The recent Forrester Customer Experience Summit in Nashville was a powerful reminder that customer experience (CX) is no longer a standalone function, it’s the connective tissue of modern business. From keynote sessions to hands-on workshops, one message resonated loud and clear: sustainable growth belongs to organizations that align brand, technology, and empathy to deliver experiences that are both meaningful and measurable.

One of the most compelling themes to emerge was the rise of Total Experience (TX)—a strategic fusion of brand, customer, employee, and digital experience. TX isn’t about doing everything; it’s about doing what matters most and doing it exceptionally well. It’s a shift from fragmented initiatives to a unified approach that drives both acquisition and retention.

What sets TX leaders apart? They understand what truly matters to their customers—and they act on it. According to Forrester, only a small fraction of businesses have a deep, actionable understanding of customer priorities. Yet those that do are pulling ahead, creating differentiated value and building loyalty in ways that competitors struggle to replicate.

Throughout the summit, themes like AI-powered personalization, intelligent creativity, and outcome-based design surfaced repeatedly. But these innovations were always grounded in human insight. Whether it was rethinking how we fund innovation, mapping journeys that move people, or building intelligent experiences that act with empathy, the focus was on creating value that feels personal, purposeful, and scalable.

For senior leaders, the implications are clear: TX is not a trend—it’s a transformation. It requires breaking down silos, investing in cross-functional collaboration, and embedding empathy into every touchpoint. It’s about designing experiences that not only meet expectations but elevate them.

If your organization isn’t currently presenting a Total Experience strategy to your customers, now is the time to assess the health of your business. Are your brand and CX teams aligned? Are your digital investments driving emotional connection as well as operational efficiency? Are you measuring what matters?

Our team of experts can help you evaluate your current experience strategy and identify opportunities to create more connected, customer-centric growth.

Contact us to get started.

In Adobe’s 2025 AI and Digital Trends report, one message rings loud and clear: the convergence of marketing and IT is essential to digital success. As AI becomes increasingly embedded in customer experience strategies, marketing and IT leaders must collaborate closely to unlock its full potential.

The Rise of Agentic AI

One of the most transformative ideas in the report is the rise of agentic AI, autonomous systems that collaborate across platforms to deliver hyper-personalized, real-time experiences. For marketing and IT leaders, this represents a major shift. These aren’t just tools, but strategic partners capable of transforming how content is created, optimized, and delivered at scale.

This shift is already being realized in the field, as industry leaders begin to harness the power of Agentic AI to streamline operations and enhance customer outcomes. For example, Perficient’s Adobe services delivery team is leveraging the technology to make AEM as a Cloud Service migrations faster.

“The emergence of Agentic AI is revolutionizing our service delivery, delivering significant time and effort savings for our customers. Take the move to AEM Cloud, for instance. We’re leveraging agents to handle tasks like code remediation and complex mapping for advanced content migrations into AEM,” says Robert Sumner, principal in Perficient’s Adobe practice.

As organizations explore these capabilities, the collaboration between marketing and IT becomes even more critical. IT leaders must ensure the infrastructure is in place to support real-time data flow and AI orchestration, while marketers must rethink workflows to fully leverage AI’s creative and analytical potential.

Nearly two-thirds (65%) of senior executives identify leveraging AI and predictive analytics as primary contributors to growth in 2025. (Adobe 2025 Digital Trends report)

Seamless, Personalized Experiences

The report also highlights a growing emphasis on predictive analytics. Businesses are moving beyond reactive strategies to proactively anticipate customer needs. This shift is enabling more meaningful, real-time interactions across the customer journey.

For marketing leaders, this means moving beyond historical performance metrics to real-time, forward-looking insights. For IT, it means ensuring the data infrastructure is robust, integrated, and accessible across teams. However, many organizations still struggle with siloed systems and fragmented data, which hinder their ability to deliver seamless experiences.

Ross Monaghan, principal in Perficient’s Adobe practice, underscores this point by highlighting how leading organizations are turning data into action through AI-powered strategies.

“We don’t have a shortage of data. The challenge lies in consuming it, unifying it, and activating it in real time to deliver personalized, one-to-one experiences that meet the demands of consumers. Organizations that are winning are already leveraging predictive bidding, dynamic budget allocation, and channel mix modelling to optimize media buying. They’re also developing AI-driven audience clusters based on behavior, intent, or psychographics to improve targeting precision. By training models on past customer behavior, they can predict which leads are most likely to convert. The possibilities are endless if you embrace the power of what AI can bring to the table. AI isn’t here to replace us, it’s here to eliminate the thousands of hours spent on manual tasks, chasing insights that may or may not exist in fragmented data,” says Monaghan.

