Adobe named a leader in Forrester DXP Wave 2021

Adobe has been named a leader in the recently released report, The Forrester Wave: Digital Experience Platforms, Q3 2021. We believe this recognition validates Adobe’s vision and mission to change the world through digital experiences. And as importantly, we feel it recognizes the value that Adobe’s multi-year investment to re-imagine customer experience management with a purpose-built platform is driving for customers.

Changing the world through digital experiences has been Adobe’s north star for over three decades. In today’s post-pandemic world, that mission is more relevant than ever as companies face a renewed urgency for digital transformation. Over the past year, digital became a primary, or in some cases, only channel to engage customers. It drove a lasting shift in how customers think, interact, buy, work and relate to brands and the world at large.

Definitions are important

Forrester defines digital experience platforms as, “A platform that provides the architectural foundation and modular services for developers and practitioners to create, orchestrate, and optimize digital journeys at scale — to drive loyalty and new commerce outcomes across owned and third-party channels.”

This definition aligns with our vision and mission because we see the digital customer experience as the connective tissue between the end-to-end customer journey: from discovery and engagement to purchase and ongoing value realization.

Here’s the Forrester report’s take on our approach:

“Adobe leads with the strongest portfolio and an evolving cloud-native strategy”.

Adobe serves customers like Helly Hansen, Swisscom, and Walgreens Boots Alliance, with a bigger presence in retail, high tech, and manufacturing/consumer goods. Adobe offers solutions to address both marketing teams’ needs across creative, demand generation, and acquisition and also technical teams’ needs to integrate customer data and touchpoints with enterprise sales and support stacks. Adobe continues to refactor its acquired products to use the shared services of the Adobe Experience Platform.

Compared with other vendors we evaluated, Adobe shows strength in testing and optimization, digital commerce, and customer profile and segmentation. It also has strength in developer tools and support, integration tools, and platform operations. Reference customers told us that they like easy-to-use analytics tools that help marketers that aren’t as analytical, but would welcome improvements in integrating its products. One reference said, ’We needed something to replace so many individual technologies — so it had to be someone that had everything.’ Adobe is a good fit for global organizations needing integrated experience components and a real-time customer data platform (CDP) that supports local teams.”

Adobe is on a quest to power digital businesses because the core of any customer experience transformation powered by digital requires a platform that spans the end-to-end customer journey, integrating front-end and back-end applications and technologies that allow the organization to manage and tailor customer interactions and experiences specifically to each customer.

Forrester performs a comprehensive and detailed analysis of vendors’ DXP capabilities. The Adobe Experience Platform received the highest scores possible in 19 criteria, including:

Platform Services 5.0
Campaign Management 5.0
Digital Commerce 5.0
Content Creation 5.0
Content Hub 5.0
Customer Profile + Segmentation 5.0
Customer Identity + Access 5.0
Customer Analytics 5.0
Customer Journey Mgmt 5.0
Automation + AI 5.0

Our strategy

Adobe Experience Cloud Applications and Adobe Experience Platform are powering the next generation of customer experience management.

For example, Customer Journey Analytics was one of several new apps developed natively on Experience Platform. It is bundled with Experience Platform services that enable consumption of channel-specific data from across your enterprise, to manage governance and usage policies for that data, and to enable data preparation with query and identity resolution capabilities. From there, omnichannel views are formed that can be analyzed within the Customer Journey Analytics analysis workspace.

As customers adopt additional platform-native applications, workflows and services are seamlessly integrated because they are built using the same shared services provided by Adobe Experience Platform. This makes the applications easier to use and implement, while allowing us to innovate at a more rapid cadence.

We are on a multi-year journey to progressively evolve Adobe Experience Cloud. And Adobe Experience Platform adds value to customers’ existing investments while also enabling them to evolve at a pace that is right for their needs, and their unique business dynamics.

Adobe is unique in developing a platform and applications to drive a more seamless offering, efficient and extensible real-time services, and the ability to address multiple personas on the same integrated platform.

Making experience your business is GOOD for business

Adobe recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct two studies, one on the business results of a focused customer experience (CX) offering and the other on the total economic impact (TEI) of investing in Adobe Experience Cloud.

The findings bear out that brands that make CXM their number one priority are realizing improved customer and business results, including increased revenue per customer, increased customer satisfaction, better customer engagement, better understanding and ability to address customer issues, and longer customer relationships.

And just as exciting, the Forrester TEI study shows the aggregate ROI of investing in Adobe Experience Cloud is 250 percent over 3 years.

Check out the Forrester Digital Experience Platforms Wave report for yourself and learn more about how Adobe Experience Platform can benefit your business.