Adobe announces entrance into customer experience management market

Adobe is making its first foray into the customer experience management space by releasing an enterprise ‘web experience management’ offering that is intended to boost consumer acquisition and engagement.

The vendor has integrated the Day Software’s Software-as-a-Service-based CQ5 web content management software that it acquired last year with its Online Marketing Suite and the Omniture analytics system that it purchased in 2009. The goal is to enable users to target personalised content at customers across multiple channels, including mobile and the social web, in a bid to increase sales conversion rates.

Neil Morgan, Adobe Enterprise’s marketing director, said: "This is the first of a number of announcements that we’ll make during the course of this year, but today we’re announcing our entry into the CEM market and our vision for CEM. Our first product is focused on web experience management, which provides the basis for people to do multi-channel personalisation."

He claimed that the vendor was the first to create a single integrated suite that connected "behavioural data with content and targeting". Up until this point, customers had to "buy systems and tie them together themselves, which is not trivial", he added.

Additional offerings in complementary CEM areas such as customer on-boarding are also expected follow in the third quarter of this year, and in 2012 there will be announcements focused on the vendor's CEM platform and the cloud.

"The aim is to work our way down through the customer lifecycle, focusing on the experience, on how efficient the process is, how well you communicate and how personalised and consistent across channels and time it is," Morgan said.

The first announced customer to employ the new system, meanwhile, is Waitrose. It has spent £10 million on a new ecommerce environment based on CQ5, which will be launched under the Waitrose.com brand in the second week of March.

The platform will replace the retailer’s Waitrose Direct online grocery site and is intended to provide a "contemporary and intuitive" experience across all of the retailer’s online channels, which include Waitrose Entertaining.

The aim is also to provide ‘personal touch’ functionality that will, for example, enable consumers to make specific requests to a personal shopper who will be responsible for selecting their purchases.