Adobe’s Customer Experience Management Tools Are a Win/Win for Marketers

By providing integrated tools that manage both the customer experience and the process supporting it, Adobe allows marketers to deliver a personalized experience to customers faster and with more control than ever before.   

What is CXM?

CXM stands for customer experience management. The term represents the long-anticipated unification of the varied and plentiful tools used to manage a customer’s interaction with a company. These include tools for: content creation, management, and delivery; customer targeting and engagement; and finally measurement and optimization.

The Evolution of CXM

Historically, companies have used a mash-up of home-grown and purchased solutions to meet their customer management needs. Cobbled together, these solutions rarely covered all the aspects of a true CXM and, over time, supporting each application independently turned into an expensive maintenance nightmare.

In an effort to meet the growing demand for an integrated and full-featured CXM platform, many web content management (WCM) providers have begun building or acquiring niche applications -- with varying results.

And Then There’s Adobe

Adobe’s Web Experience Management (WEM) platform  allows marketers to manage the full CXM Lifecycle using familiar tools that integrate without Herculean effort from your IT department or consultants.  

Over the years, I’ve been involved in the implementation of a wide assortment of content management systems. Adobe solves some of the common headaches. Here are some examples:

• Makes working with your creative team easier. Rich digital assets built in Creative Suite (such as images with text layered on top) can be easily checked into a shared library, either the CQ Digital Asset Management system or made available via Scene7. No more emailing huge files! In some circumstances, content owners can even make their own edits, allowing for on-the-fly changes, A/B testing, and segmented content -- without engaging the creative team.
  
  
• Enables personalization and one-to-one marketing. Using the Campaign Manager and Test&Target integration, web content stored in the web content management tool can be targeted and customized for site visitors based on segmentation, campaign rules, and context. Each visitor is presented with content that aligns with their individual interests.
  
  
• Integrates social media for engagement, management, and tracking. The CQ Social Communities tool makes it easy to include social features, such as comment and content share, on your website. It also provides a suite of back-end management and publication tools for Facebook and Twitter to build loyalty and drive conversions. What’s more, you can define that personalized experience for your customers based on details shared in their profiles.
  
  
• Compiles Data from All Customer Touch-points.  Working with a bunch of spread sheets wastes time and increase the opportunity for error. The SiteCatalyst/Omniture integration captures data from each stage in the CXM lifecycle, delivering multi-channel analytics, including social, mobile, e-commerce, and search. As a result, you spend less time pulling data together and more time acting on it.

When the marketplace is one click away, and consumers make decisions in 1/100^th of a second, how you manage CXM is vital to your competitive advantage.