Engagement in the enterprise
Bridging the engagement gap
Engagement has never been more critical than in today’s highly collaborative business environment. Much of a company’s success depends on the quality and ease of interactions between an enterprise and its customers, suppliers, alliance partners, and even employees in remote offices. By emphasizing the depth and strength of these ongoing business relationships, engagement will become even more critical for enterprises, involving important financial ramifications.
From ERP systems to rich Internet applications
Over the last decade, organizations have invested heavily to improve their internal business processes. As a result, many internal workflows are now managed and executed more efficiently than ever before. Businesses and government agencies have also looked for ways to improve interactions across extended project teams and with business partners and customers. While technologies such as PDF can reduce the time and costs associated with producing forms and improve the accuracy of data entry, many organizations are finding it difficult to extend these efficiencies to external stakeholders by leveraging the Internet—with security concerns and awkward user interfaces being the biggest hurdles. The challenge for IT managers is to find reliable and cost-effective solutions that balance controlling access for security with designing open systems for ease of use.
Many organizations are integrating powerful back-end systems with interactive, customer-facing processes that can be executed online or offline using free, ubiquitous client software, such as rich Internet applications. This approach focuses on delivering customized information to meet customer expectations for a compelling, yet efficient experience. As a result, companies can establish longer lasting, more productive and meaningful relationships with partners and customers—enabling them to interact using accurate, always accessible information and services.
Building lasting, productive relationships is critical
In today’s global business environment, where customers are more demanding than ever and brand loyalty is increasingly difficult to obtain, deeper customer engagement is integral to an organization’s success. Creating touch points that make every customer interaction compelling, dynamic, and useful is the foundation for better, more engaging experiences. Workflows need to be transformed from largely manual, disconnected experiences to more engaging, two-way interactions. Corporate executives increasingly recognize the value that customer engagement brings to their businesses. For example, in a recent study on engagement conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit on behalf of Adobe, 80% of executives said that better engagement translates into improved customer loyalty, and 75% believed it meant higher profits. Engagement is also critical to transforming customers into active advocates for brands and businesses; 79% of respondents said that engaged customers will recommend products and services to others.
Organizations must find ways to successfully engage customers online with highly personalized and responsive services. Traditional approaches require completing and mailing paper forms, faxing documents, or handling transactions in person which can increase costs and cause delays. Unless organizations can adopt new technologies that provide streamlined online experiences, busy customers will go elsewhere for services. Attempts to automate service delivery using typical online applications have failed to achieve many of the desired results. High abandonment rates due to customer confusion or system inefficiencies are common. For example, a user interface might be too difficult to navigate, or a form might be too complex. Or perhaps the customer would prefer to complete the transaction offline but is not offered that option. A key corporate initiative at Adobe is to improve engagement by offering solutions to these critical issues.
Strong, lasting connections drive deeper engagement
To address these challenges, companies and government agencies are leveraging software and technology—many of which are Adobe products—to provide customers with ready access to quality information and services via desktop computers, mobile phones, and other computing devices.
Unlike ERP installations, today’s engagement solutions integrate easily with existing systems and workflows and require no costly software or specialized training for end users. As a result, organizations can safely and affordably replace outdated workflows with updated, more efficient processes at their own pace and to the degree that is appropriate for them.
Engaging software solutions can transform an organization’s operations and its customers’ experiences. Workflows such as processing loan applications or applying for health benefits can now be handled in minutes instead of days. Personalized, dynamic front-end interfaces can be integrated directly with an organization’s back-end systems, enabling completed digital forms and other materials to be generated and routed instantly to all parties for processing. For example, enterprise software provided by Adobe enabled a leading investment firm to install an asset management tool that displays an elegant dashboard branded with the firm’s identity to the customer. The interface accesses third-party applications to gather current account information from all of a customer’s assets, but it does so invisibly. The customer’s experience is significantly improved by eliminating page refreshes and enabling the manipulation of large amounts of data on-the-fly.
Bridging the enterprise engagement gap
Engagement solutions that support meaningful, interactive relationships offer clear benefits to enterprise organizations and their external stakeholders. These solutions take the friction out of business processes and reach across computing devices and communications systems to enable all users to reliably access services and complete tasks in seconds, instead of hours. Imagine business scenarios in which customers never have to re do application forms or in which upselling strategies are built into dynamic user interfaces. These are just some of the ways that software and technologies can revolutionize how organizations operate and build lasting, productive engagement with employees, partners, and customers.
We’re seeing enterprises increasingly recognize the urgency of overcoming the obstacles to connecting with their customers through more responsive, personalized services. As demands for better communications continue to increase, engaging enterprise software will become more and more important for building and maintaining mutually beneficial—and profitable—relationships with business partners, colleagues, and customers.