Efficient, accurate, and personalized experiences all start with secure and reliable data. Learn More

Breaking Down Silos to Boost Adoption

The customer journey is increasingly owned by a mix of marketers, technologists, and CX specialists. And while this diversity brings valuable perspectives, it can also lead to friction and inefficiencies. Marketing needs IT to deliver scalable, secure, and flexible platforms. IT needs marketing to define the customer vision and drive innovation. The report suggests that aligning these teams around shared goals and metrics is essential for success and the ability to deliver seamless, personalized experiences.

Monaghan says, “Organizations must continue to view everything through the lens of the customer. That means breaking down internal silos, politics, and bureaucracy. Customers don’t care who owns the data or whether it sits with IT or marketing. What matters is that we come together to identify key audiences, mapping core personas and journeys, and developing dynamic use cases that guide each user through a personalized experience. We then can analyze the effectiveness of content, offers, and sentiment to drive customer lifetime value at scale.”

Ensuring Responsible AI Deployment

The report also addresses the ethical dimensions of AI. Issues like data privacy, algorithmic bias, and transparency are top of mind for both marketing and IT leaders. Building trust with customers requires more than compliance. It demands intentional governance. IT leaders must implement frameworks for responsible AI use, while marketers must ensure that personalization efforts respect user boundaries and values.

The Time to Act is Now

Adobe’s 2025 report is both a roadmap and a call to action for marketing and IT leaders. The future belongs to organizations that can harness AI not just as a tool, but as a strategic enabler, bridging creativity and technology to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Digital experience enhancements, shifting social norms, and evolving attitudes around the role of technology in everyday life are changing customer expectations when it comes to how, when and where people engage with your brand, services and products. Is your organization prepared for success in this rapidly changing landscape? These customer experience trends are what we think we’ll see in 2023.

1. Make It Personal – Personalization in User Experience

Personalization in UX design refers to the customization of a product or service to meet the individual needs and preferences of a user. This can include personalized recommendations, customized content, and personalized interactions with a brand.

Why Should You Care:
Personalization has been a key trend in UX design for several years, with the adoption of personalization strategies increasing rapidly over the last few years, and with good reason. A recent study by Epsilon found that 80% of consumers were more likely to purchase from a brand that provided personalized experiences, and 90% of consumers expect personalization as a standard part of the customer experience.

High-level Implications for Brands:
Personalization in UX design has significant implications for brands. Personalization can help brands improve customer engagement and satisfaction, leading to increased customer loyalty and higher conversion rates. Brands that fail to provide personalized experiences may risk losing customers to competitors that do.

To take advantage of this trend, brands should consider implementing personalization strategies into their UX design. This can include collecting data on customer preferences and using this data to personalize content, recommendations, and interactions with the brand. Brands should also consider using AI and machine learning technologies to automate and optimize the personalization process.

2. Connecting the Dots – Meeting Omni-Channel Expectations

Omni-channel customer experiences refer to the seamless integration of a brand’s various touchpoints, such as its’ website, physical stores, social media, and mobile apps, to provide customers with a consistent and cohesive experience across all channels. The goal of omni-channel experiences is to create a fluid and uninterrupted journey for customers, regardless of the channel they are interacting with.

Why Should You Care:
There is significant growth and adoption of omni-channel experiences largely driven by customer expectations. In fact, a recent study found 77% of customers said that the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services, and 73% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and preferences across all channels.

But the value of creating omni-channel experiences reaches far beyond meeting customer expectations, it directly impacts an organization’s bottom line. Harvard Business Review recently reported that companies that excel at omni-channel customer experiences see a 9.5% year-over-year increase in customer retention and a 14.4% increase in sales per customer.

High-level Implications for Brands:
For brands, implementing an omni-channel strategy can have a significant impact on customer experience. It allows brands to provide a more personalized and efficient experience for customers by using data collected across all channels to create a more complete understanding of the customer. Additionally, it allows for more seamless transitions between channels, such as being able to start a purchase on a mobile app and then complete it on a website or in a physical store.

However, implementing an omni-channel strategy also requires significant investments in technology and infrastructure, as well as changes in organizational structure and processes.

Overall, omni-channel customer experience is crucial for brands to stay competitive in today’s market as it’s clear customers are looking for a more holistic, cohesive and personalized experience. Brands that can deliver on this expectation tend to see significant improvements in retention and sales.

3. Payment on The Go – Mobile Payments and Mobile Wallet

A mobile wallet is a virtual or digital version of a physical wallet that allows users to store and use their payment cards, coupons, and other information electronically, and mobile payments refer to the use of mobile devices to make transactions, such as buying goods and services or sending money to others. These two technologies combined have created a new era of both commerce and Peer to Peer payments.

Why Should You Care:
Mobile wallet and mobile payments have revolutionized the way consumers make transactions and interact with brands, and both are rapidly growing and evolving, with the global mobile wallet market expected to reach $4.41 billion by 2023, and the total value of mobile payments expected to reach $3 trillion by 2023. This growth in mobile payments in particular is driven by an increase in the adoption of the technology by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the increasing popularity of peer-to-peer (P2P) payments.

