Adobe unveils the power of experience-led business at 2016 symposium

Adobe hosted Symposium 2016, attracting more than 1,000 business and marketing leaders who heard from top national and global brands about the importance of being an experience-centric business in the digital era. Delegates learned about how transformative digital strategies can help brands stay ahead in India’s highly competitive market, and win domestic and global customers in its mobile-first market landscape.

Speakers from big brands including Flipkart, IDFC Bank, MakeMyTrip, Royal Bank of Scotland, SpiceJet Ltd, and Taj Group took the stage to explain how their companies are making major strategic and structural changes to ensure digital is delivering a compelling customer experience. Leading Adobe partners includingAccenture Interactive, Cognizant, SapientNitro and Valtech, attended a full day partner session dedicated to exploring the disruptive trends that are driving massive growth worldwide.

“First came back-office software, followed by the next wave of front-office technology that helped business streamline data to better interact with customers,” said Paul Robson, President, Adobe Asia Pacific. “Now, we see the arrival of the third wave of enterprise software, making possible fundamental changes to how businesses deliver customer experiences. Adobe platforms are the powerful enablers helping companies deliver personalized, compelling and connected customer experiences at each relationship touchpoint, from websites and social networks to mobile apps, and all the way through to real-life transactions and interaction.”

“Digital natives in India are forcing businesses and brands to offer amazing customer experiences across platforms and devices,” said Umang Bedi, Managing Director, South Asia, Adobe. “This trend is accelerated by the government’s focus on strengthening the nation’s digital roadmap, driving a wave of digital transformation across India. The convergence is opening up enormous opportunities for brands and making it imperative for marketers to create a consistent consumer journey to win brand loyalists.”

"For any online marketplace, customer experience is now clearly the defining differentiator. We standardized our marketing platform on Adobe Marketing Cloud, deploying Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target and Adobe Social and started leveraging real-time data insights to significantly improve customer engagement through multiple platforms and devices. We are seeing our sales results boosted by a factor of five; with revenue growing by up to 10 times over previous levels – these are record levels of growth. To me, it’s a clear testament that we are reaching the right audiences,” said Manav Sethi, Group CMO & Head Digital Strategy, AskmeBazaar.

Best of the Best India 2016 Launched

A new Adobe Digital Index report, Best of the Best India, was released at Symposium 2016, highlighting the growing gap between countries, industries and companies who have embraced digital experience at the core of their strategy, and those who lag.

The report leverages Adobe Analytics to aggregate anonymous data from 100 billion visits to more than 3,000 websites in Asia, including 16 billion visits from India. It presents the average and top performing benchmarks across industries including Retail, Media and Entertainment, Travel and Hospitality, Financial Services, and High Tech and looks at parameters such as share of smartphone, tablet and desktop visits, stick rate, conversion rate and minutes per visit among users.

Report author Tamara Gaffney, Principal Analyst, Adobe Digital Index, said the lesson was that companies with a digital mindset are reaping the rewards of their transformation. “A leading digital mindset goes way beyond having a nice website, or a new mobile app. The leaders in this space have put digital experience at the centre of how they engage with customers. Their advanced digital strategies are helping them offer a rich, compelling and consistent customer experience, so they are staying ahead of the curve and driving better business results.”

Brands investing in methods to attract and retain traffic can be seen breaking away from the pack by delivering relevant and engaging customer experiences.

Spotlight findings for India include:

• Volume in smartphone traffic is growing in India across all industry sectors, but grew fastest in Banking and Finance sector, with 101.9% year on year growth, followed by Technology sector at 90.8% and Media and Entertainment at just under 70%.

• Gaps in smartphone traffic widened dramatically between the best industry performers in each segment, indicating that the leaders are pulling away to capture higher share of traffic than their competitors. In this respect, the best performers in Media and Entertainment had the greatest gap between the best and the rest at 28.1%, followed by Retail at 35.6%. Banking and Finance recorded a much smaller gap of just 6.4% between the best industry performers and the rest, suggesting there’s still room for fast-moving and innovative players in this sector to make their move and pull ahead of the competitive pack in the year ahead.

• As these leaders see growth in performance and return in mobile traffic, they are continuing to invest more – in people, resources and infrastructure – than those who are average performers or lagging.

• Mobile optimization is playing a big role in helping consumers complete their digital needs faster, reducing their overall online time. This underscores the pressure on brands to get it right the first time, by driving innovative and personalized online engagements.

Navigating the Mobile Economy

As mobile and app usage has exploded, organizations are increasingly investing the time and resources to define a mobile strategy that enables them to transform their business.

Globally, leading companies are allocating up to 20% of their marketing budgets to mobile. However, creating brand differentiation through mobile is challenging as consumers today are unforgiving. One in four apps once downloaded, is never used again and a high percentage of apps fall short of expectations. Companies and users demand immediate benefit from the mobile experience and if app developers can’t innovate or deploy quickly, users simply delete the apps or stop using them.

In February, Adobe announced Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Mobile, developed to simplify the process of building and managing visually appealing enterprise applications that are as easy to use as consumer apps. AEM Mobile also enables developers to extend the functionality of these apps by connecting them to critical business data and systems like customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP).

“For marketers worldwide, and especially in India, mobile apps are integral to the business experience, yet the challenge of how to build, manage and deliver optimized mobile engagement is very real,” said Aseem Chandra, Vice President AEM and Target Business. “Adobe Experience Manager is helping businesses across sectors on the mobile platform deliver a richer customer experience while helping them successfully navigate the app economy.”

“Internet and mobile penetration in India is increasing rapidly, especially within the travel industry,” said Chinmai Sharma, Chief Revenue Officer, Taj Group. “Consumer behavior is changing fast, as customers search and shop on multiple devices and platforms throughout the day for travel research, accommodation ideas and best value. The biggest challenge we faced was how to deliver an immediate online experience that matched the wonderful experiences we were providing to guests at our hotels. Working with Adobe Experience Manager, we were able to leverage data and analytics to develop measurable strategies and tactics that helped us overcome this challenge.”