Adobe UK Enterprise Blog

So day one of the Gartner CRM Conference 2011 behind us and day 2 well underway. What have we learnt so far?

Customer Experience Management is here to stay

Ed Thompson of Gartner highlighted a number of pieces of research covering the main drivers behind the increased focus by organisations on the customer experience. One that really stood out was a study byBrand Keys that found that only 21% of products and services had any points of differentiation that were meaningful to consumers. This is nearly 10% less than a benchmark study conducted in 2003. In an undifferentiated world, the customer experience is king.

Social and mobile are huge opportunities for delivering great customer experiences

Alongside some great examples of social initiatives (below) Gartner was predicting spend on social software would be more than $1 billion by the end of next year. Another stat that stuck in the mind was that 80% of businesses are losing revenue from not supporting web-based customer service on mobile. However the audience were pretty bullish about how quickly mobile is and will be adopted as channel over the next 3 years (more on that below as well).

Management of the customer experience is spread across multiple disciplines, departments and has numerous metrics.

Gartner highlighted 4 different customer experience themes – Customer Satisfaction / Loyalty & Advocacy / Brand & Reputation / Quality – and 4 different elements within each of these themes. That’s 16 different elements of the customer experience with 16 different metrics and very little integration or synchronisation of these metrics, according to Gartner. We think that joining up these metrics is key to managing, measuring and delivering a holistic customer experience and we know that some organisations are making good progress.  We’re running a survey at the Adobe booth at the show to ask a wider audience, so if you’re there do take part. More on the results later in the week!

That CRM practitioners are a lot more bullish about how quickly CEM will develop than the Gartner analysts

Adobe’s Kevin Cochrane was on a customer experience panel with other sponsors after the Mark Raskino’s keynote introduction. The analysts had already provided predictions for progress against a number of different elements of the customer experience. The panel discussed and the audience voted on these predictions. A great example of the audience’s bullishness was a question about the percentage of sales, marketing and customer service processes on mobile by 2015. The analysts predicted 30%, the audience were at 60% along with the panel. Great to see the excitement in CEM and the potential of new tech at a practitioner level!

Companies that really understand the value of customer experience are embracing mobile, social and multi-channel

QR codes are beginning to take off in the UK, today we learnt that they’re huge in Japan where Gap is using them in store windows to enable consumers to sign up for promotions without even stepping inside the store. Something that it’s now doing in the US as well. Lufthansa’s www.myskystatus.com is a service that automatically updates a travelers Facebook and Twitter profiles with where they are, even if they’re flying with someone else. While  www.thejohnnycashproject.com is just a great example of the power of social to create something really shared and very special.

Day 2 of the conference sees Adobe partner SQLI present some of the innovative projects we’ve been working on together across Europe – Delivering improved Customer Experience to enhance business value at 9.15am – and more from Jim Davies, Ray Valdes and Ed Thompson of Gartner. More details on the blog to follow soon.

Thanks to everyone that joined us for the recent Adobe government webinars with ITU Live. It was another really interesting debate. It’s great to see a panel of eminent experts from the industry who are also so “hands-on” in shaping the future of government IT, expressing their opinions in an open and challenging forum.

The topic was Cloud Computing and sparked a lively discussion about the barriers to innovation that are created by the public sector procurement process. A full video of the webinar is available here please do take the time watch.

I’ve also pulled out a few bullets below from the session which I thought were particularly insightful. Do feel free to add your own thoughts about this via the comments section within this blog. We always keen to hear what you have to say.