Additionally, consumer adoption keeps growing, in fact Business Insider Intelligence estimates that the number of mobile wallet users worldwide will reach 2.3 billion this year, that’s a quarter of the world’s population.

High-level Implications for Brands:
The growth and adoption of mobile wallet and mobile payments are creating new opportunities for brands to enhance the customer experience and build a more robust understanding of their customer across buying channels. Brands can benefit from the massive growth in these spaces by integrating mobile payments into their apps or websites to speed up the checkout process, and by leveraging geolocation and push notifications to promote personalized and targeted offers to customers both online and in-store.

4. Talk to Me – Leveraging Voice UI

Voice UI, or Voice User Interface, refers to the use of voice commands and speech recognition technology to interact with devices and applications. This can include things like virtual assistants (such as Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant), voice-controlled smart home devices, and voice-enabled mobile apps.

Why Should You Care:
According to a report by Grand View Research, the global voice recognition market size was valued at $14.6 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 21.1% from 2020 to 2027. This growth is largely driven by the increasing penetration of smart devices and the growing use of virtual assistants.

And consumer adopting is also growing rapidly, Capgemini Research Institute found that 38% of consumers now use voice assistants at least once a day, and the overall number of users of voice assistants has grown by more than 130 million in just two years.

High-level Implications for Brands:
As for the customer experience implications, the use of Voice UI can offer many benefits for brands – primarily making it easier for customers to engage with brands and find the information they need through a more conversational, engaging experience. This ease of use leads to increased brand awareness, customer satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty. Moreover, Voice UI is also a great accessibility tool for those with mobility issues or reading difficulty, providing a more inclusive, participatory experience.

5. Open To All – Accessibility as a UX Foundation

Digital accessibility in User Experience (UX) design considers how your target audiences will use your application or website, and with what technologies, languages, abilities, and even in what location they might be at the time. That’s why it’s important to make user experiences inclusive – a design process in which the needs of people with different abilities are specifically considered.

Why Should You Care:
Millions of people rely on easily accessing information and performing daily tasks on the internet. But users living with disabilities face increased barriers to accessing the same information because the typical design of websites, videos, podcasts, and mobile apps do not perform as needed on their devices.

Now there is a growing body of research highlighting the importance of accessibility in UX design. According to a 2020 study by the World Health Organization, approximately 15% of the world’s population lives with some form of disability. In fact, in the United States alone persons with disabilities have $500 billion in spending power, with global spending power estimated to be $1.2 trillion. Companies making online accessibility a priority are poised to capture their share of this outsized consumer segment with choice. This is in large part because 71% of people with disabilities will leave a website that isn’t accessible.

In addition, when companies are accommodating to this market, they improve customer experience, strengthen customer relations, and help foster brand loyalty.

High-level Implications for Brands:
Since 2020 more brands are competing for this outsized global consumer segment of 1.85 billion people with 1.9 trillion in annual disposable income. For example, retailers have begun to identify the need to explore new ways of thinking about the intersection of business, disability and increased profitability. According to Forbes, multinational giant Wal-Mart expanded its diversity and inclusion initiatives when it formed its Accessibility Center of Excellence in May 2021.

Opportunities are rising for inclusive brands. Brands that prioritize accessibility in their UX design can improve the customer experience for all web users, both with and without disabilities, and gain a competitive edge in the market. It also improves the inclusivity and diversity of overall customer base and benefits all age groups. Making a product or experience easier to use for users on the margins tends to improve usability to for all.

Overall, accessibility in UX design is an increasingly essential foundational element in the industry as more and more companies recognize the benefits and potential business opportunities it presents.

The Different and Next Generations of Digital Consumers

Rock n roll vs. big band, grunge vs. pop – these music styles divided generations. Perhaps an even greater generational divide has grown around technology. Technology has been called The Great Equalizer, but while technology is available to anyone, it clearly shows the divide between generations.

Baby Boomers (born 1946 – 1964), Generation X (b. 1965 -1980), and most Millennials (b. 1980 – 1996) remember life without personal computers and cellphones. They have had to learn and adapt as technology became available and a part of our daily lives. While all living generations now have access to the same tech, they aren’t using it in the same ways and have different expectations for their experiences with technology.

The next generations have interacted with technology all their lives and are the new customer generation. How are you planning to serve them as digital consumers? Let’s take a dive into their relationship with technology.

Generation Z (b. 1997 – 2010)

• They grew up while social media was really forming.
  • YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006), Pinterest (2010), etc.
• They are pragmatic and shrewd
• They prioritize purpose over a paycheck.
• They expect to be communicated with in a personal and relatable way.
• They expect authenticity and
• They prefer visual

Over the last twenty years, we’ve witnessed social media take hold and begin changing how the world works – impacting daily life, politics, entertainment, and so much more. Gen Z grew up with social media when it was forming. They observed the world around them changing even though they didn’t understand it. Now they search for deeper meaning in their interactions, from social media to online purchases.

