Adobe s Approach to Customer Experience Management

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1 Adobe s Approach to Customer Experience Management Table of contents 1: Introduction 2: What is not working 3: Adobe s Approach 4: Getting Started 6: Summary 7: For more information Introduction In recent years, there has been an increased interest in organizations around the role of customer experience in achieving competitive advantage and differentiation, or at least reducing customer churn. The financial impact of improved customer experiences is significant. Forrester estimates the annual revenue gains from improved customer experience can range from $27M to $1.574B, depending on the industry. (Source: The Business Impact Of Customer Experience, 2011 Forrester Research Inc., July 7, 2011.) This comes from experience driving increased likelihood of repurchase, reluctance to switch, and advocacy. Despite this increased focus and opportunity, the majority of customers find the experiences they have with the businesses they work with to be far short of excellent, as the table below illustrates. As the chart shows, the vast majority of customer experiences are not excellent and often much, much worse. As a result, customer experience is not enabling differentiation, even if it s a focus. This needs to change. (Source: The Customer Experience Index, 2011, Forrester Research Inc., January 11, 2011.)

2 Adobe is committed to providing technology and solutions that will help consumer and business-to-business organizations consistently improve the experience for their customers and capitalize on the revenue and differentiation opportunities available to customer experience leaders. To achieve this, it is important to understand what is not working today. What is not working and a path forward Despite the broad interest in improving customer experiences, current approaches are failing because of their inside out focus. Simply extending internal applications and processes out to your customers does not work. Additionally, transferring internal company goals on to your customers (e.g. We want to reduce costs in our service center by shortening call handle time. ) will not facilitate an improvement in customer experience. To consistently deliver great experiences requires a combination of organizational focus and innovative use of technology. Organizations need to re-orient their focus, reward structures, and processes to be more customer centric, focusing on the satisfaction of each customer experience. (e.g. We surveyed a number of existing and former customers and they told us that our plans are too complex to understand when they sign-up and even our service representatives can t explain them when there are issues. We need to create and communicate simpler plans in a way that our customers can understand. If we do that, we should increase new subscribers and decrease our churn rate, while also reducing our costs to sell and service. ). On the technology front, organizations need to take a similar tact. Rather than extending existing systems that were designed to optimize internal processes and record keeping out to customers (which often projects the usability and complexity issues of these systems directly to customers), they need to create a new experience layer designed to support today s tech savvy customer. This system of engagement needs to leverage all of those existing systems of record, but do so with solutions that are designed from the outside in, using user centric design principles to create engaging experiences. Customers today have much more control of their buying process than ever before. While the general phases of the customer journey Learn, Validate, Decide, Use, and Commit have not changed, the paths a customer follows through them are unpredictable and punctuated by Moments of Truth specific activities/events that accelerate or slow the journey due to the emotional impact they create and Information Distractions tangentially related information that catches the customer s eye and takes them down a different path. At any point in the journey, the customer may decide to disengage and exit for whatever reason they choose. In order to support these unpredictable journeys, the experience layer must provide a variety of capabilities to help guide the customer and keep them engaged: Support for content-rich applications that run on a wide variety of devices, making it convenient for customers to easily find the information they want and take action easily; Web Content Management facilities to keep content up-to-date and relevant; Business Process Management and workflow to manage and execute business processes that cannot be completed in a single point in time; Social facilities to both embrace external communities (e.g. Facebook) while also supporting building targeted communities for key customer segments; enabling customers to get independent evaluations of your products and services; Analytics to measure results and target improvements; Facilities for managing and using context to deliver offers and information to customers based on past interactions and current activities at key points along the journey. In the past, these capabilities have often been viewed as separate technology purchases, with a varying degree of focus on customer needs (v. internal operations). But when viewed from the customer lens, they all clearly play a part in an integrated solution to support great customer experiences. By combining these technologies in an organized manner, seamless experiences can be delivered to support a wide range of customer needs and expectations. 2

