Forrester recognizes Adobe as a Leader in mobile engagement automation

Over the past few months, as I have adjusted to social distancing requirements and working from home has become the norm, my digital behavior has also changed quite a bit.

While my weekly average screen time has definitely gone up on my mobile phone, I’m also using my phone more often to make online purchases for everything from weekly groceries to stationery for my school-going kids as they start a new year with distance learning. All of this is definitely playing on my mind as I think about what Adobe’s customers need to stay relevant today.

Adobe has always been guided by its mission to change the world through digital experiences and enabling every brand to become an experience business. We believe that mobile strategy is becoming less about just creating an app and more about how a brand incorporates mobile moments throughout the customer experience to respond to customers who are dictating when, where, and how they prefer to engage. Today more than ever, you need to find ways to unify your engagement strategies across all customer interaction points, and, more importantly, connect all of these experiences while making them personalized and contextually relevant.

It’s timely that Forrester just published The Forrester Wave™: Mobile Engagement Automation, Q3 2020 report, and I’m thrilled to see Adobe has been named a Leader. We have been executing on our vision for customer journey management supported by a strong data management foundation and real-time journey orchestration. This has strengthened our mobile engagement automation offering as well as the strategy, and I am proud that, in my opinion, it is being recognized in the report.

In Forrester’s report it states that “Adobe customers reap the benefits of having some of the strongest tools in the market – such as Adobe Analytics for reporting and Adobe Target for testing – applied to mobile use cases.” These applications all have a strong heritage in data collection, analytics, and reporting, as well as testing, personalization, and campaign execution. And they all have deep mobile capabilities. However, when you combine and use them together, your results can be magical by bringing art and science together to deliver the best experiences to customers at the moment of engagement. That’s because the solutions are supported by the capabilities of Adobe Experience Platform and its new real-time services.

Core to Adobe Experience Platform is Privacy by Design, which is how we build our solutions. It’s part of our mission to help customers responsibly unlock the power of data. Our data management includes a strong data governance model to ensure that all data collected in our platform is properly classified and is secure so that users can’t use or export any data that has been categorized as such.

A look into the future

I’m equally excited about our innovation agenda in this space. As a customer-centric company, it should not be surprising that we work closely with our customers and partners to understand their forward-looking strategies and determine how we align their visions with our own roadmaps. As we continue to make investments to drive our mission forward, below are a few key strategic pillars of innovation:

• A centralized, unified real-time customer profile: In order to truly understand your customer and their relationship with you, you need a centralized customer profile that is constantly kept up to date and can stitch together all the interactions to provide a complete view.
• Applying intelligence to decision making: In order to treat each customer uniquely and to match the right message to the right customer at the right moment in time, and to do it at scale, you need to apply artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to your decision making. Whether you are trying to determine the best time to send a message, to predict customer churn, or to pick the right content for your messages, we want to help automate those tasks and decisions for the practitioner.
• Real-time orchestration of customer journeys: You have to evolve transactional marketing strategies to be able to react to real-time, contextual signals like location or business events or change in inventory to orchestrate a personalized journey for your customer at that moment in time.
• Bringing together marketing-led and customer-initiated engagement on a single canvas: Brands today use one system to define, manage, and measure their scheduled marketing campaigns, and they use another to handle their mobile engagement with customers. Why aren’t these two being orchestrated from one canvas where the practitioner has full visibility to both their scheduled programs as well as their “in-the-moment” engagement activities? That is exactly what we are focused on building and streamlining for the practitioner.
• And last-but-not-least, focusing on simplifying the user experience for the practitioner: The goal is to significantly reduce the time-to-value when using Adobe applications.

I would be remiss if I did not thank all of our fantastic customers and partners who guide us to focus on the right priorities every single day and of course to all my wonderful colleagues across engineering, product management, marketing, and our customer-facing teams, who contributed to make this happen. We’re excited about the capabilities we continue to bring to market and for all the great innovation that is planned over the next two to three years.

View the full report and the Customer Journey Management Keynote at Summit.