Scott Wellwood

EY Americas Adobe Alliance Go-to-Market Leader

3 minute read 22 Jan 2024

Related topics

Consumer Products

Learn how the EY-Adobe Alliance strengthens customer journeys faster, creating the personalized experiences they crave.

In brief

  • In today's dynamic business world, creating differentiated customer journeys is critical, but it often poses a challenge.
  • Siloed departments and fragmented customer data can make it difficult to see the bigger picture and define a common path to success.
  • An ecosystem approach can provide clarity and accelerate your customer-centric transformation.

The world is recalibrating around the customer. That’s clear, but for many businesses, it’s unclear just how to effectively build differentiated customer journeys.

Organizations that try to focus on the customer often get mired in how and where to start, often underestimating the complexity of the task and trying to take it on without working with a proven advisor. Siloed departments mean siloed customer data, which makes it difficult to see a unified view of a customer and identify problems, or even come to a common understanding of what success would look like.

Astute business leaders recognize and respect that creating a unified, customer-focused experience demands collaboration and a cohesive approach across departments. Leaders who do this best understand their role as agents of change and embrace an ecosystem of trusted vendors who are equally vested in their success.

Bringing the customer into view

I’ve found that applying an ecosystem approach to customer-experience transformation (and more) provides clarity.

Ecosystems are beneficial in transforming the customer journey because they add momentum. This helps companies transform the journey more quickly, effectively creating a consumer-first reality. The reason why is the bespoke nature of ecosystems themselves — a unique combination of tech, our partners, systems, data and capabilities, all brought together in a way that addresses core business issues particular to each organization.

From the customer’s perspective, ecosystems help provide the clear, seamless, differentiated and personalized experiences they’re looking for. For business, putting the customer at the top of your priorities translates into a better bottom line.

EY Alliance partner: Adobe

Changing the world through digital experiences

As forerunner in digital marketing solutions, Adobe develops personalized customer experiences, delivered seamlessly across any channel.

But first, first-party data

Personalization at scale requires putting emphasis on first-party data.

This first-party data is information provided by the customer and collected with their permission. It then becomes the lifeblood that companies can use. But as insightful as it can be, it presents an additional challenge: how do you capture and drive personalized experiences?

That’s a task uniquely suited for the EY-Adobe Alliance. Before they begin collecting first-party data, we recommend that our clients establish operating models and marketing workflows, democratize digital assets, and most importantly centralize and provide governance over customer data to facilitate sharing insights and creating experiences. Through the alliance, we create centralized customer experience repositories for our clients.

So, by enhancing understanding of each customer, organizations can then create individualized, differentiated brand experiences that your customers are looking for.

How EY can help

Focusing on minutiae to power a massive transformation

A recent example of the EY-Adobe Alliance value is with our joint client, a leading global provider of products and services in the biopharma and health care space.

 

The client was in the midst of a multi-phase massive digital transformation toward customer-centricity. Having Ernst & Young LLP (EY) as a trusted advisor enabled them to leverage the tremendous experience, we brought to the table from navigating similar transformations. We knew what challenges they’d face — customer data segmentation rising to the top of the list. And so we could help them navigate through that process more seamlessly.

 

This took focus not only on streamlining their existing technology, but also orchestrating relevant data and robust customer segmentation to drive highly personalized customer experiences.

 

Straightforward as it seems, it required the client to embrace the complex integration of data and technology plus the insights, teams and workflows to make it all happen. When done right, it drives personalized customer experiences that in turn drive growth directly correlated to ROI metrics.

How EY can help

Customer alignment through collaborative alliances

This is a great example of how ecosystems can help approach pivotal problems like transforming the customer journey. Organizations that attempt to transform it on their own don’t benefit from the collective experience of an ecosystem, like the one EY orchestrated in this example with Adobe.

 

Our alliance with Adobe enables businesses to address challenges they’re often unprepared to face alone. Thanks to the EY-Adobe Alliance, we've jointly helped clients to develop a customer-centric journey, including collaborative efforts with chief marketing officers and chief digital officers in both B2B and B2C arenas. This alliance’s unique approach directly benefits our clients.

 

With a long history of working with Adobe, EY has been at the forefront of evolving their platforms to address key B2B use cases. We were Adobe’s first and largest B2B customer of their Real-Time CDP product. Thanks to that exposure to and experience with Adobe, that EY perspective helped elevate their product development to better address B2B needs.

 

Clients can trust us because we blazed those trails and understand the challenges they face. And we were their first customer to deploy these tools, which we’re now replicating for other clients, both B2B and B2C.

 

The real difference is in the data

When you want to quantify the impact of successful ecosystems, you must look at the data.

 

Organizations that leverage high-performing ecosystems see a 2x increase in top-line revenue growth. But not only that — they see a 1.5x decrease in cost reductions compared with organizations that have low-performing or no ecosystems whatsoever.

 

Source: The CEO Imperative: How mastering ecosystems transforms performance

 

The power of EY-orchestrated ecosystems: proving greater than the sum of our parts

By coalescing multiple elements — EY services, Adobe, client systems and legacy vendors, along with related technologies — the EY team is orchestrating opportunities and helping clients realize tremendous value.

 

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Summary

The EY-Adobe Alliance leveraged an ecosystem approach to personalize the customer journey by synthesizing existing technology, the right data and robust customer segmentation.

About this article

Scott Wellwood

EY Americas Adobe Alliance Go-to-Market Leader

Helps Fortune 500s and startups drive transformation and growth through alliance relationships. Father to teen boys. Working to perfect his tennis backhand. Canada native who calls San Francisco home.

Related topics

Consumer Products

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