Adobe Content Platform Banks On Boosting Customer Experience

Adobe has rolled out a new set of tools for businesses to help create, manage, and monitor digital content for multiple channels of delivery.

Adobe's Digital Enterprise Platform for Customer Experience Management (CEM) is based on Adobe's LiveCycle and CRX products. It's a modular framework that facilitates the management and deployment of Adobe technologies like Flash, AIR, and Reader, open standards like HTML5, development tools like Flash Builder and Flex, and marketing tools like Adobe's Online Marketing Suite. It aims to be the one-stop shop for assembling and overseeing mobile, print, social, and web content.

"The Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform provides a complete foundation for enterprises to truly engage with customers at every point of interaction, through solutions that are easier to use, more effective and productive, and more apt to delight the customer and promote brand loyalty," said Rob Tarkoff, SVP and general manager of Adobe's digital enterprise solutions group, in a statement.

Tarfkoff asserts that being able "to deliver superior customer experiences has become the imperative in achieving competitive advantage." However, it's hard to imagine a past in which businesses could prosper by delivering inferior customer experiences.

Customer Experience Management is simply the latest jargon that encapsulates the need to deliver functional, well-designed applications and content. Melissa Webster, program VP for content and digital media technologies at IDC, said in a statement that businesses need a range of solutions that accommodate customer needs and keep customers happy.

This has always been the case. What's different is that now Adobe has a platform for doing just that, a platform that promises to unify content and application delivery in a way that's meaningful for enterprises.

T-Mobile recently created a rich Internet application for its customer service operation using Adobe Flex, AIR for the runtime client, and LiveCycle on the back-end. The goal was to make something that tied together its existing systems and was easy for the mobile carrier's customer service representatives to use. The result, said Scott Tweedy, VP of customer service at T-Mobile, in a video, was an application that helped unlock the potential of T-Mobile's workforce.

"Everybody sells phones, everybody has retail locations," said Tweedy of his competitors. "But it's that customer experience that you have when you interact with the customer that's going to differentiate you in the marketplace."

The Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform offers several template solutions designed for specific business problems. Among others, these include: Web Experience Management, which encompasses web content management, mobile content delivery, web analytics, and content personalization; Selection and Enrollment, which includes tools for guiding customers with wizard-based templates and workflow automation; and Unified Workplace, which provides tools for accessing customer information collected from multiple sources for more efficient service.

In conjunction with its Digital Enterprise Platform announcement, Adobe released Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5, which now allow developers to build applications for iPhone, iPad, and BlackBerry PlayBook, in addition to Android. The updated software won't run Flash on iOS devices, but it will convert Flash content so that it will run as a native application.

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