Adobe survey reveals the ingredients required to achieve great customer experiences

The Customer Experience (CX) has become an important focus of digital marketing in recent years. In times, in which products hardly differ from one another technically, consumers resort to other criteria: How does a brand make me feel? What do I experience with the products? To score points in this regard and be able to take your customers with you on your journey, you have to take an in-depth look at their wishes and requirements.

Creative content is an important travel companion for the journey. “Every convincing customer experience thrives on superbly designed content. But how can this be achieved in the practical reality of everyday business? That’s exactly what we asked those decision makers who are on the pulse of experience creation—the design specialists themselves,” says Katrin Baumann, Adobe Marketing Director Central Europe, in reference to Adobe’s latest Digital Trends survey. “We were particularly fascinated by the following three findings: Creativity is increasingly becoming a competitive advantage. Impressive customer experience is based on tailor-made content. And cross-team collaboration in creation is key to success,” Baumann continues.

Let’s take a closer look at these three main findings:

Creativity as a competitive advantage

Those who already rely on creatively designed customer experiences show 36 percent faster growth rates than non-creative competitors. This was indicated in another study conducted by Forrester and Adobe. As Baumann explains, “anyone who wants to be successful in the competition for customers must invest in technology, creative talent and collaborative workflows.”

Impressive Customer Experiences require personalized content

The right content in the right place at the right time is the basis for outstanding customer experiences. This requires real-time personalization, which entails compiling and presenting the prepared content in a tailor-made way. The decision-makers surveyed regard Artificial Intelligence as the decisive technology for this. This is the only way to understand and analyze the needs and interests of customers and to create tailor-made campaigns using the available design elements.

Creation as a cross-team task

However, only half of the overall challenge can be mastered by creating and designing various contents and elements. Close cooperation with marketing and IT is necessary to ensure personalized content is precisely tailored to each customer. The creative decision-makers therefore want agile forms of collaboration for their companies and a cloud-based IT architecture that enables them to work from anywhere.

Outstanding Customer Experiences begin with outstanding employee experiences

While the first two key results of the study are not all that surprising, the third result clearly demonstrates why the first two cannot yet be put into practice in many companies. There is often a lack of a shared work experience, in which multiple departments work together toward common goals. This not only requires the right technology, however, but also a conducive corporate culture. If this is not the case, it will be difficult to create outstanding Customer Experiences.