For example, while Gen X may feel more inclined to think about what they’re getting from technology, Gen Z is more interested in its meaning and purpose and the companies it comes from. Gen Z uses meaning to drive their decisions. They want interactions to be personable and relatable and expect authenticity and purpose.

They prefer visual communications. After all, they were the selfie generation, taking and posting pictures of themselves and the food they were eating. Older generations saw this trend and said, “taking pictures of your food, who cares about that?” Gen Z grew up in a more disconnected world where such photos were a way to reach out and communicate, ultimately making a more personal and meaningful communication by sharing their world and introducing themselves to their surroundings through selfies.

Generation Alpha (b. 2011 – 2025)

• Considered the first fully digital
• They are accustomed to having immediate access to information and media
  • Lecturing and old models of learning will be obsolete.
  • No sense in “owning” media like tapes, CDs, DVDs, etc.
    Not even digital “collections” like an iPod or a Spotify collection.
  • All content is on demand.
• 65% of Alphas will have jobs that don’t yet exist.
• Increased interest in personalization, humanized messaging, and social shopping.
• Greatly prefer video-based content.
• Expected to be the wealthiest, most highly-educated, and technologically-connected group to date.

Generation Alpha is often called the first fully digital generation. Consider that the iPhone was first released in 2007 and social media exploded in the early 2000s. Their world is completely different than that of previous generations. They have had immediate access to media and information. Watching live TV is a totally foreign concept to them, as are traditionally disruptive commercial breaks.

Generation Alpha’s use of technology and consumption of different forms of media is drastically different from previous generations. Old ways of learning are completely out the window. They are used to EVERYTHING being in the digital realm, so purchasing items like DVDs isn’t relevant to them. They take Gen Z’s preference for visual communication to the next level, as Gen Alpha prefers video-based content.

Perhaps the most mind-boggling thing is that the majority of Gen Alphas will work in jobs that don’t even exist yet.

Both Gen Z and Gen Alpha want technology to cater to them. They expect a personalized experience that speaks to their core values and intrinsic desires. These expectations will shape the future of technology, with that technology, in turn, shaping the future.

Read the next blog in this series – The Future is Now.

It’s the beginning of the year and there is no shortage of “Top Digital Trends” articles describing all the ways organizations need to be heads up to the next big thing in digital if they don’t want their expenses to increase and profits shrink. These articles are full of valuable information. Some of it may even be immediately actionable, but having read my fair share of these articles I can report there are no fewer than 100 digital trends an organization could start diverting resources to if they wanted to try and stay ahead of the curve. But what should you pay attention to? What’s real? Who has the answers? Ask your customers.
In March, I’m speaking at the annual SPECS, The Forefront of Physical Retail, conference in Dallas, Texas, and the topic of my discussion is titled “Trends that Keep Retailers Up at Night.” It’s meant to highlight all the digital trends retailers can start infusing into their physical presence. The problem is, I only have 50 minutes and I needed to decide what I thought were the most important “phygital” trends to discuss. The reality is it’s going to differ for every organization depending on their maturity and progress on their digital transformation continuum. However, there IS a simple methodology any organization can use to think about and prioritize cross-channel digital trends they deem actionable – talk to your customers.
Taking the time to speak to your customers will give you valuable insights on what they think is important and how you can garner their loyalty, but I’ve found a lot of brands short-change this type of direct interaction. Through years of customer research and 1:1 interviews, I continue to find customer feedback falls into one of five themes I call “The Five Customer Commandments.” Understanding these themes and organizing customer feedback into them can help an organization think about how to take action on trends across digital and physical channels.

The Five Customer Commandments

• You will not make me work hard to be a customer
• You will reward me for my loyalty
• You will listen to me and personalize my experience
• You will protect my personal information and my privacy
• You will practice good corporate social responsibility

Again, specific initiatives to address these commandments will look different in every organization, but by thinking about how these trends are reflected in both the digital and physical spaces of an organization, teams can start devising which trends are applicable to their customers and growth goals. Below are some examples of how trend-based initiatives addressing The Five Customer Commandments translate across digital and physical channels.

You will not make me work hard to be a customer

Digital Example: Easy to browse products, easy to search products, relevant search results, and ease and speed of online checkout.
Physical Example: A simple example is offering Apple Pay or Chase Pay at the register. More advanced thinking is rooted in customer goals when they visit a physical location. Sephora does a good job at this with a very low-tech approach, offering color-coded shopping baskets for shoppers to indicate to sales associates whether “I would like to be assisted!” or “I would like to shop on my own.”