• Liam Maxwell, IT specialist and Conservative councillor at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, argued that government needs to focus its attention on transparency, personal identity and cross-platform in the cloud to reduce IT spend in local government. A pioneer in his own constituency Liam is championing cloud computing with a view to moving most of Windsor and Maidenhead’s IT into the cloud within the next three years – a bold ambition to say the least.
• Liam states that one of the key things about localism and the localisation of services is that “it should be possible for someone to set up a trestle table in the town centre and open a government office providing services where and as they are needed”. I agree that cloud technology is certainly an enabler for that vision.
• He was also discusses that the public sector can do ‘Better for Less’ – a sentiment which Mark O’Neill, CIO at the Department of Communities & Local Government, and lead on the government’s new ‘skunk-works’, also felt.
• Mark explained how he believes the Comprehensive Spending Review has become a catalyst enabling local and central government to “rethink the business model”, and that this is an opportunity which comes along very rarely in IT.
• Alan Banks, MD for Adobe, completed the panel. Alan brought an IT vendors perspective to the proceedings. Alan commented that, “the model for government IT is changing and there will be no more monolithic IT projects.” He also led the panel in a discussion about the need for open standards and innovation. This a topic also close to Liam Maxwell’s heart, who said that a staggering £51m saving could be achieved by moving to an open document format within government.

Here in the UK, the minds of everyone in government and public sector have been duly focused on the Comprehensive Spending Review, as well as ongoing budget cuts and the undoubted effect that it will have on how services are delivered to UK citizens. It is sometimes difficult to look beyond ‘this Sceptred Isle’ and easy to feel that the issues which we have to overcome are unique. The reality is that local authorities and government bodies across Europe face the same issues and pressures as we do in the UK.

We recently hosted a very insightful seminar with colleagues, partners and customers from the Nordics. The topic for discussion was customer experience, customer engagement and the role that technology plays in redefining the experiences users have. You can view the whole webinar via the video below and a short summary of the topics covered is below.

A problem shared…

Just like in the UK, central and local government departments across the Nordics have to economise – searching for cost savings and efficiencies across their operations. New technology processes which incorporate tools such as rich internet applications, content management and electronic document management are being investigated as a means with which to not only reduce costs, but to increase the quality and efficiency of the way services are delivered.

Niels Tapdrup, citizen service manager, Municipality of Skanderborg in Denmark is heading a project which will streamline the ways in which citizens contact the council more efficiently, collating postal mail, email, online and telephone enquiries. Tapdrup explains how efficiency and cost saving are essential. The challenge they faced was how to change their channel strategy, and move expensive traditional channels of communication, to cheaper online methods whilst at the same time improve services for citizens.

The citizens changing demands

The customer, or citizen, is king and their needs must be met. Johan Salenstedt managing director, Adobe Nordics explains how the demand on how we use and access information has changed dramatically – people are familiar with just ‘using’ applications, rather than being trained on how to access them. Facebook is a perfect example of this – no one has ever been trained to use Facebook, yet implicitly millions of people use it every day. The same now applies to business or public service applications.

Barriers to implementation

In the discussion familiar barriers to change were identified, which concentrated on the internal operation of a department or authority:

• How do you tackle the initial business process?
• How do you manage the inevitable cultural shift within the organisation caused by doing things differently?
• And finally, overcoming the elephants in the room – those things which have always been seen as too expensive or difficult to change.

How to succeed

Rule number one for a successful IT implementation is to plan with the customer in mind. The needs of the end user must drive the new system. For example, any new technology or process which is delivering information and services must be delivered in exactly the way that the end users wish to receive it. Salenstedt confirms that public sector services must replicate consumer applications – they need to be easy and intuitive to use, whilst available 24×7 on mobile and PC and must be personalised to the individual users needs.

Secondly, developers need to involve all stakeholders in a collaborative consultation process. It is vital that they ‘show’, rather than ‘tell’ how new functions and solutions will operate. Taking a brand new approach to processes which have been set in stone for years is not easy – overcoming cultural barriers could make or break the project. For example, if the users don’t see the benefit in electronic documents, then they’ll always revert back to paper documents. Involving stakeholders at the outset will help to address these cultural issues.

Authorities can reap the benefits

The benefits are clear as at Skanderborg they reduced the cost of a single ‘traditional’ citizen contact point from 145DKK (£16.50) to just 10DKK (£1.15) by using an online interaction point – this is a huge saving.

Taking a business minded, commercial attitude to public sector reform is perhaps the best approach to managing this difficult process of business transformation. Local authorities can fundamentally change the dynamic within an organisation and the way it interacts with its customers. This can be an un-nerving process but is often essential – a new way of working in which customer experience and customer centricity are embedded in the organisation.