Take the MarTech Fitness Drill! Well, Adobe, Through Its Recent Announcements at the Adobe Summit 2019, Has Exemplified Why the MarTech Fitness Drill Is Key to Customer Experience and Success Strategies

At the ongoing Adobe Summit, the leading Analytics and Customer Experience technology provider announced key updates to its offerings and services. These announcements are largely focused on accelerating the adoption and scaling of Customer Experience initiatives that have been long-pending due to lack of insights, data integration, and non-availability of resources. In short, these announcements from Adobe Experience Platform would beat what we call the ‘Customer Experience Fatigue,’ and why Adobe is key to the MarTech Fitness Drill.

But first, what is fatigue in Customer Experience?

In clear words, Customer Experience Fatigue is the phenomenon observed among marketing teams who already have a Customer Experience strategy but are unable to reinforce or re-inspire customer advocacy. The lack of advocacy from the loyal base of customers leads to reduced churn, fall in revenue and finally, depleted brand preference in the market. Fatigue is dangerous to the MarTech ‘tissue,’ and may lead to permanent damage to the reputation of the brand and organization.

There has been a lot of buzz around Customer Experience and how it has become the key differentiator for relevance, growth and sustenance in the consumer-focused industry. Customer Experience is defined by the quality of interactions between a customer and the organization throughout the customer relationship. However, 60% of marketing teams are yet to figure out the holy grail of Customer Experience, despite investing in some of the top-selling platforms.

The fatigue could be caused due to many reasons. We have identified three pain-points that Adobe could solve right away. These are:

• Inability to provide consistent experiences across channels, resulting in halfway actions, abandonment of carts, and non-returning customers.
• Lack of integration between Channels, Systems, Applications and Processes in the customer journey.
• Inability to consolidate, analyze and intelligently act on customer data, resulting in incomplete customer view

When these pain-points are left unattended, fatigue rises to an extent where it becomes impossible to further churn effectiveness from any Customer Experience strategy.

According to a recent report, nine in 10 people aged between 18 and 34 said they will take ‘action’ after having a bad online Customer Experience, such as telling friends, not purchasing from the company, and posting reviews on a review site or social media.

People over the age of 35 were only slightly less likely to take action (eight in 10) but are more likely to complain directly to the company after a bad experience.

We spoke to leading MarTech CMOs and CEOs to understand what they think about Customer Experience as part of their Customer Success stories. Almost every CMO and CEO has openly pledged ideas, efforts and resources to devise an optimal Customer Experience strategy for better customer satisfaction at every touchpoint along the customer journey. While this may sound easy to say, there are hundreds of dynamic components that actually deliver on Customer Experience promised by SaaS providers offering their technology to the marketing teams. Fatigue causes lack of responsiveness to react and reach to customers who didn’t enjoy the experience.

“Responsiveness could easily remedy a person’s frustration, whereas the feeling that you are not being heard could add to that annoyance.” – Taylor Schreiner, Director of Adobe Digital Insights

In the ongoing debate over Customer Experience as part of customer service, Adobe has managed to deliver a package of technologies that deliver on what every marketer wants — real-time decision-making that improves every customer experience with their brand in multiple digital and physical interactions.

Here are a few key announcements from Adobe that would beat the Customer Experience fatigue, inspiring other CX providers in the market to address the issue and build a competitive market in this space.

The Global Availability of Adobe Experience Platform

Adobe Experience Platform is projected to be MarTech industry’s first real-time platform for Customer Experience Management (CXM).

Adobe Experience Platform activates content based on customer profiles to deliver personalized experiences in real time. Some of the world’s largest brands are already using Adobe Experience Platform in beta, including Best Buy, DXC Technology, The Home Depot, Verizon Wireless and Sony Interactive Entertainment.

At the time of this announcement, Abhay Parasnis, Executive Vice President and CTO, Adobe, said, “Solving today’s data challenges requires a cloud-based, hyper-scale architecture with a rich data pipeline and real-time customer profile powered by AI and Machine Learning. The Adobe Experience Platform is purpose-built for capturing, processing and actioning data in real time, enabling enterprises to deliver rich and relevant experiences to their customers.”

AI-Driven CX Analytics

In a blog by Adobe Fellow (Data Science), Anil Kamath, Adobe’s new AI services have been clearly explained. Adobe Sensei’s role in CXM and removing fatigue would be crucial.

New AI services in Adobe Sensei include:

Role of AI in CXM Campaigns

Customer AI

Brands could leverage Customer AI in Adobe Sensei to accurately uncover specific segments of users. Then, the marketing team can build, execute and target each segment with the right marketing campaign.

Journey AI

Letting AI execute journey-focused interactions would kill fatigue.

Today, customers engage with brand messages every day and across different channels — the website, landing pages, email, mobile, apps, live videos, and social. In the constant fight to acquire and retain customers, brands lose attention in the first milliseconds of their interaction.

Reason: Stale, non-personalized messaging sent at times that non-intelligent platforms have recommended.

Adobe has brought Journey AI, which gives brands a means to orchestrate journeys across millions of users. Anil said, “Journey AI is constantly analyzing (the) behavioral data and activating brand experiences at the optimal times. It will enable a retailer, for instance, to orchestrate different paths for long-time customers versus early prospects.”

Attribution AI

How many Customer Experience platforms actually tell the true story about their impact on customer conversions?

