Experience Delivers

Transforming customer experiences by designing processes from the customer-in, enabling rich, meaningful interactions

Yesterday I spent a lively 45 minutes pummeling my keyboard for a very good cause. I was adding my perspective to a multitude of perspectives on the state of Customer Experience Management (CXM) in 2011 and the future of it in 2012 at CMSWire’s Tweet Jam (#cxmchat). Although it is a topic most debated among marketers, technologists and experience strategists, the innovation and understanding around it, I am convinced, impacts all of humankind.

Think about it, how many times are we all subjected to bad customer experience in our personal lives? Imagine each of these turning into a utopian interaction that inspires delight. Ah, the improvement to quality of life.

Outcomes from the Tweet Jam? Here’s my take and some of the perspectives I provided:

Most agreed that Web Experience Management/Web Content Management is a core subset of CXM. There was very little controversy on this matter from the stream of tweets.

As for other tools besides Web Experience Management that are central to CXM? I really emphasized the need for strategy and tools that enable companies and marketers to both listen and deliver experiences across all channels/touch points. I know, listening, what a concept. The notion of customer context was also hot as an area critical to CXM.

Where does the buck stop?

Most agreed it was bottom-up and top-down. I think of the executive sponsors as the CMO, CIO and CXO, the trifecta of customer experience leadership. The three musketeers of CXM. I was excited at this point. Thankfully, Twitter’s forced brevity restrained my desire to make other references to superhero trios and exclamations.

What is the most important CXM lesson you learned in 2011?

My tweet: “Any cxm strategy worth its X needs #wem digital and multi-channel element. Investment is imperative. This is Darwin in action.” I am serious about the Darwin reference. All the businesses I’ve talked to about WEM and CXM strategy in 2011 are thinking and investing hard in the area of digital and multi-channel. I firmly believe companies not doing this will fade, crumble or drop into market irrelevance.

What is the CXM opportunity in 2012?

Read the post title my friend. Full tweet: “2012 is Year of Personalization. How we make CXM and #wem intimate in a world of digital bits and bites. #cxmchat” Simplicity from the depths of complexity. It’s funny how we need sophisticated technologies to ultimately deliver the seamless, delightful experience customers crave, make the technology interfaces meld away, and in the end feel a true connection to businesses and other people.

The kicker was a bonus question from CMSWire about how one differentiates the offline and online strategy. Can you guess the response from several of the participants? I thought it was a trick question, in fact. There should be no differentiation, it must be an integrated strategy for CXM.

Period. I say no more…for now.

Loni Kao Stark, @lonikaostark

Group Manager, Solution Marketing

The Singapore Tourism Board (STB) wanted to develop marketing and brand experiences that resonated emotionally with potential visitors to the country. With that in mind, STB, along with development partner XM, looked to our Web Experience Management (WEM) and Adobe Digital Marketing Suite solutions to provide rich, interactive online experiences that engage potential visitors and help to boost tourism. Since the web is the leading source for travelers planning their own vacations, STB developed YourSingapore.com – Experience, an inventive, informative platform that offers useful information about vacationing in the country. The website achieved five million unique visitors as of December 2010—representing a gain of three times the amount of traffic compared to STB’s previous online presence.

Our WEM solution enables STB to create and distribute tailored content, giving customers more personalized and memorable experiences. The single-source publishing capabilities of Adobe WEM enable dispersed STB teams to quickly update, edit, approve, and publish pages, accelerating time-to-market for new online information and services. STB also uses the Digital Marketing Suite to acquire deeper insights into customer behavior. For instance, SiteCatalyst enables the board to gather reliable, real-time data across all of its online platforms. In addition, with the help of the Digital Marketing Suite, STB achieved a five-fold increase in the social fan base of YourSingapore.com.

To learn more about STB’s story, check out the full case study here.

Calling all digital marketers, advertisers and publishers! Want to learn how to gain a competitive advantage, strengthen customer relationships and extend brand value – and top it off by hitting the slopes? Then you’ll want to book a trip to Salt Lake City, Utah for the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit (formerly Omniture Summit) from March 20-23, 2012!

Attend Summit 2012 to take advantage of up to four days of informative sessions, insightful keynotes from industry leaders, training workshops and numerous networking opportunities exploring the latest trends around social, mobile and web analytics, site conversions, audience and advertising optimization, Web Experience Management (WEM) and implementing multi-channel marketing. More than 70 breakout sessions across eight tracks (Analyst & Reporting, Media Monetization, Mobile, Web Experience Management, Multi-Channel Campaigns, Personalized Engagement, Social, and Tech Track) will focus on real-world customer case studies and how digital marketing data can drive business decisions.

