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.
Designing great products is a start
While Adobe is best known for its creative tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, the company also has an enterprise arm that includes tools aimed at marketers. Before it bought Figma last week, Adobe bought marketing automation software firm Marketo in 2018 and e-commerce software Magento earlier that year. It was all part of an effort to beef up its marketing platform.
It announced a customer data platform the following year. All of this activity was about building a set of tools that work in tandem to deliver … wait for it … a good customer experience. Adobe’s angle is to develop marketing and sales materials with the creative tools and combine that with advertising and marketing campaigns. Now the company has the premier product design tool in the market on top of those other capabilities.
If you think about how the tools work together, it’s all about attracting customers, gathering data, then building great products based on the data you have collected — or at least that’s the theory.
Sheryl Kingstone, an analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence, said it’s a matter of connecting the customer data to the actual business, but that’s not always easy to do.
“If we embrace it, if we really understand the importance of the first-party data that’s driving this, and if we’re able to architect the use cases to be more proactive, and hopefully eliminate as much as possible what humans need to do, [we can deliver better experiences],” she said.
Certainly Adobe’s chief product officer, Scott Belsky, sees the connection between customer and digital experience and how businesses are being designed on Figma.
“I don’t think anyone realizes how big that market will be. I think that Figma will be the source of truth for every product that every company ships to their customers, every digital experience,” he said. And that means for every customer experience, wherever it happens.
Salesforce releases the Genie
While both companies share a marketing product catalog, Salesforce is less about the design part of it and more about the customer itself, with the end game being improving that nebulous customer experience.
When it announced Genie this week, it wasn’t so much a single product, even though the company loves to productize platform components, as it did with artificial intelligence, calling it Einstein.
Genie is similar in some ways to Einstein in that it’s more a set of technologies designed to shift data wherever it’s needed. (Genie includes the CDP, a new data lake purpose-built to move customer data more efficiently, the company’s own Hyperforce architecture and other elements.) Ideally, that speed gives you immediate knowledge to deliver whatever the customer desires.
Liz Miller, an analyst at Constellation Research, said the comparison between Einstein and Genie isn’t necessarily a perfect one. Einstein, she said, is really designed with transactional data in mind, but when you combine it with Genie, it becomes less about the system of record and more about a system of engagement.
“The real value of a CDP is its ability to bring structure and usability for what for years felt impossible, connecting the dark, dirty, big, (insert your word of choice for that firehose of data we’ve been desperately trying to drink from) that our customers and our engagements create,” Miller said in an email. “That data exhaust can’t and shouldn’t be housed in CRM. But it can’t go ignored.”
She said when you combine the CDP with the data lake, and throw in Einstein and Flow, you begin to address how to take advantage of that data exhaust in a much more powerful way.
“Salesforce is following through on that promise of the entire customer-facing brand engaging with that market of one, with relevance and contextual personalization that can be delivered at the right time for the customer and the person charged with delivering that moment,” Miller explained. If Salesforce can truly deliver that, it would bring real-time customized experiences much closer to reality.
It’s worth noting that startups have tried attacking different parts of the customer experience problem. Companies like Qualtrics, which looks at customer sentiment, was acquired by SAP in 2018 for $8 billion before being spun out a couple of years later. Then there’s Segment, which was going after the CDP, which was acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion in 2020, and then, of course, there’s Figma being plucked by Adobe.
Wherever there is some innovation to improve customer experience, it seems one of the platform players goes and buys it.
As for this week’s news, tons of money and resources have been spent by these two companies with the goal of delivering truly great customer experiences, even if they went at it from very different angles. Now we’ll see if they can actually deliver on building better experiences, or if it’s just another step on the journey.