What’s in a Form? A Whole Lot of Experience for T. Rowe Price Customers

In the Age of the Customer, a company’s ability to keep people coming back for more comes down to how quickly, efficiently and creatively they deliver brand experiences. Make your communications personalized and provide timely responses to inquiries, they tend to be happy. Fail to do that, and they’re likely to take their business elsewhere – without a second thought.

Statistics help tell the story. According to an American Express survey, U.S. consumers say they are willing to spend 17 percent more to do business with brands delivering excellent customer service. In another study, 84 percent of customers rank the experiences companies provide just as high as the products or services they sell. And 97 percent of people polled by Zendesk say they altered their buying decisions because of a bad experience while 52 percent switched brands altogether.

T. Rowe Price, a global investment management organization overseeing more than $1 trillion in assets this year, has always preferred to be among those fostering customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

In any given year, the firm’s Retirement Plan Services (RPS) division mails out thousands of marketing collateral pieces to its 401k retirement plan participants. Letters. Statements. Pamphlets. Forms. Promotions and offers. Even posters. These are critical components of maintaining an ongoing dialog with participants, and many communications are personalized for that extra special added touch.

To meet T. Rowe Price’s high standards for branded content, however, company marketers were spending an inordinate amount of time working relevant logos, images and customized data into the documents they use to engage and communicate with customers. For instance, If a 401(k) plan client asked to have mutual fund educational materials sent to their plan participants, the firm would have to create, publish, and mail a document containing the correct chunks of corporate approved visual content, plus all of the client-specific details that relate back to that specific 401(k) plan.

At one time, this was accomplished by having the client’s Participant Engagement Consultant pull all the information together into a single design template, mark up all the detailed edits needed, send it to the company’s design production team to execute on the changes and make it brand and client appropriate This redundant workstream could take up to four days to accomplish, (longer, if adjustments were needed). which T. Rowe Price viewed as far too long for the expectations of today’s customers.

However, by deploying a combination of Adobe Experience Manager Forms and Adobe Experience Manager Assets, T. Rowe Price says it’s reduced that turnaround time to as little as 15 minutes.

“The communications still have to go through proofreading and legal review, but the time it takes to get to a good first draft has been trimmed significantly,” says Mary Consugar, Retirement Plan Services Content Lead Manager, who manages RPS Participant Engagement content for the company. “This really helped us streamline processes by removing redundancies between client consultants and graphic designers. At the same time, it greatly improved customer experience by enabling us to produce and distribute communications much faster and more consistently over time.”

Consugar says one of the aspects of Adobe Experience Manager Forms that has made her life easier is the way it works with components known as “ content fragments.” Like Lego blocks, these are pieces of content that can be assembled or reassembled, depending on the need, across different documents or channels. By simply changing the master copy building block, designers (or consultants in T. Rowe Price’s case) are able to automatically roll out changes to other pieces of collateral without nullifying the underlying templates. Only the logo, image or piece of text being targeted is substituted.

An advantage of this flexibility is that, if an approver asks the content creator to change content in these fragments, it can often be done in mere minutes. It also ensures consistency among their mass collection of communications, so every experience is branded and correctly updated across touchpoints.

“Previously, we would have to send it back to production, and it could take another 24 hours or more to get it back and sent out to customers,” Consugar says.

T. Rowe Price isn’t the only company upping its communications game with Adobe. Indeed, according to an Adobe-sponsored IDC report, The Business Value of Adobe Experience Manager Forms, organizations saw a 379 percent return on investment within three years and a 63 percent faster delivery time of new forms and documents when they used Adobe’s solution.

Companies also experience benefits when integrating Adobe Experience Manager Forms with Adobe Experience Manager Assets. T. Rowe Price, for instance, now has more than 1,000 digital assets in its online libraries. All of these can be accessed, plugged into documents and replicated across channels on a moment’s notice. What’s more, every image can be automatically tagged, cropped and manipulated using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), saving designers even more time and trouble.

“You’ve got to have your team doing meaningful work, and if they are spending too much time on manually intensive tasks – like updating titles or swapping out colors – they might not be able to achieve their full potential,” says Adrienne Tsai, product marketing manager for Adobe. “With Adobe Experience Manager Forms and Assets, brands now have the tools to deliver outstanding digital experiences at scale with much less grunt work.”

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