You will reward me for my loyalty

Digital Example: Native apps with integrated loyalty programs or additional shopping or content features available only within the app.
Physical Example: Geo-fenced or location-specific perks or experiences when in a store. Madewell does a great job with this concept offering members of their “Insider” program free product monogramming on certain products while they wait, whether they purchased online or in store.

You will listen to me and personalize my experience

Digital Example: Live chat, chat bots, AI-driven product recommendations based on click stream and order history data.
Physical Example: Allowing customers to interact with a physical location while sitting on their couch. Lilly Pulitzer recently implemented a “Connect with a Stylist” feature that allows customers to select their store and launch a live conversation with a stylist in that store. This allows customers to get product recommendations, set up appointments, start a fitting room, or just get advice from a live person in that store and transact how they choose, the end result being a trusted personal connection to a store, a stylist, and a brand. (Disclosure, I was the VP of Digital Commerce at Lilly Pulitzer when this feature was launched.)

You will protect my personal information and my privacy

Digital Example: Increasing in importance with even the least tech-savvy customers, privacy-enabling features, usually within “My Account,” can give a customer the ability to see data collected about their interactions with a brand and self-service tools to export or delete that data.
Physical Example: Privacy by Design. This is a broad set of principles that is channel agnostic and organizations are starting to tackle how it applies to physical locations. Important considerations for brands include implementation and consent of in-store Wi-Fi services, data collection, and usage of any Bluetooth/beacon technologies, and video meant to capture customer traffic and behavior patterns. As concerns around consumer privacy and data usage rise, any organization should take a step back and understand where they sit in their Privacy by Design application and maturity.

You will practice good corporate social responsibility

Digital and Physical Examples:
There’s an adage that says something like, “If you have to claim you ARE something, you’re probably not.” This doesn’t apply to communicating about corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities within an organization. Customers want to hear how brands are contributing to their community and will reward them for it.
With 87% of consumers apt to purchase a product if the company supports something they care about, according to a recent Cone Communications survey, the recommendation is if you are participating in any CSR initiative, make it transparent. Online, offline, wherever – it’s important to your customers.
REI is a poster child for CSR storytelling, making their stance known during Black Friday across digital and physical channels. Companies like Everlane do a great job communicating CSR initiatives across channels, from clear language on their eCommerce product detail pages to language on their product hang tags that include the story around their policy of transparency.
Organization leaders are often focused on the day-to-day challenges that exist and are not able to see the proverbial forest for the trees. Using The Five Customer Commandments to assess and prioritize actions will not only allow companies to address trends head-on, but do it in a customer-centric way, which is the uber digital transformation trend.

I had the pleasure of attending an Adobe Café in NYC earlier last week. The Cafés are a series of workshops Adobe is hosting for its partners. This one in particular was specifically geared towards business development in the financial services industry.
Christopher Young, director of industry strategy and marketing for financial services at Adobe, presented some great statistics on the retail banking industry. In a recent industry poll, one question pertained to digital marketing strategy plans. This is an industry traditionally built on one-to-one relationships, and one that still relies on offline interactions to drive sales. Study results showed the biggest concern was how to keep those relational benefits alive in a digital space.
As a whole, the survey showed companies plan to increase their digital spend by 22%. Where do they plan to invest, exactly?

• 42% will increase spend on content marketing
• 42% will invest more in analytics
• 41% will invest in personalization
• 39% will increase spend in social media

The industry standard is to see an increase of 16% in digital sales per year driven by the increases in these digital spaces. As a result of the increased digital spend, they will also decrease spend in the following areas to achieve their digital goals.
Decrease spend in:

• Display 11%
• Paid search 8%
• Webinars/virtual events 7%
• Social media 6%
• Video ads 5%

The retail banking industry is also keenly aware that acquiring new customers (or new accounts for existing customers) is happening in the mobile space. Mobile will play an ever expanding role in acquisition.
Mobile plans:

• 87% indicate mobile will be an equal or higher source of new accounts origination in next three years
• 19% say mobile will be primary source of new accounts origination
• 59% will extend analytics to their mobile app

In the ever disruptive world of the digital space, retail banking is at a crossroads, but are navigating their way to drive sales through digital channels. If they can continue to leverage first-party data with their customer’s digital behavior thus improving real time personalization, they will begin growing sales and acquiring new customers and accounts like they did back when business was conducted one on one.
 
Lynn Brading
Director of Alliances
Adobe | Rackspace | Google

Integration is king; long live integration. In some ways, this may be one of the more obvious trends. If you want to deliver a great customer experience, you have to both know something about this person interacting with you and provide key transaction(s). Both of these elements drive the need for integration. Let me give you a couple examples:

Energy Utility

In a very competitive market, this utility wanted to add additional sales channels. In speaking to one prime partner the conversation went something like this:

Utility: We love what you’re doing and want to work with you. We think a partnership with you and your site would benefit us both.