Summit 2012 will also include a customer and partner showcase, opportunities for attendees to connect with Adobe’s Digital Marketing teams, a Summit Bash with a surprise headliner concert and a ski day at the end of the week. Thousands of marketers, advertisers, publishers, agencies and developers across industries will come together to better manage, measure and optimize digital experiences so don’t miss out. Register today and lock-in early bird before Friday, January 13, 2012. Visit the registration, pricing, and accommodations page for more information about special discounts and group passes.

Check out today’s announcement for more details and visit the Summit 2012 website. We hope to see you in Utah next March!

With more than 450 hotels, resorts and vacation properties worldwide, Hyatt is a global leader in the hospitality industry. Having a strong web presence plays an important role in giving customers valuable information and resources for travel and leisure. To make the web experience more dynamic and personal, Hyatt is leveraging our Web Experience Management solution and Digital Marketing Suite to accelerate creating and delivering rich, relevant experiences to customers using a range of mobile devices, as well as desktops. By continually updating websites worldwide with the latest content, the hospitality leader gives customers easy access to the information they need—booking details, schedules for local events, weather, and other information—to plan their ideal vacations.

Our WEM solution enables Hyatt teams to quickly and efficiently publish content to more than 500,000 web pages that attract almost 250,000 visitors every day. Customers who are on-the-go can find hotels, book rooms, review reservations, and check loyalty points all from their mobile devices or from their desktops via traditional websites.

To further refine customers’ online experiences, more than 1,000 Hyatt managers rely on the Digital Marketing Suite to gain quick insight into the performance of both regional and national marketing campaigns. By following trends and optimizing visitor experiences, Hyatt saw a 1,000 percent increase in mobile visits over the past year.

Check out the full Hyatt story here.

On Nov. 10, Gartner, Inc. positioned Adobe in the Leaders Quadrant of its 2011 “Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management” research report (see our press release here). Our completeness of vision and ability to execute were noted by the firm, which looked at 20 different vendors for the report. From an Adobe perspective, the research centered on CQ5, now part of our Web Experience Management (WEM) solution.

The evaluation criteria for a vendor’s ability to execute included product/service, overall viability, sales execution/pricing, market responsiveness and track record, marketing execution, customer experience, and operations. Criteria for completeness of vision included market understanding, marketing strategy, sales strategy, offering strategy, business model, vertical/industry strategy, innovation, and geographic strategy. We believe this recognition, combined with our previous placement as a Leader in “The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management For Online Customer Experience, Q3 ’11”, is strong confirmation of our overall WEM and Digital Marketing vision.

At Adobe, we believe Web Content Management plays a crucial role as part of a larger digital marketing strategy for engaging and serving customers. Take, for example, world leader in anti-aging products, Nu Skin.

After experiencing tremendous growth, Nu Skin is now active in 52 markets across Asia, the Americas, and Europe. As a result, the company’s marketing and IT teams have to manage more than 50 websites, with most available in at least two languages, to present local distributors and their customers with comprehensive overviews of the products available in their regions. Using our WEM solution, Nu Skin is able to manage more than 4,500 online product pages and eight web properties along with 350GB of assets. The company pulled off a complete redesign of its European websites three times faster than prior to working with us, and has reduced content localization from weeks to minutes. You can check out the details in this video.

It’s this kind of result that can lead to accolades from customers and industry. But, of course, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum or overnight. As I’ve written here before, I’m incredibly proud of my Adobe colleagues who work tirelessly to perfect our offering and its various integration points, ensuring customer and partner success every time. Wherever you are, take a moment to reflect on how far we’ve come and how we’re changing the way people do business. And to our customers, I encourage you to check out the full Gartner report and to stay in touch to continue the conversation.

-Kevin Cochrane (@kevinc2003), vice president, Product Strategy and Solution Marketing, Adobe

About the Magic Quadrant

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Last week, Ben Watson and I participated in a Tweet Jam organized by CMSWire.  You can read about it here.  The theme was the 3 C’s of Customer Experience, which were called out as Content, Community, and Commerce.  Very quickly in the jam, everyone asserted that the most important C was missing – Customer (and Context was also cited as an important missing C).

It was a pretty obvious mistake, but it is unfortunately too common when we come at things from a technology first perspect (something I’ve blogged about before). We frame initiatives around the key technologies rather than around the business goal.  Make no mistake, it’s impossible to consider almost any business initiative without assessing the role of technology to support it, but the technology needs to come second.

Two hot topics now are mobile and social.  I see lots of articles and posts about mobile and social strategies, with people asking “Do we need a mobile strategy? or a social strategy?”  The answer is straightforward, but not simple, and may not be “Yes.”

In today’s customer-driven world, most, if not all, strategies should be considered through the eyes of your customers.  So put the technology second and AWE your customers.