Today, Adobe’s Attribution AI helps MarTech users to understand the impact of their decisions around resource and marketing investments. These insights help MarTech teams to fully understand the real impact of channels and campaigns.

By leveraging Adobe Sensei’s Attribution AI, brands can now see the conversion impact driven by owned, earned and paid media across the full customer journey, and make informed resourcing decisions.

Unveiling Adobe Commerce Cloud

The results of Magento’s acquisition is on display. The launch of the new Adobe Commerce Cloud confirms its integration with Adobe Experience Cloud. Build on Magento Commerce, the new Cloud deeply integrates with Adobe Analytics Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Advertising Cloud.

“Adobe Commerce Cloud seamlessly integrates with the Amazon marketplace to help brands automatically synchronize product catalog, inventory and order information across channels.” – Adobe Blog

Introducing People-Based Destinations in Adobe Audience Manager

Adobe has planned its audience data management very well. Given the gap in data, analytics and insights, DMP users often failed to fully meet their ROI targets. Now, they would get close to DMO ROI by leveraging People-Based Destinations in Adobe Audience Manager.

The new product addresses the challenge of activating channels in walled/private environments. It will enable brands to activate first-party segments across people-based environments, including social networks, using hashed identifiers like email addresses.

How People-Based Destinations in Adobe Audience Manager fights fatigue?

• By activating destinations to support real-time insight and its transfer of segment information, refreshed each time users visit or take action along the journey.
• By providing built-in data privacy controls that can be seamlessly tied to personal data.
• Data aggregation from various touchpoints, including CRM, Customer IDs, Contact Centers, POS and contracts, IoT and Connected Devices, OTT, and so on.

Putting this announcement at play, Adobe also announced its partnership with Roku. Adobe customers would enjoy the ability to precisely target the large consumer audience moving to over-the-top service (OTT).

Marketers using Adobe Advertising Cloud, Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Analytics can now target their first-party audience segments on the Roku platform.

The People-Based Destinations in Adobe Audience Manager would be available commercially from May this year.

Adobe Analytics Cloud for Powerful Customer Engagement

At the Adobe Summit, the analytics leader has launched new versions of their Adobe Analytics Cloud. The focus of data has shifted from volume to veracity and effectiveness.  To give data scientists and business analysts a way to map customer journeys more accurately, Adobe Analytics Cloud introduced deeper insights with Journey IQ and new Analytics integrations, as well as People-Based Destinations in Adobe Audience Manager.

By deploying Adobe Analytics Clouds, brands can activate their audience data within major social platforms leveraging a Data Management Platform (DMP).

Jeff Allen, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Adobe Analytics Cloud, said, “With these new industry-first capabilities in Adobe Analytics, organizations will get a more complete picture of the entire customer journey – instantaneously.”

Who Beat the Fatigue Successfully? 

By announcing the 2019 Adobe Experience Maker Awards, Adobe showcased the names and winners of successful practitioners of Customer Experience strategy. The winners are:

• Velocity Frequent Flyer, Loyalty Program of Virgin Australia (in partnership with CHE Proximity) for Best Audience-Driven Experience
• Accent Group (in partnership with eWave) for Best Commerce Experience
• NVIDIA for Best Data-Driven Experience
• T-Mobile (in partnership with Tata Consultancy Services) for Best Digital Experience
• Hilti (in partnership with EPAM Systems) for Best Experience-Driven Campaign
• Dollar Shave Club for Best Integrated Ad Campaign
• AARP for Best Personalized Experience
• Xero for the Audience Choice Award

Adobe also hosted the annual Revvie Awards for Marketo customers at the Adobe Experience Maker Awards gala.

Recipients of the 2019 Revvie Awards include:

• Palo Alto Networks for Marketing Team of the Year
• Joe Reitz of AWS for Marketer of the Year
• Glenn Thomas of GE Healthcare for Marketing Executive of the Year
• Euan Howden of Education New Zealand for The Fearless Marketer
• Honeywell for The Performer
• Pelco by Schneider Electric for The Transformer
• Concentrix for The Dream Team
• Helix Education for The Orchestrator
• Juli James of St. Edwards University for Champion of the Year
• Taishi Yamada of Trend Micro for MUG Leader of the Year

These award-winning Experience Makers are all part of Adobe Experience League, Adobe’s global customer enablement program to help customers get the most out of Adobe Experience Cloud. New Experience League programs launched at Adobe Summit focus on a more personalized guided learning experience, company level tracking and streamlined guidance for Experience Makers. The winners were recognized at an awards gala at Adobe Summit.

As TV advertising, Social Media Intelligence and Email Marketing Automation continue to make their dash forward to meet CXM goals, Adobe has connected all these and tied into its Cloud offering. To sustain the digital journey within its own ecosystem, Adobe announced a new design-led partnership with Infosys — a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. Infosys would help Adobe customers in their end-to-end digital journey, providing ‘Experience Transformation’ with a focus on design.

Don’t Flog the Dead – Ride a New Stallion

MarTech customers understand the limitations of the various legacy enterprise platforms that deliver only fatigue with static, siloed customer profiles. In this changing dynamic of CXM, Adobe Experience Cloud is a powerful platform for consistent, continuous and compelling experiences across customer touchpoints and channels—all while accelerating business growth. After all, it’s driving its own transformation. We will showcase Adobe’s initiatives in Immersive Content, AR/VR, and E-document in our next series.

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