How Fortune 500 Company CDW Fuels Steady Growth by Focusing on Customers

Image provided by CDW.

As the business world goes increasingly digital and customer expectations rise, companies face the ongoing challenge of evolving their businesses to organize around customer value. Increasingly, success hinges on Customer Experience Management (CXM), with a deep understanding of customer needs and the ability to mobilize and deliver quickly.

CDW stands out as a powerful example of how to succeed in the digital era. Over the past few decades, the company has become one of the world’s leading solution providers—ranked 191 on the 2019 Fortune 500 list and #5 in CRN’s 2019 Solution Provider rankings. Not only has CDW navigated its own digital transformation, it helps 250,000 customers do the same by providing integrated IT solutions with hardware, software, and security from more than 100 brands.

CDW builds a customer-focused delivery engine

CDW has succeeded thanks in part to its hyper-focus on the needs of its customers—a diverse group ranging from small businesses to nonprofits, schools, healthcare organizations, and government agencies. Across the board, these organizations are navigating their own digital transformations, and their IT needs are growing increasingly complex. One powerful way CDW helps them tackle this challenge is by offering valuable advice and industry news through award-winning publications and marketing materials.

That means CDW has a lot of creative content—partner logos, branding guidelines, stock photos, and other design elements—amounting to 4TB of data. To make the most of it, the company uses Adobe Experience Manager Assets as a digital asset management (DAM) platform. The DAM is the newest addition to an integrated technology stack at CDW that includes Adobe Analytics, Adobe Experience Manager Sites on Microsoft Azure, and Adobe Creative Cloud.

The company uses Adobe Experience Cloud solutions to rapidly deliver useful information to each customer or potential customer in a targeted way. By consolidating its assets in Adobe Experience Manager Assets, CDW can make sure that content is easily accessible as the company works with agencies and partners to produce materials.

“We decided to create best practices to improve content creation, access, and management by implementing a central DAM,” says Jim Garlow, Director of Content and Creative Services. “Unlike other web content management systems, Adobe enables us to achieve true content velocity. By consolidating digital content on Adobe Experience Manager Assets, we improve production efficiency and give our designers time to create content that engages all audiences. The ability to integrate Adobe Creative Cloud makes it easy and quick to leverage content created by our designers in our online portal and marketing materials.”

Designers and marketers now spend less time searching for assets or recreating them when they can’t be found. Teams can work more collaboratively with agencies and partners and no longer get tripped up over version control issues. Plus, they can better control usage of partner logos and other copyrighted assets. All told, that means the team and tools are oriented around delivering relevant content to many different audiences faster.

“Overall, the team has saved approximately 20 hours a week from faster search and streamlined workflows,” Garlow says. “We’re improving asset reuse rates and reducing creative costs while delivering highly creative content that connects with customers.”

The transformation continues with personalization

With the tools in place to rapidly deliver valuable content to customers, CDW is now looking toward greater personalization as part of its CXM strategy. Many of its ads and publications already incorporate personalized elements, but the company aims to hone its targeting and segmentation for more relevant, contextual experiences that help customers succeed in the digital era.

“In an extremely competitive landscape, CDW must continue to increase personalization of messages for our diverse customers,” says Garlow. “Adobe Experience Manager Assets provides the strong foundation we need to support custom messaging that cultivates sales and loyalty with quality, relevant customer experiences.”

CDW uses Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud, including analytics, content management and digital asset management to become a true Customer Experience Management company. Learn more here.