The Gist
- Unified experiences. Seamless customer journey across all channels ensures consistency with user expectations.
- Personalization imperative. Access to comprehensive customer data is critical for tailoring unique brand experiences.
- Branding with empathy. Embracing anthropomorphism fosters deeper connections, making brands appear more human-like.
LAS VEGAS — Stepping into the professional world right out of college can be a daunting yet thrilling experience, especially when it intersects with the dynamic field of digital commerce. My entry into this arena was marked by invaluable lessons and remarkable milestones, much of which have influenced my insights and experiences regarding CX trends from attending the 2024 Adobe Summit.
Your first job out of college is always exciting and terrifying. For the past four years, you’ve been preparing for the “adult world” — a sort of training for the rest of your life.
In my case, my first job out of school was working in the IT department of a medical device distributor as an ecommerce specialist. My main duty was to help set up and build Magento 1.0 instances for some of our independent pharmacy customers, which wasn’t something I had learned in school. In 2009, the world of digital commerce and customer experience was present but wasn’t a common subject in most undergraduate curricula. This early encounter with CX trends laid the foundation for my career.
So, as you can imagine — being thrown into this type of role right out of school was, well — a bit frightening. Yet, it was an early deep dive into the evolving world of CX trends.
However, one thing that has always remained true to who I am and what I believe in regarding effective business strategy is this: The customer is above all else. In this new role, our business’s customers needed help, and their customers (end-user consumers) needed medical devices for their daily lives. This inspired and motivated me to dive deep into a world I didn’t know, and ties into my growth regarding CX trends.
Another factor that helped me was working with a platform like Magento, which aims to curate content and products tailored to individual customer desires. During my time at this organization, we launched about 30 Magento 1.0 sites for various businesses. Looking back, this period of my life evokes a strong sense of nostalgia and highlights the significant progress both I and the industry have made over the past 14 years, particularly when it comes to evolving CX trends.
As a quick sidebar — in case you aren’t familiar, Adobe acquired Magento in 2018 and rolled the solution into its portfolio of customer experience driven solutions.
Related Article: Adobe’s Big Bet on Generative AI Takes Center Stage at Summit
A Decade of Growth and Insights at the Adobe Summit
It’s remarkable that 14 years later, here I was this week attending Adobe Summit. It’s remarkable that I ran into CMSWire Managing Editor Dom Nicastro, who shares my passion for exceptional customer experience. And it’s remarkable that 14 years later, I’m presenting at Adobe Summit on a new Adobe Commerce healthcare solution that is HIPAA and PHI ready, recently launched by Adobe in collaboration with my organization, Perficient. These experiences highlight the evolution and importance of CX trends in our industry.
I share this because, like the customers you serve with your brand experiences each day, I am always growing and progressing, but still desire experiences that evolve with me. The majority of the people I talked to at the Adobe Summit this year share this common spirit and desire. At the end of the day, they just want to provide customers, people, humans with an unforgettable experience, and meet expectations created by current CX trends.
Related Article: Revolutionizing the Digital Economy: Experience-Led Growth Takes Center Stage
3 CX Trends on the Minds of Adobe Summit Attendees
Here are three CX trends that I’m hearing at Adobe Summit that could help your brand create some full circle moments for your customers:
Unified Customer Experience Touchpoints
I often discuss the concept of “unified commerce,” a supercharged version of omni-channel, if you will. In unified commerce, the customer drives their future experiences through the activity they input across various brand channels. The key point is this: regardless of the channel your customer is using (web, social, in-store, Apple VisionPro), you must provide the experience they desire and keep it consistent with their expectations.
The brands I’ve spoken with at the Adobe Summit all share the desire to stay close to their customers, regardless of the channel. This unified customer experience approach can be daunting, but it’s best to start slowly and focus on areas that will have the most profound impact on your customers — look for the low-hanging fruit.
Turn the Volume up on Personalization
Personalization is only effective if you have the necessary customer data to curate and present content and products unique to the customer’s journey. I can say with profound certainty that 100% of the attendees here at the Adobe Summit want personalization — it’s moved from a nice-to-have to a must-have for all brands.
However, ensuring that you have customer data that can be shared across channels is critical to effective personalization. Before your brand turns up the volume on this approach, I recommend starting with your data teams to determine what customer data you have access to today and where there might be gaps. From there, you’ll be able to fill those gaps and leverage solutions that can digest, share and analyze customer data to better personalize at scale.
Moments of Anthropomorphism
Last year, I wrote an article about the importance of brands tapping into the five senses we all have to build stronger customer experiences and connections. Part of doing this well involves brands incorporating moments of anthropomorphism, which is the process of assigning human-like characteristics to non-human things. We do this all the time with our pets, for example.
Brands can create their own moments of anthropomorphism by fostering dialogue and interaction with their customers. Engaging in posts from followers on Instagram, predicting what someone will need to order and sharing values with their customer base all create moments where the consumer sees the brand not as a transaction engine, but as a friend who truly understands them at their core and knows what they need, when they need it.
Brands attending the Adobe Summit this week sought to build this type of connection with their customers. Doing so will not only increase revenue for brands but, more importantly, enhance levels of customer lifetime value. It allows brands to create customers for life, and, ultimately, create customers who see the brand not just as someone they buy from, but someone they converse and interact with.
More than anything else, brands aspire to have a lasting place in the lives of their customers — just as I’ve had a connection to Adobe (Magento) in one way or another over the last 14 years. For me, coming full circle to present on a product that serves the industry I grew up in creates tangible and relatable nostalgic moments of anthropomorphism (I see what you’re doing here, Adobe).
As humans, we never really know where life will take us; tomorrow is never the same as today. But what we do know is that we all have things that inspire us, drive us, and fill up our proverbial cups, if you will.
As Fred Rogers once said, “There is no person in the world like you, and I like you just the way you are.” Embrace your customers for who they are, what drives them, what inspires them and what fills up their own individualistic cups. If you do, it will always be a wonderful day in the neighborhood between you and your customers, and they will always be OK with you being their neighbor.
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