The engagement mandate

By Mark Greenaway, Director, Financial Services for Adobe Systems Europe Ltd

For 25 years Adobe has been focused on making it easy for people to share information in print, online and through pictures and video. Its products lie at the heart of engagement – the key challenge for today’s organisations.

Engagement means providing customers, and other audiences, with experiences that bring them closer to the organisation; interacting with it in an easy to use and pleasing manner. Customers are increasingly confident using the web and other self-service channels and have heightened expectations of the interactivity and richness of these channels. Successful organisations are already presenting highly engaging, personalised experiences for customers online and are setting the standard by which all are judged. Those that fail to meet these benchmarks will quickly fall behind.

Banks were early to the online world and drove initial advances in customer engagement through internet banking but are now falling behind. The introduction of social networking and community technologies, as well as emerging ‘web 2.0’ sharing and participatory capabilities, has transformed the way that some retailers (Amazon being the obvious example) engage with their customers. Other industries need to learn from this and re-create their online experiences to meet these new demands.

Some are already innovating. The Intelligent Finance division of HBOS is using Adobe technology to power its Offset Mortgage Calculator. This rich internet application provides customers with a real-time, visual representation of how they can save money with an offset mortgage. Other banks and independent financial advisors are looking at similar ways of presenting financial plans and models to their clients.

But the web experience does not work in isolation. Research, commissioned by Adobe and conducted by Gallup, clearly shows that customers who are satisfied with an organisation’s web experience tend to be more loyal and have a greater propensity to purchase other products. Providing engaging web experiences leads to more incremental sales and helps prevent churn – two key requirements as we move into more constrained economic times.

Investment banks are another example of highly collaborative working relationships where new richer applications can add value. Here highly complex data needs to be shared quickly and securely to support decisions. Empowering traders, salespeople and customers with easy to absorb, engaging data in real-time can significantly enhance the service offered. Adobe is working with a number of investment banks to provide video and graphics based systems to do this. For example, analysis and advice can be recorded as online video to be accessed by clients, two-way video conferences can be combined with data-driven applications to illustrate and explain complex market movements and interactive web conferences used to communicate to wider audiences simply and cost effectively.

Even internal and regulatory communications can be enhanced in this way. Many organisations rely on manual distribution of spreadsheets to share key financial information. Forward-looking organisations are creating more community-based approaches where rich applications are used to present key data, in real-time, in a graphical and easy to digest format replacing the spreadsheet paper trail. US stock exchange NASDAQ has used Adobe tools to develop a rich internet application that can replay a day’s trading for an individual stock, right down to the individual trades.

Over the next few years I expect these trends to accelerate. One key driver will be the expectations of ‘Generation Y’ – those born since the introduction of the World Wide Web. These ‘digital natives’ are completely comfortable online and have high expectations not only of the brands and organisations they buy from, but also from those they work for. Engaging this generation as employees as well as consumers is a real challenge.

Adobe is focused on meeting these new expectations and we are already delivering applications that deliver richer online experiences combining the ubiquity and connectedness of the internet with the power of individual devices to deliver highly interactive, personalised experiences.

If you would like to read the full research report conducted by Gallup, on Using Technology to Engage Customers – and why banks must carefully manage their digital touchpoints to create a seamless customer experience, please visit www.adobe.com/engagement.