Adobe and ServiceNow to Connect Marketing, Customer Service

Customers’ interactions with the brands they favor, and their expectations for relationships with those brands, have changed forever. To be successful today, brands must improve the entire range of customer engagement by better utilizing data about the customer. New, best-in-class digital systems that support the customer experience are the foundation for delivering this information.

For many organizations, the biggest barrier to improvement is the persistence of siloed systems and apps, each holding one small data set that is aligned with a single, small component of the overall customer experience. Customers become frustrated with brands that don’t seem to know anything about them even after multiple interactions, all because the information gathered from those interactions is spread over many different marketing and customer service platforms.

Adobe and ServiceNow are taking a giant step forward to solve this problem by announcing the integration of Adobe Experience Platform and ServiceNow’s Customer Service Management (CSM) product. This integration aligns marketing and CSM systems with consistent and comprehensive information shared between the two. The need for such integration has become clearer than ever during the current pandemic.

Adobe, whose latest market cap is upwards of $165 billion, more than the market caps for IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce, helps brands remain wired for this digital-only reality.

 “Adobe’s mission to change the world through digital experiences has never been more relevant or powerful,” said Amit Ahuja, vice president for ecosystem development at Adobe.

Using bidirectional information sharing for marketing and CSM systems enables brands to deliver much better overall customer engagement, with consistency and continuity that aren’t otherwise possible. This integration empowers Adobe’s real-time customer profiles with more information and delivers broader input for ServiceNow’s customer service platform. In the “new normal” brought about by the coronavirus crisis, this integration is essential.

“As the leader in intelligent transformation, Lenovo understands that it needs to be a cross-organizational effort,” said Paul Walsh, global chief digital officer at Lenovo. “Leveraging Adobe and ServiceNow, we are looking forward to aligning our marketing and customer service organizations even more closely to engage customers with more intelligent, data-driven, and contextual interactions.”

The integration provides brands with tangible benefits that drive business success. Three of the most common use cases are:

• Improving the customer experience: Data that combines customer service and web activities delivers a seamless customer experience with consistency, more relevant content/offers, and information that’s in the right context for the moment. Combining the data detailing what customers own or use into their web activities, which indicate desires or needs, results in a level of intimacy that stands apart from competitors.
• Gaining deeper insight to improve personalization: With a more thorough understanding of the customer journey, it’s possible to deliver personalization at scale. Joining Adobe Experience Platform and ServiceNow Customer Service Management streamlines both workflow and data sharing between teams and apps. It’s now possible to build rich, real-time customer profiles that enable personalization.
• Using better context to increase brand loyalty: Put simply, empowering both humans and systems with comprehensive customer experience information ensures the right context for every interaction. This is obvious to customers and improves brand loyalty. Customers naturally gravitate to brands that “know” them. An unfocused web experience or the need to spend time with a customer service agent annoys customers and reflects poorly on the brand.

Connecting Adobe Experience Platform with ServiceNow’s Customer Service Management product will enhance the customer experience by integrating web and customer service activities. It’s an important step toward developing a comprehensive customer perspective that makes real personalization possible.