Adobe Launches New Digital Enterprise Platform for Customer Experience Management

On the 20th June Adobe Systems Inc announced its new Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform for Customer Experience Management (CEM). The platform enables enterprises to build immersive, multi-channel digital interactions for today’s social and mobile customers. A significant milestone in the delivery of its CEM vision, the new offering by Adobe gives enterprises the ability to bring together marketing and IT to deliver engaging, authentic solutions that increase brand loyalty and bolster competitive differentiation.

Additionally, Adobe is delivering a new set of Customer Experience Solutions built on the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform, to help marketers and line of business executives drive personalized, targeted connections and campaigns both online and offline. For IT organizations, the platform helps to optimize customer interactions across all lines of business. With this comprehensive offering for both marketing and IT, enterprises can now drive transformation of customer experiences for acquisition, retention, and brand advocacy.

Powering Customer Experiences with a Unified Platform

Adobe’s new offering is a modular, open, standards-based platform for delivering engaging digital solutions across social, Web, mobile, and print channels. It provides enterprises a unified foundation to make, manage and deliver multi-channel digital experiences leveraging HTML5, Adobe® AIR®, Flash® Player, and Adobe Reader®. Additionally, it includes integration with the Adobe Online Marketing Suite to optimize digital marketing campaigns and personalized digital experiences across all marketing, sales and service delivery channels.

Also released today, mobile application development gets a boost through integration with Adobe Flash Builder® and Flex. Integrated with the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform, Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5 now include new support for building mobile applications for Android devices, BlackBerry PlayBook, iPhone and iPad (see separate press release). With smartphones and tablets proliferating in the enterprise, IT organizations are looking for a way to more efficiently build, deliver and support applications across a broad range of devices and platforms. Using Flash Builder and Flex, enterprises can now use one tool, one framework and one codebase to create high-performance applications that run on the Web, desktops and top mobile platforms.

Driving Customer Engagement Throughout the Customer Lifecycle

Built on the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform, Adobe’s new Customer Experience Solutions power new customer-centric experiences out-of-the-box:

• Integrated Content Review – Speeds time-to-market for new marketing campaigns and customer experiences. Improves workflow and processes required to create, review, store and rapidly adapt digital content through different target segments across the entire customer journey.
• Web Experience Management – Attracts new customers by providing business and marketing professionals with a solution for creating, managing and publishing rich content across Web, social, mobile and email.
• Customer Communications – Improves customer loyalty by centralizing and managing 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.
• Social Brand Engagement – Enables enterprises to engage with new and existing 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 set up 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.

The Digital Enterprise Platform and Customer Experience Solutions will be highlighted at the first Adobe Digital Enterprise Summit, taking place October 3-4 at the JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A. LIVE in Los Angeles. The Digital Enterprise Summit will feature industry thought leaders, Adobe experts and solution partners demonstrating the future of optimizing customer experiences across all digital channels. To learn more, visit the Adobe Digital Enterprise Summit page.

Quotes

Rob Tarkoff, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Enterprise Solutions, Adobe

• “The ability to deliver superior customer experiences has become the imperative in achieving competitive advantage. The Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform provides a complete foundation for enterprises to truly engage with customers at every point of interaction, through solutions that are easier to use, more effective and productive, and more apt to delight the customer and promote brand loyalty.”

Kevin Zollinger, director of business integration, Nu Skin

• “With the Adobe Web Experience Management solution, Nu Skin can optimize the customer experience across channels, including mobile and social media. Our business managers can create more relevant, timely online conversations with customers, while our IT team can stay focused on strategic activities. Additionally, the new capabilities in the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform will help organizations such as ours take insights captured about customer behaviors on websites and use them to update content accordingly. This will help give customers access to the exact information they want, when and how they want it.”

Karl J. Uphoff, chief information officer, Global Consumer Lines, Chartis

• “When Chartis’ Private Client Group looked for new ways to expand and improve our relationship with customers, we collaborated with Adobe to produce an intuitive document-centric interface that utilizes Adobe’s Customer Experience Management solution capabilities. The result is a policy document electronic delivery platform, which advances our direct marketing efforts and enables customer self-service.”

Melissa Webster, program vice president, Content & Digital Media Technologies, IDC

• “Today’s leading organizations know that to stay at the forefront of the digital enterprise transformation, they must establish meaningful and lasting connections with their customers. This is especially challenging given the multiple channels through which customers now interact with businesses. What’s needed is a platform that provides businesses with a range of solutions designed to help them engage with their customers when, where and how the customers want, and lets them deliver an experience that keeps the customer coming back.”

Chris Davey, senior vice president, managing director and global head, Customer Engagement Platforms and Innovation, SapientNitro

• “Customer Experience Management empowers CMOs to transform brand marketing to enable stronger, more meaningful customer engagement across new digital, interactive channels. Together, SapientNitro and Adobe help our customers deliver personalized experiences across all touch-points that attract, engage, and convert targeted audiences. Using the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform, SapientNitro is building solutions that dramatically improve how businesses manage customer experiences across multiple platforms in a unified context that drives tangible business results.”

Helpful Links

• Adobe CEM
• Blog Post from Adobe’s Rob Tarkoff
• Adobe Experience Delivers Blog
• Adobe CEM YouTube Channel
• Adobe Flash Builder

Availability

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.