Adobe is known for the creative tools Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, etc. used by graphic designers. Lately, the software giant has expanded its presence in a new growth segment for the company - Customer Experience Management, CXM. This is done by a combination of internal R&D and acquisitions.
What is Customer Experience Management?
Customer Experience Management is the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet and exceed customer expectations, with the goal of increasing overall customer satisfaction levels.
A company, supported by Customer Experience Management software can engage customers in a way that these customers have a positive – or negative – experience. The goal of CXM is to optimize interactions from the customer’s perspective and stimulate customer loyalty. To help the customer experience, a company needs to create a strategy that encompasses all customer interactions and try to make them as positive as possible.
Three important cornerstones for a good CXM strategy is
To apply an outside-in view that defines the success of the company as a result of customer success, or in other words the ability to give the customers what they need and want.
Processes that are designed to deliver customer success with minimal friction.
Data to build individual customer profiles and to be able to engage with them in relevant conversations – using the right message, at the right time, using the right channel. And ultimately being able to offer the right products and services.
Software (as a Service) can support all these three cornerstones. The software can support engagement, either directly, as in marketing, sales, service, or indirectly, as in analytics, operations systems, content management systems, etc.
Adobe’s Experience Cloud
Adobe’s new Experience Cloud is a solution for content creation, marketing, advertising, analytics, and commerce. With the help of Experience Cloud, you can improve the customer journey from prospect to purchase. For already established customers, Experience Cloud makes sure the customers are happy, engaged and coming back for additional purchases.
The Experience Cloud is a collection of three sub-clouds:
Marketing Cloud (Adobe Campaign, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Target, Adobe Social, Adobe Primetime)
Analytics Cloud (Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager)
Advertising Cloud
In September 2018 Adobe made the largest acquisition in company history, spending $4.75 billion to purchase the company Marketo, a leader in cloud-based B2B marketing engagement.
Adobe’s big push into CXM has shaken up the competitive dynamics across the space. Adobe is now challenging the Marketing Cloud from Salesforce, a business on a revenue rate of more than $2 billion and growing about 37% annually. Adobe is also looking to take market share from Oracle and Microsoft.
For businesses selling to other businesses, Marketo brings together customer data and content to enable valuable real-time, cross-channel experiences. At the time of the acquisition, Marketo had nearly 5,000 customers. Adobe recently released its new Marketing Cloud, which is based on Marketo technology.
Within the Experience Cloud, the initial integrations with Marketo enable marketers to seamlessly pull or edit content from Experience Manager (a content management solution used to build websites and mobile apps) or Creative Cloud, then automatically put together marketing target lists to better understand the next best action to take in B2B sales efforts.
To enable accurate and timely insights into cross-channel consumer behavior and provide automated audience segmentation, Adobe has been adding more capabilities to its Analytics Cloud, which is the core system of intelligence for CXM.
Adobe Analytics gives brands a new way to interpret insights from both online and offline data in real-time. Within Adobe Analytics, the new Journey IQ tool makes sure the right customers receive targeted marketing at the right time. For example, an online retailer can use Journey IQ to analyze which brand engagement drove a customer to make a certain purchase, then use that information to deliver future targeted marketing campaigns around that brand.
Since commerce is an integral part of the customer experience many interactions on the Internet, mobile and social are now transactional. By this reason Adobe has been acquiring Magento Commerce, a leading commerce platform for businesses selling to both consumers and other businesses. Magento solutions provide digital commerce, order management, and predictive intelligence.
When combined with Sensei, Adobe’s AI and Machine Learning technology, Experience Cloud can offer detailed insights that can be used to improve the customer experience and increase the odds that a one-time customer becomes a repeat customer. Adobe also announced a new integration with Microsoft’s LinkedIn unit to help B2B marketing teams deliver targeted content.
Tomas Hultgren
ContentMap
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