Peek Behind the Sneaks: Giving a New Voice to Experience Marketing

https://blog.adobe.com/media_7ab03f785530de96663ca608ea4babe3fe6a020b.gifExperiences that engage and delight us are evolving at the speed of technology. The breakthrough service of today can quickly become the new normal of tomorrow, as we come to expect increasingly innovative and personalized ways of interacting with brands.

In part, that’s what inspired Adobe’s Mark Szulc, principal solution consultant in APAC, to create #BeyondClick—a sneak technology from that combines intelligent voice assistance with customer loyalty and brings voice interaction to Adobe’s Experience Cloud.

“If you think about how quickly consumer expectations evolve, it’s almost as if we have a Moore’s Law of experience. The things we find engaging and unique today will be ‘meh’ eighteen months from now. Think about how rapidly we’ve adopted voice recognition and intelligent assistants into our daily lives. Using a service like Siri or Alexa to order a pizza or get an Uber is becoming commonplace. I thought if we were doing that at scale on the consumer side, we should also be able to play in that space from an enterprise perspective,” he says.

Mark’s interest in voice started from the same place as many consumers. “I purchased an Amazon Echo for Christmas, and it was really fun and easy to play with,” he explains. “Later I saw a press release from a major hotel chain that they were going to put an Echo in every room. It got me thinking about how we could put it all together with the Adobe Experience Cloud.”

“For it to be useful, voice interaction needs to be integrated alongside other channels and capabilities so that it’s just one point in a customer journey that works across your laptop, phone, watch, the front desk, or the hotel bar,” Mark notes. “It’s the combination of voice working in tandem with the power of the Experience Cloud that makes the interaction meaningful.”

Mark also showed how marketers could use the same technology to check the ongoing results of their campaigns. “It introduces new ways of interacting with Experience Cloud on the go. We’re simply collecting the information marketers would find when they look at their campaign reports and serving it back in way that’s digestible.”

What’s next for #BeyondClick? That really depends on the imagination of marketers, more than the development of technology, says Mark. “It’s not something where marketers have to wait for technology that is still years to come. There’s enough out-of-the-box functionality between voice assistants like Alexa and the Adobe Experience Cloud to make the experience great today. It’s really just a matter of using standard APIs to make it all work together. I’m looking forward to seeing how we can make it even better.”

This story is part of a series that will give you a closer look at the people and technology that were showcased as part of Adobe Sneaks. Watch other Sneaks from this year’s Summit here and read other Peek Behind the Sneaks stories here.