Adobe Summit 2020 - CX has changed overnight, and businesses need to adapt
- Summary:
- The definition of customer experience has changed overnight - how should companies respond? With 100+ sessions live on the virtual Adobe Summit, there's a lot to dissect. Here's our first round of news analysis and highlights.
The 2020 Adobe Summit kicked off yesterday with pre-recorded keynotes and over 100 sessions devoted to all things digital and customer experience.
Whether you are an Adobe customer or not, it's worth spending some time on the Summit site to see what businesses are doing these days and where we're headed.
Customer experience is changing
Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, kicked off the Summit with a look at how fast things have changed in the last month. He said that "digital is revolutionizing how we interact with each other." Not a new statement exactly, but when you take a minute to think about how much things have changed due to the coronavirus, you understand what he means.
He explained it this way:
- CX before COVID-19: It was about delivering "delightful, personal, relevant interactions in real-time."
- CX now: It's about "supporting critical needs in an exclusive digital world."
Another observation Narayen made is that this is the "decade of the CMO+CIO." He said that companies that build a strong partnership between these two roles would be able to deliver compelling customer experiences at scale. It's an interesting point considering how much the CMO role seems in jeopardy these days.
Digital Economic Index
Narayen introduced Adobe's Digital Economy Index (DEI), a way to measure global consumer trends in our digital world. He explained that the only constant today is that things are constantly changing, and consumers, businesses, and government all need a way to understand how things are changing so they can act accordingly.
The DEI is built on Adobe Analytics and Adobe Sensei, analyzing trillions of transactions, tens of millions of products, and thousands of retailers across the globe that use Adobe's technology.
The current DEI is US only, but the plan is to build an index that covers the globe, providing insights to:
- Help consumers figure out when the best time is to buy products and what to buy
- Help businesses understand local and global trends and anticipate global trends that influence when and how people buy products
- Help the government and other policymakers understand what's happening in the global economy so they can plan accordingly.
What's unique about this index from others is that it's based on what people actually buy, not estimates or assumptions.
Here's a chart that shows what is driving digital inflation down today, including falling prices in computers, electronics and apparel, and the purchasing of groceries online.
From Adobe's Digital Economy Index (DEI)
Adobe's Experience Cloud Strategy
Anil Chakravarthy, EVP, and GM of Adobe's Digital Business Unit provided a look at the Adobe Experience Cloud vision, including introducing some new services.
From Adobe Summit Keynote: Experience Cloud Strategy
My takeaway from this talk was the Services that Adobe provides on top of the core platform, broken down into Application Services and Intelligent Services. These services are built on an API-first architecture that enables them to work across all Adobe applications in different ways.
Application Services include:
- Real-time Customer Data Platform - Adobe's CDP connects all known and unknown data known to create a complete customer profile.
- Customer Journey Analytics - visualize the entire customer journey across channels and touchpoints.
- Journey Orchestration - visually map out the journey tied to a customer profile. Journey orchestration works out the box but is also extensible.
Intelligent Services are a new class of services built on Adobe Sensei (Adobe's AI technology). Available now is the Customer AI which helps you uncover specific customer segments and the Attribution AI, which helps marketers see the conversion impact of their owned, earned, and paid media.
Also in the works are three more services:
- Journey AI - analyze behavioral data to optimize experiences (including both online and offline data).
- Content and Commerce AI - measure the impact of content in driving conversions
- Leads AI - lead routing to the appropriate Salesperson.
Chakravarthy also talked about Adobe's open ecosystem, mentioning relationships with many other vendors, including Microsoft and ServiceNow. He said that the Adobe Experience Platform is integrated with the Open Data Initiative (ODI).
One marketing trend for 2020 every marketer needs to know
Adobe and Persado joined for a session on marketing trends for 2020. It started out as five trends but changed to six, taking our current environment into consideration. It's that sixth one that is worth taking a minute to talk about: "maintaining brand purpose while building resilience."
No one really knows how best to market today. It's not business as usual. But at the same time, marketers can't throw away their current strategy and do something new. What we do know is that customer experience is more important than ever before, and as marketers, sales, and support, we need to understand and support our customer needs at this moment in time.
John Copeland, Adobe VP Marketing and Customer Insights, and Jason Heller, CEO of Persado, talked about planning for turbulent times, not just today, but in the future. They said that messaging is critical and that we need to balance our words, tone, and messaging with sensitively to the situation at hand.
We also need to rethink our value proposition. One thing we see from brands today are free offerings, extended warranties, or trial periods. The idea is to give more for less. Copeland and Heller suggest that this may be our new normal.
Sneak peeks from the Adobe Labs
One of my favorite parts of the Adobe Summit is seeing all the innovations happening in Adobe Labs. Only 60% of what happens in the lab makes it into the product. This year there were seven.
Here are my favorites as a content marketer:
- Snippets: Say you write a blog post, and you want to promote it on your homepage. But you want to show a different message depending on who is looking at that page. You can create smart variations for audience segments generated by Adobe Sensei. Sensei looks at the history of what was effective in the past and makes sure the abstract (title, text, image) is relevant to the target audience. If you don't like the first thing it recommends, you can ask for more suggestions.
- Segment Scout: Not an expert in creating segments? Don't understand the data models, just the data you need? Segment Scout lets you type in a sentence of what you want your segment to look like, and it will mine the data and create the segment for you. I would use this even if I did know how to create segments.
- Access Ace: Accessibility is critical for every web experience, but it's challenging to figure out if your emails or web pages meet the recommended standards. This feature will analyze your content and make recommendations. You can select which recommendations you want to accept and have them automatically applied. Accessibility with the click of a button. The AI will even recommend ALT tags for images that are far more descriptive than you or I would probably think of doing.
What's next?
Over one hundred sessions in this Adobe Summit, following different tracks. One area that interests me greatly is journey orchestration because customers don't live in a single channel, and the path to purchase is not a straight line. How can you identify and create journeys that work for each customer? That's my focus now - more coverage to follow. See also: Derek du Preez's Adobe Summit use case, US Census 2020 - Using Adobe to help deliver the ‘first digital census’.