Adobe Experience Forum: four trends that dominate Customer Experience Management

“Hap­py cus­tomers spend their mon­ey both online and offline. More than ever, we should put the cus­tomer first.” – Jamie Brighton, Head of Prod­uct & Indus­try Mar­ket­ing, EMEA at Adobe.

Over the past few years, the top­ic of cus­tomer expe­ri­ence has come a long way. Increas­ing­ly, organ­i­sa­tions put the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence at the heart of their cam­paigns. There is still more work to be done, though.

Over 150 dig­i­tal mar­ke­teers were invit­ed by Adobe to learn more about the top­ic, on the top floor of the Van der Valk hotel in Diegem (Bel­gium) on June 20th.

Which trends in Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence Man­age­ment are emerging?

Pro­fes­sor Gino Van Ossel told the audi­ence that we have come a long way when it comes to cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, but there’s always room for improve­ment. Van Ossel men­tioned four trends that cur­rent­ly dom­i­nate Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence Management.

1. Behave like a but­ler. In this data-dri­ven envi­ron­ment, it is impor­tant that you focus on all of the data. For exam­ple, you’re look­ing for a hotel online and you check some hotels. Even though you book a sim­i­lar hotel, you still get retar­get­ed with ads of the oth­er hotels. Busi­ness­es should invest in the entire cus­tomer rela­tion­ship instead of indi­vid­ual touch­points. It’s impor­tant to serve the right mes­sage to the right audi­ence at the right time.
2. Think end-to-end. Tech­nol­o­gy is chang­ing, and so is the way we use day-to-day items. Think about how we read books these days or smart tech­nol­o­gy telling us when we’re run­ning out of cof­fee. It’s impor­tant to take this cus­tomer behav­iour into account and focus on the entire cus­tomer jour­ney: from the ‘path to pur­chase’ to insights in con­sump­tion of the pur­chased goods.
3. Man­age cus­tomer effort. Make the process itself as effort­less as pos­si­ble for peo­ple. By mak­ing it eas­i­er to buy or order a prod­uct, you might even enhance pre­mi­um buy­ing and increase aver­age spend — all while hav­ing few­er costs because of the opti­mised work­flow. A good way to mea­sure this KPI is using the Cus­tomer Effort Score (CES). More than the Net Pro­mo­tor Score (NPS), CES dis­tin­guish­es the con­ve­nience fac­tor of the added val­ue and emo­tion­al aspects in the over­all cus­tomer experience.
4. Go opti-chan­nel. The cus­tomer jour­ney is dif­fer­ent for each chan­nel. For each stage, you need to decide who is in con­trol of the jour­ney: you or the cus­tomer? Using nudg­ing tech­niques to encour­age the cus­tomer to pur­chase a prod­uct is some­where in between.****

Prac­tice what you preach

Jamie Brighton, Head of Prod­uct & Indus­try Mar­ket­ing, EMEA at Adobe, talked about how Adobe itself invest­ed in cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. “If you don’t focus on your cus­tomers’ expe­ri­ence, you’ll prob­a­bly lose them. Soft­ware has increas­ing­ly become a ser­vice instead of just a tool or prod­uct, so Adobe had to shift its own busi­ness mod­el a few years ago.”

And since dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion is a jour­ney, Adobe had to find the right part­ners and tech­nol­o­gy to make sure it could prac­tice what it preached.

Mar­ke­to: the com­plete solu­tion for lead management

As a part of their own trans­for­ma­tion, Adobe acquired Mar­ke­to to be a part of the Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud. This solu­tion is the answer for B2B mar­keters look­ing to trans­form cus­tomers expe­ri­ences by engag­ing across every stage of com­plex buy­ing jour­neys. It brings togeth­er the mar­ket­ing and sales to orches­trate per­son­alised expe­ri­ences, opti­mise con­tent, and mea­sure busi­ness impact across every channel.

Sounds effort­less, right? The mod­el, based on arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, takes into account a num­ber of vari­ables, so you can eas­i­ly dis­cov­er what’s per­form­ing best and fine­tune it. This way, you have an indi­vid­ual mod­el that fits your company’s needs.

Magen­to: the e‑commerce solu­tion as a part of the Adobe Expe­ri­ence Cloud

The sec­ond impor­tant acqui­si­tion Adobe did in their own strive for cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is Magen­to. From per­son­al­is­ing con­tent to enabling omnichan­nel ful­fil­ment, this solu­tion fine­tunes every aspect of the shop­ping expe­ri­ence. The open-source plat­form lets you cre­ate web­pages and online shops with just a few clicks and can be used for all plat­forms like web, mobile and even in-store expe­ri­ences. Just choose a tem­plate, per­son­alise it and find the right exten­sions in Magen­to Marketplace.

Cus­tomer sto­ry: the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion jour­ney of a diver­si­fied retailer

Dev­id Dekegel, Head of CCX Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Data & Ana­lyt­ics, shared the best prac­tices using Adobe Expe­ri­ence Cloud tools for Col­ruyt Group. Col­ruyt is high­ly known for its ‘best-price guar­an­tee’ and their fold­er with coupons. In the ear­ly days, they just had one ver­sion of the brochure for all their cus­tomers. The prob­lem was that a lot of the coupons were irrel­e­vant because they weren’t personalised.

“Since we can now con­nect online to offline behav­iour, we have a broad­er view of the client. This means we can be more rel­e­vant in our com­mu­ni­ca­tion and tar­get­ing.” Hav­ing access to enriched online data in Adobe Ana­lyt­ics and the Adobe Audi­ence Man­ag­er, they can cre­ate rel­e­vant audi­ences, build a sto­ry and extend the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence across all plat­forms. This result­ed in less waste (Col­ruyt could reduce the num­ber of pages) and bet­ter results, since more peo­ple start­ed to use their per­son­alised coupons.

Like the cus­tomer jour­ney itself, opti­mis­ing cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is nev­er real­ly fin­ished. There are always ways to improve and new ways to awe the audi­ence with a flaw­less expe­ri­ence. This requires not only dig­i­tal tools but a con­tin­u­ous strate­gic focus on what might be the most valu­able asset to your organ­i­sa­tion: the cus­tomer experience.