Adobe Expands Strategic Partnership With Microsoft to Deliver Superior Customer Experiences

It isn’t unusu­al for an organization’s sales, mar­ket­ing and cus­tomer ser­vice depart­ments to oper­ate inde­pen­dent­ly. How­ev­er, this becomes much more than a col­lab­o­ra­tion chal­lenge when every team is work­ing as a silo on a spe­cif­ic role. It can – and will – affect the organization’s cus­tomer engage­ment and its bot­tom line when cus­tomer-fac­ing depart­ments work in siloes. And ulti­mate­ly it’s not just the orga­ni­za­tion that suf­fers, it’s also the cus­tomers and prospects, who are left with a bad brand experience.

In order to address this chal­lenge, today at Adobe Sum­mit EMEA, Adobe and Microsoft are announc­ing a strate­gic part­ner­ship in which Adobe’s Mar­ket­ing Cloud solu­tions will be inte­grat­ed with Microsoft’s Dynam­ics CRM to pro­vide brands with cus­tomer intel­li­gence by con­nect­ing data from sales, mar­ket­ing, cus­tomer ser­vice and oth­er front office depart­ments of orga­ni­za­tions. Togeth­er, Adobe and Microsoft are join­ing forces to cre­ate the industry’s first large-scale solu­tion for con­nect­ing the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence across all cus­tomer touch points and help­ing com­pa­nies com­mu­ni­cate much more effec­tive­ly regard­less of where cus­tomers are in the lifecycle.

For exam­ple, if I’ve been metic­u­lous­ly research­ing a new fam­i­ly car online, then final­ly go to the deal­er­ship to test dri­ve and ulti­mate­ly buy a new car, I don’t want to receive a pro­mo­tion­al email the next day about the car that I just pur­chased. To me, this is a clear indi­ca­tion that teams and sys­tems with­in the car com­pa­ny are not speak­ing to each other.

Inte­grat­ing Microsoft Dynam­ics CRM and it’s best-in-class solu­tion with over 40,000 cus­tomers, with behav­ioral data through Adobe Ana­lyt­ics (for­mer­ly Omni­ture Site­cat­a­lyst) and Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud, the leader in mar­ket­ing cloud solu­tions, will enable brands to offer expe­ri­ences that take all cus­tomer engage­ments into account – from reach and acqui­si­tion, to reten­tion and loy­al­ty. Brands will ben­e­fit from increased pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and elim­i­nate com­mon frus­tra­tions that result when inter­ac­tions are siloed.

Spe­cif­ic func­tion­al­i­ty includes the abil­i­ty to better:

• Inte­grate Ser­vices: Align sales and mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties by tight­ly inte­grat­ing audi­ences and their behav­iors, which can help guide sales or ser­vice calls, iden­ti­fy sales oppor­tu­ni­ties or inform lead scoring.
• Pro­vide Val­ue: Find high-val­ue audi­ence seg­ments and pro­vide them with real-time offers on the web site or enable tar­get­ed dis­play ads.
• Deliv­er Con­tent: Com­bine web behav­ior data with order his­to­ry, return his­to­ry, loy­al­ty sta­tus and call cen­ter his­to­ry to not only iden­ti­fy where in the sales life­cy­cle stage a cus­tomer is in, but then also deliv­er the right con­tent at the right time, whether that con­tent resides on a land­ing page, in a ser­vice fol­low-up email, or as an alert in a mobile app.

In addi­tion, Adobe and Microsoft announced that sev­er­al of its Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud solu­tion will run on Microsoft Azure mov­ing for­ward includ­ing Adobe Cam­paign and Adobe Expe­ri­ence Manager.

The com­bi­na­tion of mar­ket­ing solu­tions from Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud and Microsoft’s CRM Dynam­ics pro­vide a uni­fied cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. Gone are the days that con­sumers set­tle for a dis­joint­ed expe­ri­ence from brands.

Find out the lat­est on Adobe and Microsoft partnership.