“Organisations need to think of themselves as being in the experience business,” Adobe’s Jamie Brighton told marketers at the Adobe CX Forum in London this morning.
The six common denominators of what he described as “experience businesses” – those who deliver great experiences for customers – were:
- Great design: “Companies that put design at the heart of what they are doing and are design-led do better than the competition,” said Brighton, who leads product and industry marketing EMEA for the technology business, adding they tend to outperform the competition in terms of financial performance.
- A 360 view of the customer: This doesn’t necessarily mean a single view of the customer featuring every data point, he said, but having enough information – as close to real-time as possible – to address their engagement and deliver compelling content to them in response.
- Personalisation across devices: This includes the use of conditional content, so content is not a one-size-fits-all approach and is tailored to the channel the customer is using.
- The delivery of content that is always relevant: This goes back to understanding who the customer is, and using content to drive the desired experience.
- The use of data science and algorithms for decision-making: To enable you to make better decisions (or a programme to make them on your behalf), which will allow you to optimise advertising and campaigns you produce – and ultimately improve the CX you deliver.
- Digital workflows: “If you can’t create the content and get it out there to people as quickly and efficiently as you need, you are going to miss opportunities to put content in front of people,” Brighton added.
Customer experience was highlighted as one of the top priorities for marketers in 2017 in research presented to the audience, although just a third of organisations said they had the people required to engineer good CX.
“It’s not just about understanding what your customer wants; it’s about how you segment your audiences, how you create experiences and how you deliver those experiences out to audiences across your website, mobile apps and social audiences,” said David Burnand, senior marketing manager, northern Europe at Adobe Marketing Cloud.