Partner: We’d love to but first we have to ask whether you have an API or SDK that will make integration easy. Do you have those available and surfaced outside your firewall?

Utility: Well, not yet. It’s in our road map and we will definitely address it in the next year……..

Partner: Talk to us in the next year when you have the API ready.

The conversation didn’t go exactly like that but everyone wants to integrate and no one wants all the extra effort to do a one off integration.

Large Hospital

Has delivered a new mobile application with the patient portal embedded.  Also plans to deliver wayfinding, appointment scheduling, and other key features. The key challenge: lack of a secure api available outside the firewall.  Of course, it’s on the 2017 road map and will be addressed but everyone knows it’s important.

The Case for Integration

From just two examples, you see the case for integration. Customers demand a personalized experience and the ability to transact regardless of channel.  This drives integration capabilities.  Of course, in today’s modern world, we no longer think of integration as simply an internally facing ESB. Now you need the following:

1. Available outside the firewall
2. Secure: only the correct external entities can call the API
3. Scalable: able to scale to meet the need
4. Not so scalable: Able to shut off when key partners, customers, etc use too much of your resources
5. Easy to use: Web Services are out. RESTful and micro-services are in

Provide this type of integration to your data, transactions and content and you just created a pipeline to innovation.

No one should be surprised that cloud continues to be a trend in 2017 and beyond.  The fact is that Digital Transformation requires exactly the features that cloud provides.  Forrester has a nice quote that I think summarizes the value we need:

Many I&O technology investments fail to deliver true business value through great customer experiences. A BT agenda emphasizes technology investments to deliver superior customer experiences, thus giving the business genuine competitive differentiation. Few I&O investments are as critical to that as cloud computing. I&O leaders invest in cloud because it is:

• Fast: You can use cloud services to deliver technology-enabled services in minutes, not days or weeks. You can make changes to these services just as quickly.
• Empowering: The business gets self-service solutions that don’t require the specialized skills of your technologists.
• Economical: Cloud is not always cheaper, but its transparency and flexibility can help you avoid costly, long-lasting capital expenditures. You pay only for what you need, when you need it.

So let me focus on a few examples that shed light on this.

Large Hospital

We work with a well known hospital undertaking their own digital journey. This journey includes a need to increase the velocity of change.   To that end, their strategy focuses on mobile, social, and web customer experience enhancements.  They need to do that to remain relevant and because their most well known competitors aren’t slowing down either.  These changes demand a variety of new systems.  For each, we see a demand for either new infrastructure and services or a cloud based approach.  In talking to a variety of mobile, social, and digital experience providers, each has a cloud based solution that has allowed this hospital to get their new social and analytics capabilities up and running quickly.  They are looking at a much enhanced web experience where a cloud based solution will means months of time savings and will more quickly allow their business team to create the experience.

Benefits:

1. Fast: this includes time saving across a number of systems
2. Empowering: IT has gladly ceded the business elements of running these systems.  The business has more information
3. Economical: This is probably the least powerful element in this example because this hospital focused on the previous two. That said, our ROI analysis shows cost savings compared to having to roll their own infrastructure for each of these systems.

Transportation Company

We helped a transportation company relaunch several web sites and mobile applications. This included a variety

of systems over a couple years including mobile, api / integration layer, and new web content management system.  While not everything went cloud, a significant percentage did move there.  This helped them deliver new customer experiences much more quickly and with much more flexibility.  Here’s what Victor Wolters, a colleague on our Strategic Advisors team said,

They needed a faster way to respond to their customer complaints and also to move their business operations to a more flexible platform. Azure provided a lower cost solution with increased power and flexibility.

Benefits:

• Fast: Like many companies, it was much faster to move to cloud for this
• Economical: The ROI proved better as a cloud solution

Final Thoughts

Not many but some companies still question the value of this but to that, I have to say that it’s hard to beat what we continue to see:

• Quicker rollout because infrastructure is already in place
• Higher uptime and support.  Even rolling a system as a cloud infrastructure play can make both high availability and disaster recovery much simpler.  When a cloud provider like Amazon, Microsoft, or IBM already has multiple data centers and services in place to transfer data, do backups, and push sessions to alternate sites, that’s hard to beat.
• Services, services, services.  When you look at the various services provided, it’s amazing.  You don’t need to install your own user repository, data storage, data base, data lake, monitoring, video streaming, etc.
• Security. I’ve only sat through or read a few of what various cloud providers give from a security standpoint but it’s impressive. I’m talking about major cloud providers and even smaller niche providers of web content management on cloud.  I know many of my clients can’t come close to what they do.

