Adobe Unveils New Customer Experience Management Innovations Across Adobe Experience Cloud at NRF 2020

The retail industry is going through a radical change. Customers today are interacting with their favorite brands on mobile devices and computers, using in-store kiosks, engaging with emails or on various social channels, and meeting the needs of the digital consumer has become a mandate for all retailers, regardless of size.

The latest holiday season (November through December) suggests that online shopping, and particularly mobile, is now carrying the torch for overall retail sales growth. According to Adobe Analytics, U.S. consumers spent a record $142.5 billion online during the 2019 holiday season, up 13.1% year-over-year. Of note, 84% of the ecommerce growth during that period came from mobile devices. At the same time however, we’ve also seen that the “death” of physical store narrative has been greatly overexaggerated, with BOPIS (buy online, pick-up in store) seeing 35% YoY growth. Another indicator that the physical store narrative is alive and well is the increase in store openings by digital native brands such as Warby Parker, Allbirds and Casper Bedding, to name a few.

Retailers are realizing that in the era of hyper-connectivity, they must lead with Customer Experience Management (CXM) is key to stay competitive and drive brand loyalty. Consumers want relevant and engaging experiences no matter where they’re shopping and delivering the best brand experience requires the right combination of data, insights, and digital content. With 80 of the top 100 U.S. online retailers relying on Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe is at the forefront of empowering brands to better understand their customers and deliver impactful experiences in real-time and at scale.

At NRF 2020, we’re introducing innovations across Adobe Experience Cloud that will help retailers holistically manage customer experiences across both physical and digital store fronts. Our new capabilities include:

• Adobe Experience Manager Available as a Cloud-Native Product: Delivering omnichannel, personalized content experiences at scale is a challenge faced daily by brands. Adobe today unveiled Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service. It takes their leading experience management product and further accelerates a brands ability to deliver engaging content with its new architecture which ensures customers always have the latest features and can launch new experiences faster. Leveraging Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s AI and machine learning technology it offers mid-size and enterprise companies a new level of global performance and agility for their digital transformation. Brands including Under Armour and Esri are already early adopters of this new application. For more information, refer to this media alert from yesterday.
• New Capabilities in Magento: Building an ecommerce store that’s visual, quick, easy-to-navigate, and offers an intuitive checkout process is table stakes for retailers. The Magento 2.3.4 release provides significant enhancements to improve the development process and quality of a brand’s online store. Adobe Stock’s integration with Magento Commerce and Open Source enables merchants to add high-quality media assets to their website without leaving the Magento admin. We’re also bundling dotdigital’s Engagement Cloud live web-chat functionality into the Magento core as a vendor bundled extension. With this update, all Magento 2 merchants will have access to one free chat agent seat to engage with their customers in real-time. In addition, Page Builder enhancements give merchants more control over product merchandising, compatibility with Venia reference storefront extends Page Builder capabilities to PWA Studio-built storefronts, and GraphQL coverage is expanded for search, layered navigation and cart functionality. These enhancements will be available to Magento merchants on Jan. 28.
• Adobe Analytics Helps Bridge Online Shopping and Physical Stores: With Customer Journey Analytics for retailers, brands can now stitch together disjointed data through Adobe Experience Platform and get a more accurate view of the overall shopper journey. A set of analytics tools, inspired by Photoshop, will empower retailers to be more creative in how they pull out actionable insights. For instance, teams can begin to see the types of online behaviors that drive people back into physical stores and optimize those paths accordingly. They could also get a better sense of where shoppers hit roadblocks and remove barriers to conversion, such as a clunky mobile checkout experience. And with Sensei, we can help automate cumbersome analysis tasks and catch insights the human eye may miss. For more information, refer to this blog post.
• Journey Orchestration Makes Custom Experiences for Shoppers Possible: Coordinating individualized experience for customers in real-time and at scale can be a challenge for any retailer. By combining intelligence, precision and a standard data model powered by Adobe Experience Cloud, retailers can leverage Journey Orchestration to make this a reality. Based on a shopper’s interaction with a retailer, a cross-channel shopping journey comprised of series of touchpoints – email, push notification, in-app and more – can be automatically triggered in real-time to the customer. For example, a customer pulling into a retailer’s parking lot automatically receives a push notification that a new sweater is available in their size. To entice the shopper to take action, they also receive a 20% discount coupon that expires the same day, encouraging them to try on and ultimately purchase the sweater that has already been pulled by a salesperson for them.
• Adobe Target Introduces Highly Personalized Recommendations for Retailers: Adobe Target’s new user based “Recommended for You” algorithm for retailers allows brands to deliver a highly-personalized ecommerce experience based on individual customer behavior. These recommendations go beyond traditional approaches like “last viewed brand” or “people who viewed this, also viewed,” and instead, use the totality of a customer’s behavior to infer their underlying preferences. For example, a consumer shopping for purple gloves on a retailer’s website in the winter may receive a recommendation for a scarf in the same color. When that shopper returns to the same website in the spring and browses running shoes, the shopper will receive new recommendations during their online session to reflect the new interest by displaying a tank top – but will retain knowledge of the user’s preference for purple.

These new innovations will be on demonstration at the Adobe booth (#5810). Additionally, we’ll be showcasing how global brands such as Rite-Aid, Whirlpool and Albertsons Co. are leveraging Adobe Experience Cloud applications to lead in CXM.