The three keys to transforming customer experience in the digital age

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Image via K Louw/peopleimages.com.

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when delivering great customer experiences and growing the bottom line were positioned as choices — a company could focus on one or the other.

Today, the winning strategy for the world’s most successful brands is “experience-led growth,” where companies deliberately create highly relevant, personalized experiences that both delight the customer and increase lifetime value. As a trusted partner to many of these organizations, Adobe has identified three areas that successful companies master to earn their customers’ undying loyalty and financial success.

Key #1: Experience-led customer acquisition


Before the decline of third-party cookies, most brands deployed acquisition strategies such as “spray and pray” that targeted huge groups of very different prospects with the same messages, or offered endless discounts and sales. Today, most consumers aren’t enticed by low prices alone and expect their experiences to be highly relevant from their very first encounter with a brand.

Making the shift to experience-led customer acquisition begins with having a focused and deliberate strategy that details the campaign value proposition, audience targets and budget. The strategy then drives creative ideation and production in addition to audience development and media planning. This ensures media partners receive just the right combination of media, creative and audience, along with tracking parameters to provide the right experience to prospects — and the right data for brands.

Bringing this data together with modern technologies, increasingly powered by AI, allows brands to personalize experiences and even journeys for anonymous prospects, as well as power real-time ROI optimization across the largest media channels. AI-assisted measurement enables brands to understand which creative attributes influence performance and get recommendations for the best earned and owned investments across channels.

Key #2: Personalized insights and engagement

For most organizations, fragmented data, systems and teams result in experiences that are inconsistent, delayed, uncoordinated across channels and sorely lacking in what customers really need.

The key to addressing this problem is to centralize your data from across channels into unified customer profiles. With a holistic understanding of customers’ needs and behaviors, brands can create fully coordinated, journey-based engagement strategies that meet customers wherever they are with the right experience.

Solutions such as real-time customer data platforms (CDPs) can unify customer data and identity around a single individual, capture interactions, and deliver coordinated, governed and orchestrated results for a truly personalized experience. Campaign orchestration tools enable brands to create, iterate on and optimize cross-channel journeys. Using customer journey analytics tools, brands can continuously unlock deeper insights, perform powerful analyses across systems and visualize customers’ cross-channels journeys.

Brands are using these tools to personalize experiences and to experiment, learn and improve. The results are better and more relevant experiences with higher conversion, lower churn and improved customer lifetime value.

Key #3: Scaling content creation

Great creative content is an essential ingredient for effective customer experiences. However, personalizing that content across myriad channels, languages, geographies and campaigns has become an impossible task even for the largest teams with the biggest budgets — until now.

New integrated solutions that leverage generative AI for both images and text can give superpowers to professional creative teams and empower non-creatives to perform specific tasks. Brands are scaling by adopting gen AI to accelerate ideation and content production, adopting DAMs to share brand-approved assets across their organizations, and empowering non-creative pros to take on tasks such as asset resizing and localization. With the right workflows in place between marketing teams and creatives, these solutions enable organizations to scale content creation while keeping everything on-brand.

Enabling creative pros to focus on imaginative, brand-differentiating work and allowing marketing teams to move at the speed of social keeps top talent engaged and ensures customers get the right experience every time. Moreover, generative AI innovation is progressing at a breathtaking pace: Beyond improving the velocity of content development, it is already beginning to improve content quality, and extend into new content formats including audio and video.

The call for companies to adopt a more customer-centric approach and provide truly personalized experiences is not new. However, today’s technologies, specifically tools like generative AI, are making this both possible and necessary. By shifting to experience-led customer acquisition, centralizing data to deliver personalized insights and engagement, and adopting tools to scale content creation, brands can provide the relevant experiences customers expect, while optimizing their own financial performance.

Adobe: A trusted partner in next-gen customer experience delivery

Adobe is the only partner that can offer the full range of AI-powered solutions to deliver truly personalized customer experiences at scale. Learn more about how our applications, platforms and solutions, built on Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud, can help your teams work faster and your brand achieve competitive differentiation and experience-led growth.

https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/10/10/creative-pros-generative-ai-usage

https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/10/10/next-gen-of-creativity-powered-by-ai

https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/03/21/research-generative-ai-will-play-starring-role-in-customer-experiences