1 Introduction
Customer interaction is much more than marketing: it comprises all touchpoints during the customer journey. And the borders are becoming more and more blurry as many areas such as marketing, sales, service, support, and consultancy become part of customer experience (CX).
When it comes to customer interaction, various areas are relevant. The customer lifecycle or journey comprises several steps: it starts with creating consumer awareness of a product or service. In the next step, the consumer will consider whether this offer is relevant for him or her and will make a decision on whether or not to buy. A purchase—or conversion—represents the moment of truth in both online and offline scenarios. But it’s not just about the conversion; the customer journey continues afterward. Retention and advocacy are important steps that can help a business stay in touch with its customers, and can create advocates for a specific product or brand, with the aim that these advocates will give recommendations promoting the product or brand to their peers.
In each step, different types of customer interaction might be relevant—this depends on the business sector, products or services, and last but not least, customers.
In any case, customer centricity is key: focus on creating a positive experience for the customer by building relationships and maximizing service and/or product offerings. Customers expect real-time experiences when it comes to marketing, sales, e-commerce, and service management. This applies to B2C and B2B.
In order to achieve an optimum customer experience, many factors will have to be considered. Relevant touchpoints need to be fed with personalized content and media assets. The right action must be taken in the right moment when it comes to email marketing, recommendations, offering discounts, or asking for a recommendation.
Big data, data engineering, and analytics are prerequisites to managing this challenge. Machine learning might support the process here. On the other hand, privacy aspects and legislation such as the GDPR will have to be considered as well when it comes to processing personal identifiable information (PII).
Many companies are facing the challenges related to the digitalization of marketing and sales right now. Recent megatrends, such as the internet of things (IOT) and conversational interfaces, will have to be considered in future sales and marketing strategies.
Adobe Inc., founded in 1982 in California, USA, and historically focused on multimedia and creativity software products, offers with its Adobe Experience Cloud a comprehensive solution that covers many aspects of managing the challenges related to customer experience mentioned above.
Adobe Experience Cloud is a cloud-based solution that addresses the main areas of customer experience management, such as advertising, touchpoint management, personalization, data management, and analytics. With the Adobe Experience Cloud and it’s “classic” products such as Photoshop or Illustrator, Adobe spans the whole range from content creation, content publishing, measurement and monetization of digital experiences. In addition, Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities can be used within Experience Cloud, based on Adobe’s AI and machine learning framework Sensei.