We rely more on anecdotal evidence for this but it’s definitely a trend.  While B2C organizations continue to highlight the importance of consumer-based mobile we see that the hype cycle has begun to level out.  Mobile is important.  No one argues that.  Omnichannel is important. No one argues that either.  However, more companies now realize that their best strategy isn’t just to make their site mobile or to get a cool app out there.  The best strategy is to give customers a great experience.  Here’s a few reasons why we believe this to be a trend:

1. No one expects mobile web sites to be hard.  Software vendors and clients just set about doing it
2. Very few companies are doing “Omnichannel” strategy.  They are doing customer experience or digital strategy
3. Most companies we work with are pulling back from the over-abundance of mobile applications in favor of fewer, more carefully thought-out mobile solutions.

Mobile Web

The industry continues to mature.  With modern JavaScript frameworks and web content tools, even small companies find it relatively easy to create mobile friendly sites.  Web content or digital experience vendors now provide a huge amount of functionality almost out of the box. This includes:

• Support for mobile sites
• Preview content for phone, tablet, web etc.  They even let you create new preview options
• Author content from a mobile device
• Approve and publish content from a mobile device

I was speaking to a top tier web content vendor last earlier this week.  One person asked if they needed to prioritize mobile as part of a demo and her response was telling, “That functionality is just there. We do it as a matter of course.  We don’t need any additional preparation. Companies don’t prioritize it as part of the demo. They just expect it.”

On the other hand, companies fully expect every site they release to be not just mobile friendly but fully supported. In 2016, we didn’t see a single company create a customer facing web site that wasn’t fully mobile optimized.  Keep in mind that fully optimized doesn’t mean that you display all your content and functionality. It means you give a great mobile experience for what’s important.  Companies get that now and hold conversations on optimizing the experience and prioritizing the work.

Down with Omnichannel

Don’t get me wrong.  Creating a great and similar experience across many customer touch points remains important.  But companies no longer call it Omnichannel strategy because just the term limits them. Instead they focus on customer experience, digital transformation, or even digital strategy to get there.  These options expand the focus and allow them to address challenges beyond the front end.

Some companies continue to say omnichannel, however, they quickly move to customer experience.  A colleague of mine, recently completed an omnichannel strategy whose focus changed in the first week.  That retail company quickly focused on customer experience and what activities brought the most return on their investment.  Those activities included online to store ordering, enhanced mobile web capabilities, updates to ecommerce systems, etc.  (See my budget post for more info on that trend)

Mobile Apps

Yes, new cool apps are released all the time. Andrew Chen highlights this with a stunning graph on average usage for 95% of the apps in the Android store. But what we’re seeing now is the frustration that comes along with releasing an app without taking the time to create a strategy, research your users’ needs, and build something that adds value.

 
This won’t be a surprise to you and it’s no longer a surprise to many companies.  They rushed to build an app without really understanding its impact, and now it’s time to reassess. Let me give you a few anecdotal examples as well.

• A large pharmaceutical company has well over 100 applications across many drug brands.  2017 efforts will re-focus on creating a smaller set of key value-driven mobile apps.  This will improve customer engagement and ROI
• A  very well known hospital only has plans for one mobile app they call the flagship app. They don’t plan on releasing one app for your in hospital experience, another to look at your medical records, and yet another for pure marketing purposes.  Instead, they are folding all of that into one app to improve the experience for their patients at any time in their lifecycle.

Bottom Line

While mobile is important and you must address it.  Address mobile in the context of the larger customer experience.  Let that be one driver for digital transformation and for investments in both front and back end capabilities.

For additional perspective on the trends we’re seeing in enterprise mobile, check out our post on the Perficient Digital blog, How Enterprise Mobile Goes Beyond Customer Experience.

As is inevitable when something matures, people take a closer look at what is actually happening and what they can realistically expect to gain from it.  That’s no different for Digital Transformation.  It has significant upside and just a few of the various activities can benefit you.  For example:

1. Focusing on DevOps can decrease time to market for key apps, features, sites, etc.
2. Better customer experience can decrease customer churn
3. An agile integration platform allows you to branch out to markets and partners you never could

We could go on but whether it’s increased revenue, averted loss of revenue, or true cost savings, a holistic approach to Digital Transformation can bring business value.

But Here’s The Rub

Altimeter, in their 2016 State of Digital Transformation, stated the following key statistics:

As more companies evolve, change agents are asking leaders for more funding and resources. In turn, they’re being asked for results projections to support their requests and roadmaps. This lack of data or ROI to justify the value of digital transformation (69%) is still holding companies back from taking steps toward digital relevance, a sizable increase from our 2014 survey wherein only 34% of respondents cited the lack of data as a challenge. Although we’re in an era of Big Data, companies still struggle to capture, comprehend, and act on insights available to them

Oddly enough, in the same section, they referenced another challenge in risk averse organizations but I already covered that in another 2017 trend.

What we’ve seen with the companies we work with is a combination of willingness to invest at least a little alongside a huge demand for a better business case.  Business leaders want a business case.  You can’t blame them although sometimes, the best business case can be, “Our competition did it and they just too 5% marketshare from us.”  In any event, business leaders must still go through the capital justification process inherent to their organization.  They have to justify not just all of Digital Transformation as a key initiative but also the various individual components of the transformation.