How do you AWE them?

1.  (A)sk – Ask them about their business pains and needs.  Focus the discussion around the areas of strategy you are considering.  For example, if you are looking at mobile, ask them what types of work they would like to get done on tablets or smartphones.  If social, ask them how they use social tools today.

2. (W)atch – Asking is not enough, because with many new innovations, customers don’t know what is possible.  A great way to uncover hidden pains and needs is observation.  Watch them perform their work.  You can put a fancy term on this (like ethnography), but really you’re effectively walking with them in their shoes as they try to get things done.  This will uncover new opportunities. 

3. (E)xpose – After you’ve asked and watched, it is your turn to lead.  Expose your customer to what is possible using prototypes, scenario maps, and other tools.   This will fuel more discussion and may uncover additional opportunities to make improvements and add value. 

By taking this “AWE” approach, you’re not just listening to your customers, but you are also leading them.  Customers may know what they need, but they sometimes don’t know what they really want because they don’t know what’s possible.  This approach, if accompanied by the right follow through, will also build loyalty.

Furthermore, it will become obvious whether you need the latest strategy du jour.   As you define and implement that strategy, you’ll be able to do it in the context (there is that word again) of customer value.  It should reduce the mis-steps, feature creep,  and dead ends that can plague strategies that are driven by technology first and customers second.

Awe your customers to inform and optimize your technology strategies for maximum customer value.

- Hank Barnes http://twitter.com/#!/hbatadobeand http://hbcemcollection.tumblr.com)

Or…Scott Brinker’s latest smash Broadway hit, The Book of Marketing.

If you are working at the intersection of digital and marketing, you will enjoy Scott Brinker‘s presentation from the recent Adobe partner day in NYC.  This is an updated and extended version of talks that he gave at Search Insider Summit and Pivot.

Ben Watson and Hank Barnes of our Experience Delivers team participated as panelists in CMSWire’s latest Tweet Jam, on Oct. 26. Over the course of an hour, the event brought together some of the strongest and most informed voices in the field of customer experience. Check out Ben and Hank’s thoughts on the event just below, as well as a recap of the complete Tweet Jam conversation.

Ben Watson (@bitpakkit): It was great to participate in this Tweet Jam and to be able to gain different perspectives so quickly to the questions while we were thinking about the challenges they represented – leadership, mobile, social, cultural and more. The conversation today really proves we are thinking about both the art and science of great experiences in the digital space and are doing digital with a huge dollop of humanity.

The patterns of customer focus and customer excellence are there now. We can see the successes of brands like Hyatt, Audi, Nike and others who have really focused on transforming their brands through more customer-centric thinking. Both the art and the science are inclusive and holistic for these brands. From co-value and shared value through service excellence, every time we interact with a brand that ‘gets it’ we feel the difference.

It starts with customer awareness and building the story around brand promise but in the mobile, social and UX-driven world we live in today it’s no longer enough to be a great digital marketer that promises a great experience. You have to deliver. You have to be awesome more. People often ask me where to start. I first tell them to figure out what they suck at, what people don’t like, and stop that first. Then move on to the aspirational stuff. And somewhere in there, take the opportunity to walk a mile in your customer’s shoes. That’s the kind of context that buzzwords can’t describe.

Hank Barnes (@HBatAdobe): The most interesting part of the Tweet Jam for me was seeing things flip from technology orientation, i.e. content management and e-commerce, to a business discussion centered around Customers and Context. That was great to see and shows the understanding that the real issues of CEM/CXM center around meeting customer needs.

That focus on the customer is both easy and hard. Easy in that if you can truly commit to it, the opportunities for experience improvements become very clear. Hard in that it requires new disciplines and approaches and it’s easy to get distracted.

When we look at things from a technology lens, we get sidetracked arguing about acronyms (WCM, WEM, CEM, CXM) and lose sight of the opportunity. You can’t do CEM, or digital marketing, or pretty much anything without technology today, but we have to remember that the idea of context is not just about “customer context”. Technology only provides value when used in the right context—otherwise it just adds complexity and confusion.

I look forward to more of these Tweet Jams with CMSWire and others.

View the full TweetJam transcript below.

Last month in a story regarding the “Making Measurement Make Sense” initiative, Bob Liodice told Ad Age, “Digital, which we always thought was going to be the most measurable medium, turned out to be the least measurable…It’s bad for the digital industry because marketers are gun shy from not understanding the rate of return”.

When our SVP of marketing, Ann Lewnes took the stage for a speech at the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) annual meeting she had a little fun, saying her presentation was going to try and “convert” Bob Liodice, the ANA’s CEO and everyone in attendance. A tall order.

