Adobe LiveCycle 2.5 Provides Enhanced Customer Experience Management
by Bill Ives
Adobe is making a major play into the enterprise application market building on their strong consumer market presence. They began offering LiveCycle in 2004 and are now focusing this platform on supporting customer experience management. I recently spoke with Nicole Kealey, Group Product Marketing Manager, Enterprise Solutions to go over their offerings in this space. She said that enterprise solutions are now the fastest growing segment of the Adobe business.
They are focusing on helping enterprise and government customers increase efficiencies and improve service. For example, enhancing customer self-service and supporting frontline customer service staff. LiveCycle is an enterprise suite that helps companies streamline human and document-centric processes. It takes advantage of the Adobe Flash Platform for the delivery of intuitive RIAs as well as Adobe Reader for rich documents. . They have been primarily focusing on the financial services, government and the public sector helping produce both B2C and B2B apps.
LiveCycle brings together multiple solutions within one framework. This allows for cross channel integration for supporting end-to-end customer experiences. It offers a mix of SaaS and on-premise options. Three major features of LiveCycle are process automation, security and interactivity. LiveCycle also brings the ability to provide Rich Internet capabilities to BPM and the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant on BPM lists Adobe as a leader.
Nicole showed me a great example using high-end graphics and interactivity to enable self-service for auto insurance claims processing. You told the system what type of car you were driving. Then it displayed an image and you could visually define the areas in need of repair. This helps avoid confusion in claims processing as the visual image can be much more accurate than text. You could also define the accident through graphics of the street location. In addition, this interactivity is more likely to engage the users, reducing the possibility of disengagement and a move to a call center.
Adobe looked at the most common uses cases for LiveCycle and has now released Solution Accelerators to speed development in these areas. Built on LiveCycle 2.5, Solution Accelerators kick-start project planning, decrease development time for production applications, and reduce risk with a supportable and upgradable framework. Solution Accelerators also provide best practice methodologies, solution templates, and building blocks to extend LiveCycle 2.5. They take you through the first 80% of development, leaving space for some customization. The three initial Solution Accelerators are:
Correspondence Management Solution Accelerator enables business users to dynamically create personalized communications using pre-approved layouts and content to provide consistent customer correspondence such as creating a customized claims letter. You can see a sample from the financial services sector below.
Interactive Statements Solution Accelerator engages customers through communications that embed the power of personalized RIAs in secure PDF formats, including credit card statements, telecommunications bills and electronic invoices. Below is a sample from a financial services firm. Nicole showed me a lot of interactivity that you cannot see in this one image. PDF has come a long way with its increased interactivity. I wish my banks and insurance companies used these.
Managed Review & Approval Solution Accelerator can rapidly deliver solutions that enable multi-party participation in content review processes. This has been very helpful for media and entertainment companies as they review visual material. Here is a sample below.
Adobe is also enhancing its support for mobile apps. Nicole mentioned that mobile devices have exceeded laptops. Most analysts predict this as a major growth area.
They are also planning to add more social features, enabled, in part, by their pending acquisition of Day Software. This includes the ability for users to better integrate their global Web presence with LiveCycle apps. Adobe expects to add social Web content management solutions, as well as robust measurement, analytics and visualization tools into future versions of LiveCycle. These are all good moves.
I asked Nicole why enterprise apps are the fastest growing area within Adobe. She said there are several factors. First, it is new so there is more room for growth. Second, enterprise IT budgets generally allow for larger efforts than what occurs within the consumer world. Third, and perhaps most important, there is a movement toward making the enterprise IT world look and act more like the consumer world and LiveCycle is a great platform for this transformation. Looking at what they are doing with LiveCycle, I can see why this platform provides a solid means to create apps with both Web 2.0 capabilities and enterprise business requirements.