That makes your life harder, but not impossible.

What To Do

I think two colleagues of mine, Jim Hertzfeld and Brian Flannegan got it right with a recent digital strategy they did for a Midwestern Retailer.  They did a lot of research into the current organization and into the relationship between store and digital.  As part of their research, they were able to see and demonstrate some savings and a lot of lost revenue where a focus on digital transformation would provide value in 2017 (the next business year).  The final presentation focused on four key things:

1. Current state and a variety of inputs
2. Vision for the future
3. Prioritized list of activities with key business value inputs
4. Roadmap based on the business value

Note that 1/4 of the effort in this strategy focused on business value and placing it correctly.  The reality is that no organization will sign off on all aspects of you strategy.  Key activities will be missed.  If you have the data to back up the business value of any one activity in your digital transformation strategy, then the chances of funding it will increase.

As is inevitable when something matures, people take a closer look at what is actually happening and what they can realistically expect to gain from it.  That’s no different for Digital Transformation.  It has significant upside and just a few of the various activities can benefit you.  For example:

1. Focusing on DevOps can decrease time to market for key apps, features, sites, etc.
2. Better customer experience can decrease customer churn
3. An agile integration platform allows you to branch out to markets and partners you never could

We could go on but whether it’s increased revenue, averted loss of revenue, or true cost savings, a holistic approach to Digital Transformation can bring business value.

But Here’s The Rub

Altimeter, in their 2016 State of Digital Transformation, stated the following key statistics:

As more companies evolve, change agents are asking leaders for more funding and resources. In turn, they’re being asked for results projections to support their requests and roadmaps. This lack of data or ROI to justify the value of digital transformation (69%) is still holding companies back from taking steps toward digital relevance, a sizable increase from our 2014 survey wherein only 34% of respondents cited the lack of data as a challenge. Although we’re in an era of Big Data, companies still struggle to capture, comprehend, and act on insights available to them

Oddly enough, in the same section, they referenced another challenge in risk averse organizations but I already covered that in another 2017 trend.

What we’ve seen with the companies we work with is a combination of willingness to invest at least a little alongside a huge demand for a better business case.  Business leaders want a business case.  You can’t blame them although sometimes, the best business case can be, “Our competition did it and they just too 5% marketshare from us.”  In any event, business leaders must still go through the capital justification process inherent to their organization.  They have to justify not just all of Digital Transformation as a key initiative but also the various individual components of the transformation.

That makes your life harder, but not impossible.

What To Do

I think two colleagues of mine, Jim Hertzfeld and Brian Flannegan got it right with a recent digital strategy they did for a Midwestern Retailer.  They did a lot of research into the current organization and into the relationship between store and digital.  As part of their research, they were able to see and demonstrate some savings and a lot of lost revenue where a focus on digital transformation would provide value in 2017 (the next business year).  The final presentation focused on four key things:

1. Current state and a variety of inputs
2. Vision for the future
3. Prioritized list of activities with key business value inputs
4. Roadmap based on the business value

Note that 1/4 of the effort in this strategy focused on business value and placing it correctly.  The reality is that no organization will sign off on all aspects of you strategy.  Key activities will be missed.  If you have the data to back up the business value of any one activity in your digital transformation strategy, then the chances of funding it will increase.

Digital Transformation has been happening for a while, what is different now compared to earlier years of digital transformation, is the factors which determine the Transformation. Who is changing the game ? the speed and the volume of information available etc. The change is fast because it is just not only the companies who changes the customer engagement but also each consumer armed with the power of a mainframe equivalent of yester years and has the ability to dictate the rules of digital engagement through disruptive technologies. B2B customers do their research on-line and do their purchases with their models and not wait for the salesperson to stop by to look at the colorful materials. One can buy directly from overseas and execute the contract without leaving their desk. So it is important for companies to change their methods of interactions with customers using digital transformation.

Source: McKinsey Global Institute

Major Factors driving Digital Transformation :

1. Disruptive technologies / Companies
2. Customer behavior changes, options available to customers
3. Proliferation of smart devices

To adapt to this changing world order companies has to invest in technology and be responsive to the customer. Brick & Mortar and On-line are not mutually exclusive. For a customer it is the same company. Engaging the customer through multiple channels and providing superior experience will be a big differentiator. Big Data powers this behavioral pattern recognition and help deliver the superior customer experience. The expected income growth based on the Big Data technology is on par with Digital Transformation for product/operational innovation (see picture). The biggest expected return  is the digital engagement of the customers.

Creating the data driven environment to support the advanced/predictive analytics and leveraging information through Data Science to engage Customers and innovate new products means investment in Digital Transformation in each of those areas.

See Also: What Salesforce backing of Predictive Analytics Firm means