Adobe Announces Comprehensive Customer Experience Management Platform
by Bill Ives
Adobe continues their major play into the enterprise application market building on their strong consumer market presence. I covered their moves before (see Adobe LiveCycle 2.5 Provides Enhanced Customer Experience Management). Recently, I spoke with Ben Watson to discuss their announcement of new Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform for Customer Experience Management (CEM). They had released a number of capabilities in this space. Now they have filled in additional Customer Experience Solutions to provide a comprehensive platform.
The new offering is a modular, open, standards-based platform for delivering engaging digital solutions across social, web, mobile, and print channels. It is cloud-based and provides a unified foundation to make, manage and deliver multi-channel digital experiences leveraging HTML5 and other Adobe products: AIR®, Flash® Player, and Reader®. They are relying on dynamic frontend integration rather than the more complex backend integration that has also need used in the past. See the diagram below for an overview. Ben walked me through the components and I will now share what I learned.
Web Experience Management provides a solution for creating, managing and publishing rich content across web, social, mobile, and email. With this release they have further enhanced integration to Adobe’s Online Marketing Suite enabling publishing offers to Test & Target and also provide the survey capabilities within the WEM authoring environment. There is also integration with Scene 7 to enable retail customers to get detailed products views. Here is a sample web content management screen with Scene 7.
Social Brand Engagement enables enterprises to engage with customers to create community, driving brand loyalty and commitment on enterprise-owned digital properties in addition to public social media sites.
Selection and Enrollment reduces online abandonment and time-to-market with effective product enrollment experiences and empowers business users to quickly setup and launch online enrollment experiences.
Unified Workspace empowers customer-facing agents to provide superior service by getting fast access to critical information, enabling them to resolve inquiries and cases with accuracy and efficiency. I have seen the difficulties that agents often face with this task. One British call center agent told me that the main skill they needed to learn was how to engage the caller with interesting chat while they searched through al the different databases for answers.
Customer Communications centralizes and help manage the creation, assembly and multi-channel delivery of secure, personalized, interactive correspondence and statements. The solution allows enterprises to generate new revenue sources, reduce costs, improve customer loyalty, and meet compliance regulations. In the new release they have redesigned the user interface and added such features as: spell check, table insertion, and dynamic lists. You can also publish and retire a template on a given date and then retrieve it. Below is an example of an interactive invoice. These interactive statements can work with multiple data sources.
Here is a sample screen for creating a customer communication.
Integrated Content Review provides a solution for the review and approval of digital assets. It speeds time-to-market for new marketing campaigns and customer experiences. It also improves workflow and processes required to create, review, store, and rapidly adapt digital content through different target segments across the entire customer journey. Below is a sample content review screen.
I am impressed with the comprehensive nature of this platform. They have made some great moves here. The Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform, Integrated Content Review solution, Web Experience Management solution, and Customer Communications solution will be available August 2011. The Social Brand Engagement solution, Selection and Enrollment solution, and Unified Workspace solution are available immediately in Beta and will be generally available in Fall 2011.