3 Adobe s Approach Adobe is the first company to provide a platform for customer experience management that includes a modern technology foundation with a wide range of core capabilities specifically designed to support the lifecycle of customer interactions patterns. On top of this platform, Adobe provides a set of customer experience solutions designed to support optimized outcomes around Moments of Truth along the customer journey. The Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform (ADEP) includes: Modern Technology Foundation ADEP s technology foundation is designed to support composite content applications while providing technical agility, enabling faster time to market and change for solutions, while supporting iterative development approaches that leverage design thinking. It includes a virtual, standards based Java content repository, a highly modular application run-time environment based on Apache Felix, and a Restful application development framework based on Apache Sling. The foundation includes a variety of standard based approaches for exchanging information with existing corporate systems as well as facilities for integrating with real-time collaboration and a variety of user interaction technologies across a wide range of devices. Rich security capabilities are available at all levels of the system to manage access to information and functionality for users both within and outside your organization and firewall. The platform was designed with three core architectural principles in mind: 1. Cloud First Everything in the digital enterprise platform is designed with the perspective of being suitable for deployment in the cloud, whether actual deployments are done there or on premise. ADEP supports wide area network clustering, hot cluster join (allowing you to expand the infrastructure on the fly, and runs in a very small memory and CPU footprint. 2. Mobile First As we look at interaction patterns, our own approach has been to start with mobile devices (particularly tablets) and then expand to consider other environments. ADEP can detect over 17,000 devices with emulation and simulation capabilities exposed to content contributors, support for both HTML5 and Flex based environments, and a concept of device groups to reduce the complexity of managing the diverse range of never ending devices types. 3. Social First Today s customer increasingly leverages social activities to gain validation of their decisions and to share them with others. ADEP supports a range of social capabilities including support for local communities and the ability to glean information from public communities (Facebook, Twitter, etc) and use that information to tailor the customer experience. Social capabilities in the platform are much like the public social environment, they surround everything we do and are available for use at any time for any purpose. These design principles will continue to guide the evolution of the platform over time as continue to support requirements for agile solution delivery. Core capabilities designed to support the lifecycle of customer interaction patterns In addition to the core platform capabilities, Adobe also identified a number of critical capabilities that need to be available to design optimized customer experiences. Today, these capabilities are often sourced independently with specialized systems that address a single technology area. This makes sense from an inside out perspective, but when looking at it from the outside-in, it s evident that a more unified approach is required. The capabilities get their heritage from Adobe s strengths in content management, forms, document processes, business process management, rich Internet applications, and analytics. First, Adobe is pioneering the integrated management of content and applications to deliver immersive experiences. Customers do not want to browse information only Web sites or to interact with applications that are flat and boring. They want to quickly find what they are searching for, take action, and share with others. As a result, they expect the world of content and applications to be intertwined seamlessly and simply for their use and enjoyment. Adobe provides the ability to manage content and applications in an integrated fashion on our platform, enabling the deployment of new application capabilities as easily as content changes are deployed on dynamic Web sites. Applications and content are treated the same, making them work better together. Adobe supports a range of interaction environments for these 3

