It was a big week for the customer experience market, with two major players in the marketing tool space taking swings to bring the idea to the next level. The pair of moves taken together could move customer experience closer to reality after a long period of ambition.
“Customer experience” is kind of a vague notion. The idea is that you want your customers to feel good every time they interact with you, whether in person or online. You certainly know when that doesn’t work well, but it can be more subtle than simply a big smile in person or a successful outcome online. It’s more about taking the extra step to get ahead of problems before they happen or designing a product in an elegant way to reduce friction.
It seems that with all the data we have about customers these days, companies should be doing better at generating positive experiences. In fact, there is so much data from so many sources that companies like Adobe and Salesforce have created customer data platforms (or CDPs for short) to pull all of that data into one place with the goal of delivering optimal customer experiences based on the knowledge you have collected about customers.
Two of the biggest companies involved in gathering and using this data are Salesforce and Adobe. While Adobe doesn’t have a CRM, it certainly has marketing tools, and its $20 billion purchase of Figma was all about designing great products, which ultimately should lead to a better customer experience.
At the same time, at Dreamforce this week, Salesforce’s annual customer conference in San Francisco, the CRM giant announced a new approach to data integration on a platform called Genie. While it works in conjunction with the platform of tools itself, and with external partners like Snowflake and Amazon, the ultimate goal is to use the massive amounts of customer data to generate the best customer experiences possible at the moment they’re needed.
How Adobe and Salesforce are fine-tuning customer experience tools by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
