentful API.