Hey crew,

Apologies for the late email this week.

My excuse?

I had a few too many 🍻 on Thursday night and didn’t have time to write it 😂 ..

My key takeaway? The Adobe Digital Trends 2023 Report reinforced what I wrote about last week in my CX maturity article - figuring out how to activate first party data is going to differentiate leaders from laggards in the next 2-3 years.

Key Takeaways: Adobe 2023 Digital Trends Report

Before we get into the details, it’s important to understand the logic that Adobe has used to define Leaders VS Laggards within the report:

Leading and lagging organisations are defined based on practitioners’ and senior executives’ responses to a survey question relating to their 2022 company performance versus sector competitors.

• Leaders or leading organisations are senior executives and practitioners who agreed they significantly outperformed their sector in 2022 (20% of all respondents).
  

• Mainstream organisations are defined as senior executives and practitioners that agreed they had either kept pace with their sector or slightly outperformed their sector in 2022 (68% of all respondents).
  

• Laggards or lagging organisations are defined as senior executives and practitioners that agreed they had slightly or significantly underperformed in their sector in 2022 (12% of all respondents).

1 - SURPRISE & DELIGHT - Only 7% of practitioners consider their organisation’s digital CX to be exceptional and able to surprise and delight customers

• 42% of organisations believe their customer experience sometimes falls short of customer needs.

2 - UNSUSTAINABLE GROWTH - 76% of Agency Executives agree their clients focus on short term vanity metrics/revenue goals to determine success

• With the impending changes to third-party cookies, the cost to acquire new customers is going to become significantly more expensive. This is going to require a mindset shift at the Executive level; moving from short-term growth goals towards long-term loyalty tactics.
  

• As Adobe eloquently put it in their report, “to set up for success, organisations must make sure their CX is in the best possible shape to protect the existing customer base and build brand loyalty.”

3 - ACCESS TO INDIVIDUAL CUSTOMER DATA - Almost half of organisations (46%) do not have access to this vital real-time customer data.

• Interestingly, less than a quarter of senior executives consider the real-time activation of customer data a top operational priority in 2023.
  

• MY OPINION 👀: In the next 5 years, industry leaders will be organisations who a) capture more real-time customer data and b) activate this data to drive personalised CX.

4 - INDIVIDUALISATION AT SCALE - Adobe found that only a tiny minority, just 9% of organisations, are currently personalising content based on intent or prediction.

• The report recognises that “even leading organisations are still making their way up the personalisation maturity curve”.
  

• MY OPINION 👀: The Adobe report talks about “AI-fueled predictive modelling & pre-empting behaviour” however I truly think these are buzz words. Individualisation at scale can be achieved in 2 primary ways:

  • By leveraging the previous intent of a certain customer to predict or nudge them towards their future intent.
    

  • By predicting (and steering) the future intent of a customer in accordance to what 1000s of other customers have done in the past.

The concept of personalisation, or individualisation at scale seems to be this “taboo” subject that is seemingly hard to achieve. I personally think people are just not thinking about it as simply as they should be - leverage previous interactions to re-direct future interactions in a better way!

5 - GEN Z WILL DEMAND PERSONALISATION - In a separate Adobe study, 83% of Gen Z respondents said they expected to reap the benefits of personalisation if they shared their preference data with an organisation.

• Furthermore, they expected to reap the benefits of personalisation within a day of providing their preferences. Needy bunch 😳!

6 - DISJOINTED SYSTEMS - Half of the surveyed practitioners and senior executives continue to use multiple technologies for their customer experience operations without a unified platform.

• Disjointed systems makes it extremely difficult for organisations to connect the dots between different customer touch-points.
  

• Connecting the dots between different customer datasets is a critical prerequisite to activating your customer data. The resurgence of physical retail makes this challenge even harder, as there is now a need to connect the dots between “online" and “offline” experiences.
  

• MY OPINION 👀: Connecting the dots of customer data is a key challenge that Executives need to be solving. The issue is that they’re thinking about this the wrong way. Data nerds want to try and consolidate data into one platform (CDPs) to make it “clean”. What Executives should be trying to do instead, is investing into technology which connects the dots between the disparate systems, allowing them to activate this first party data without the need for a CDP.

  • Looking for a solution which does this? Look no further than Medallia Experience Orchestration.

7 - THE METAVERSE - One-third (32%) of senior executives say their organisation is still learning about marketing into the metaverse, while 36% do not believe it will apply to their organisation in 2023.

• Interestingly, McKinsey predicts the metaverse has the potential to generate up to $5 trillion in value by 2030, while private equity and venture capital investments in Web3 deals overall have grown by around 70% per year from 2017-2022.
  

• MY OPINION 👀: I’m still unsure about what the metaverse will bring. The bigger inflection point I’m keeping my eyes on at the moment is conversational AI. I think it is highly likely that the way we a) search for content b) generate content will change dramatically in the next 2-5 years.

Like this content? Share it around + follow me on LinkedIn 👇