Forrester research: Adobe is a leader in customer analytics.

COVID-19 has changed the expectations for customer experience in many ways.

COVID-19 has changed the expectations for customer experience in many ways.

Case in point: My wife and I recently welcomed a new baby to the world. Having a baby in the middle of a pandemic has been drastically different than what we experienced with our other children. Aside from the strict new policies and procedures at the hospital, as well as our own precautions to protect the health of our family, COVID-19 has also changed the way we interact and engage with brands right now.

As any parent knows, babies need a lot of stuff, no matter how much you prepare beforehand! A lot of these products, like baby wipes and hand sanitizer, have been hard to come by. And stay-at-home orders have resulted in virtually all of our brand engagement moving online. All of our product research, purchasing, and post-purchase support for various items is happening online through fourteen different devices, text, calls, web, apps, chatbots and voice interactions – across paid, owned and earned channels. What I’ve personally noticed through all of this is how much more the experience and the relationship I have with brands matters. Most brands have digitalized channel engagement. But only a few have truly figured out how to use their digital investments in new engagement models that provide utilitarian value or compelling experiences.

Digital transformation has been an imperative for all businesses for several years now, but the COVID-19 pandemic instantly exacerbated the differences between brands that invested and adapted, and those that did not. The pandemic has shaken entire industries in a matter of weeks, and brands must strategically re-evaluate business and operating models to deliver value to customers in today’s altered digital environment.

Customer analytics is imperative for success

One of the foundational technologies for organizations looking to understand customer behavior and expectations is customer analytics. Being able to derive detailed customer intelligence (CI) allows brands to incorporate the full customer journey in their customer engagement strategy, provide more concise customer segmentation, and increase their marketing investment and revenue impact.

We now have ample data to support the hypothesis that companies who can efficiently turn data into insights and insights into customer action have a meaningful advantage over their competitors. In fact, research shows that companies that characterize themselves as data-driven are, on average, 5% more productive and 6% more profitable than their competitors.

Adobe delivers customer analytics that are built for today’s experience expectations

Adobe has been at the forefront of customer analytics technology and the application of that technology for understanding and improving customer experience. Today, I’m proud to announce that Forrester Research, an independent research firm, named Adobe Analytics a leader in customer analytics solutions in its report, The Forrester Wave™: Customer Analytics Technologies, Q3 2020.

In the past 10 years, Adobe Analytics has evolved from primarily measuring website interactions into an AI+ML-infused customer insights platform that helps companies understand how people experience their brand across all touch points—simply, instantaneously, and at massive scale. Our evolution was driven by our customers – literally thousands of the world’s best brands – helping us refine and deliver a unique solution that solves their most pressing analysis challenges: customer analytics that are purpose-built for experience optimization.

According to the Forrester report, “Adobe not only understands that customers increasingly buy experiences over products, but it also delivers the functionality to power those experiences […]. Marketers and CI pros interested in differentiating through digital experiences should consider Adobe.” At Adobe, we believe differentiating through experience is now imperative, especially given the impact of COVID-19 and heightened expectations around frictionless experiences, relevant content, and customer relationships.

In the Forrester report, Adobe Analytics also achieved the highest scores possible in the key criteria our customers value most —usability and business impact measurement.

Adobe Analytics is designed for multiple personas touching the customer journey—from non-technical marketers and business users to data scientists who want to build their own custom models. The drive to be more data-informed and increase data-driven decision making is nearly universal amongst our customer base – they have told us they need more people making more business decisions with data-backed insights. Adobe Analytics empowers anyone with responsibility for the customer experience to visualize complete customer journeys and interrogate data with interactive, journey-based analysis tools to continuously surface insights in real-time. Additionally, users can derive additional insights with both automatic and advanced AI/ML capabilities and modeling.

Adobe Analytics provides business value by enabling workflows horizontally across the persona continuum, reducing friction between each data-driven function within the organization, and surfacing insights vertically through the tech stack by incorporating the best of do-it-yourself (DIY) in the Adobe Analytics do-it-for-me (DIFM) application.

The future of customer analytics is experience

In the Forrester report, Adobe also received the highest score possible in the product vision criterion. As we actively develop the next innovative capabilities in customer analytics, Adobe has the opportunity to expand further into experience-based analytics and deepen its position in customer intelligence by combining the unique assets of the existing Adobe Analytics business with the leading-edge capabilities of Adobe Experience Platform, which unlocks data from systems that can’t use it, activates customer experiences in real-time, and personalizes the customer experience – every time.

A complimentary copy of “The Forrester Wave™: Customer Analytics Technologies, Q2 2020” research report is available here.

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We also know many people are still impacted by the current COVID-19 crisis and our thoughts are with you. The entire Adobe team wants to thank you, our customers, and all creators around the world for the work you do to keep us inspired during this difficult time.