Ann further extrapolated that “…in today’s economy, there is simply no room for guesswork.” That, she said, is why Adobe has developed an econometrics model that forecasts future marketing spend based on three year historical results. Important when 74% of Adobe’s spend is on digital. Want to figure out how much marketing you need to meet a revenue goal? Ann’s advice was to use this model which is now within 5% of the margin of error.

In an Ad Age story about her talk, the publication mentioned Ann cited a study stating in 2012 CMO’s still only plan to spend 11%¹ of their budgets on digital. And while 62%² of marketers think social media is important only 12% believe that their social ads work.

Contrast that with Adobe’s recent “all-virtual” launch of CS5: an online only event that promoted the products with tips, tricks and testimonials. The result? 250,000 participants from 221 countries.

After Ann left the stage, Bob returned and jokingly asked if Adobe would do a campaign for the ANA. Ann agreed and as such this blogger considers us all converted and digital measurable.

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As senior vice president of global marketing, Ann Lewnes is responsible for Adobe’s corporate brand and integrated marketing efforts worldwide. She drives the company’s corporate positioning, branding and identity, public relations, marketing campaigns, field marketing and education segment marketing to ensure strong connections with customers and constituents. As champion of Adobe’s brand to employees and the community, she also oversees Adobe’s internal communications and community relations efforts including the Adobe Foundation, which funds philanthropic initiatives around the world.

Ann is definitely a great person to follow on Twitter where you can also join the conversation about the #futureofdigital.
1- CMOs will invest just over 11% of their marketing spend on digital in the next 12 months. (Source: Duke Fuqua & AMA)
2- 62% of marketers will increase spending in social media. But only 12% actually think social media ads work (Source: Collective)

I am a huge hockey fan.  I have been an addict since I moved to North Carolina from Boston and started following the Carolina Hurricanes closely.  I had always been a casual fan, since I like lots of sports, but got hooked upon seeing the speed of the game live many times.

For the casual fan, or non-fan, hockey may be primarily known for fighting.  To me, most fighting in hockey detracts from the game, although sometimes it is warranted and makes sense within the flow of the game.  But recently, hockey has been facing a bigger problem.  As players have gotten bigger and equipment has gotten better, more and more players have been getting injured due to questionable hits.  Concussions are a huge problem for the league.

Beyond penalties they get in the game, questionable hits can also result in suspensions (and salary forfeiture) for the player.  Before this year, the suspensions were handed out by a league official named Colin Campbell.  He would watch some tapes and then come up with a penalty that was never explained, often seemed to be based on inconsistent criteria, and generally left teams and fans frustrated.

That has all changed this year and that is the reason for this post.  

During the off-season, the NHL appointed a former player, Brendan Shanahan, to be the VP of Player Safety, with responsbility for reviewing questionable hits and assessing penalties.  Shanahan was a great player who played on the edge, often resorting to questionable tactics to help his team win.  Many people wondered how much things would change.

The change has been dramatic.   Shanahan is using social media to transform how the NHL communicates with players and fans.  Here is a short list of some of the things that he has done.

1. Created a YouTube video that he has also tweeted about (@NHLShanahan) that explains the changes to rules and provided examples of legal and illegal plays – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUmpNQn9pFs.
2. Provided videos that show plays that he has reviewed with a clear explanation of the rationale for the penalties he asseses (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhPVbnkV6DY) or does not (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRm2hRHeWIU).
3. Provided examples for players, and fans, of players making good decisions and not making questionable hits (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4nsYpvcVpw), but still playing the physical game that fans enjoy.

The videos are available on YouTube and NHL.com for anyone to review.  This has been a revelation for me and I think its great for the league (there are some passionate fans that complain the physical play is being taken out of the game, but no one is complaining about the transparency).

Its early in the season and many fans are waiting to see if the approach will be consistent throughout the season, regardless of the timing in the season or the stature of the player.  Based on what I have seen so far, I think it will be.  I also think this will increase the level of trust between the league and its fans and help it expand its fan base.   Basically, they are improving my overall experience.

I think there is a lesson here for all businesses.  If you have policies or make decisions that impact your constituents, including employees, partners, and customers, why not be totally transparent about it?  Use social media tools to explain your decisions, clarify interpretations, and address anticipated questions.

If you do so, I think you will build trust throughout your community.  That trust will help you at all phases of your customer relationships.  It will also help you turn some customers into advocates, the ultimate win for your business.

What Brendan Shanahan is doing is transforming how the NHL interacts with players and fans.  Its improving the experience and hopefully will expose more people to this great game.

If you are ever in the Raleigh area during hockey season, ping me and I’ll do everything I can to have you join me for a game so I can share with you the great experience that is live hockey.

- Hank Barnes (@HBatAdobe and http://hbcemcollection.tumblr.com)