4 content+app solutions, including HTML5, Adobe AIR, and Adobe PDF. This provides the ability to choose the right technology for each customer and customer situation. Adobe is leveraging the content management assets from its recent acquisition of Day software and our rich heritage in rich internet applications (with Adobe Flash technology and AIR ) to deliver these advanced capabilities. Common applications of these technologies include public Web sites, customer portals, multi-channel content delivery, and a range of applications delivered over the Internet. Second, the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform provides rich process and data capture capabilities. A big part of delivering great experiences is delivering on promises. Process and workflow capabilities help us recognize customer interaction patterns and service them, even when it requires multi-step process activities behind the scenes. Adobe LiveCycle ES is the basis for our process management capabilities. LiveCycle was recently named a leader in the Gartner BPMS MQ for 2010 and was named as a Champion in the 2011 Info-tech Market Landscape report. LiveCycle includes capabilities for forms management, workflow, dynamic document assembly and delivery, rights management and more. It excels at customer facing processes where experience matters like new account opening, customer communications, and service requests. Third, social capabilities are inherent in the design of the platform and are one of the key tools Adobe uses to develop context. Context is one of the most critical elements of successful experiences. The system needs to not only recognize information from the social activities of the customer, but it also must recognize the type of devices they are using, where and when they are using it, and historical information on other activities the customer has performed in relation to their relationship with the company. This information needs to feed the solution engines to tailor experiences for the customer s current situation. Our social capabilities come from Day Software and our LiveCycle Collaboration Service, which provides a hosted infrastructure for easily adding collaboration features to the interaction experience. The final key capability area is support for analytics and optimization. Through integration with the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture, we support the ability to measure the effectiveness of experiences and the test new approaches in a systematic, scientific way. The Online Marketing Suite excels at providing deep insights into user behavior on Web properties, while also being able to leverage that information to test online marketing campaigns and adapt site behavior for different audiences. These diverse capabilities support all of the interaction patterns that may occur on the modern customer journey, enabling the development of rich solutions to optimize particularly important situations that create user Moments of Truth. Set of Customer Experience Solutions To accelerate productivity, Adobe provides a set of customer experience solutions that are designed to optimize outcomes along the customer journey. The solutions include: Web Experience Management To generate awareness and interest across Web and Mobile properties with innovative sites that merge content and applications, delivering rich information and applications that support a variety of activities on the journey. Social Brand Engagement To enable customers to validate their thought process and share their decisions with others, building brand loyalty and deep community capabilities. Selection and Enrollment To enable customers to sign up for services that require complex decision making and information requirements. Unified Workspace To ensure that customers who need assistance, can get it from empowered employees using tools designed to optimize the interactions they have with customers. Customer Communications To deliver relevant, timely, interactive information to customers based on scheduled or ad hoc events along the lifecycle of the customer journey. The solutions are designed to be implemented by Adobe and Adobe partners to address the specific requirements to optimize the journeys for our customer s key customer segments. The solutions provide capabilities oriented toward each of the three broad constituent groups impacted by customer experience efforts: 4

5 For more information: The Customer The solutions support the range of device and delivery formats provided in the platform to deliver targeted experiences that optimize Moments of Truth to meet, and exceed customer expectations and deliver strong business returns. The Business Owner (Line of Business or Marketing) The solutions include rich interfaces designed to enable business users to configure experiences for their customers. By putting the right types of control in the hands of these users, business agility is delivered in an effective, yet safe manner. The Developer and IT With the broad platform capabilities and extensible solutions that are built for optimizing experiences, developers unlock new power to create engaging composite content applications for a variety of devices and environments. Teams leverage standards-based integration facilities, rich application and content services, and a variety of easily modifiable UX components, all running on an architecture that supports Web scale. By supporting all three of these key constituent groups, Adobe provides an environment to optimize change, while focusing efforts around a common goal-optimizing customer experiences. Getting Started The path to improved customer experiences does not have to be complex. Remember, even an incremental improvement in experience can deliver tangible revenue gains according to Forrester. Adobe recommends that you identify some key areas of opportunity or pain where the current experiences you are delivering are lacking or where you can break new ground for your customer. Then use Adobe s Digital Experience Platform, and if appropriate a solution, to quickly implement a new solution that has been designed from the Outside-In, with a customer centric design approach. Measure the effectiveness of the solution and rapidly adapt it as necessary. Then leverage what your learned about the platform and your customers to tackle the next opportunity. Consistently improving experiences will enable you to capture the revenue opportunity described by Forrester earlier in the paper. Summary Adobe is leading the market for comprehensive customer experience management solutions that support organizational efforts to change the way they engage with their customers. Only Adobe has the rich design heritage required to support engaging consumer experiences that are empowered by a modern enterprise platform that addresses key enterprise concerns, while complementing and extending the value of existing application investments. Adobe is also leading the market by providing solutions targeted at optimizing experiences along all the stages of the customer journey. Adobe s corporate mission is to change the world through digital experiences and our customer experience management platform and solutions brings that mission to life for our enterprise customers. Adobe Systems Incorporated 345 Park Avenue San Jose, CA USA Adobe, the Adobe logo, AIR, Flash, and LiveCycle are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. Microsoft and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Java is a trademark or registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. Printed in the USA /11 5