On-Demand Webinar: Adobe Experience Cloud

Adobe Experience Cloud Webinar Transcript

Introductions

Angela Meyer: Welcome to today's diva-e webinar, Adobe Experience Cloud. Today, you'll learn from our experts how to optimize customer experiences using artificial intelligence and data-driven marketing. Feel free to ask your open questions via the question box and after each presentation you will have plenty of time to ask them and we will also answer them directly then. We will also make the recording and presentation available afterwards. Let's move on to a short round of introductions. My name is Angela Meyer and I work in diva-e marketing and I'm in charge of our events and webinars, among other things. And now I'll hand over to Torsten, who is the CTO and Adobe responsible for diva-e. Torsten, it's your turn!

Torsten Green: Great, thank you very much Angela! And welcome also from me to our webinar today around Adobe Experience Cloud. For diva-e, digital marketing and reaching customers with tailored content is a key topic. This fully pays into our goal of being Germany's best Transactional Experience Partner. Especially now, when many familiar offline market, distribution and sales points have broken away - thanks to Corona - Adobe provides a very effective toolbox with the Experience Cloud. We also want to bring this toolbox closer to our customers, which is why we have greatly expanded our diva-e portfolio in 2020 and, with the company pro!vision, many of you already know them, have in any case gained one of Germany's absolute luminaries in the field of AEM. Today, Simon Buß, as pro!vision's authorized representative, is supporting me in welcoming our guests.

Simon Buß: Thank you Torsten! Welcome from me as well! Yes, we have noticed an ever-increasing demand among our customers for a coherent use of marketing tools, which is the topic of today. But also for a comprehensive, holistic consulting and implementation in the corresponding projects. That's perfectly understandable, because in principle you need both at the same time to be really successful in digital marketing today. For us, this means above all the sensible orchestration of tools and platforms. That means web content management, asset management, analytics, personalization, but also campaign management and commerce. But it also means dovetailing the various value-added activities in the project, what is based on them or what is based on the products. That means lifecycle, marketing strategy consulting, UX design, implementation, but also application operation and maintenance. And as part of diva-e, we're now even better able to do that for our customers. We have established best practices and defined interfaces at the transfer points between these value chains so that these processes really do mesh smoothly and the overall result is the best possible. We will now see a good example of how we did this from our customer Deutscher Vermögensberatung. Yes, and in their place we are still strongly committed to Adobe as a partner. We continue to invest heavily in the partnership. So we want to expand our partner status at Adobe to platinum next year and we also organize information events like today on an ongoing basis.

Torsten Green: Exactly, so we actually, Simon and I, wanted to make a short introduction. But we are now definitely pleased to welcome Hartmut König as Head of Solutions Strategy, as well as CTO for Central Europe Adobe. As a long-time Adobe employee, expert in Digital Marketing, Customer Centric IT, Digital Transformation and will show us today that customer experience is the new, digital currency. Following Hartmut's presentation, Phillip, will introduce us to our customer case DVAG again. With this case, you can see the benefits of the Adobe Experience card in practice quite well. But first of all, welcome Hartmut.

Hartmut König: Hello, welcome from me as well. I think I'll get a chance to share my screen here. I'll do it again.

Angela Meyer: Yes, that should work. It looks good.

About Adobe and hidden champions in the digital sector

Hartmut König: And it's already happening. It's like painting. Super. Yes, welcome from me as well and thank you very much for the invitation, dear diva-e team! Yes, I don't know. How are you doing? Yes, so welcome and how are you? What has changed for you in the last few months? Well my personal life has been shaken up pretty good. Home schooling, a huge challenge. I don't know about you, but I've had to go back and look it up when my kids, they're in 10th grade now, kind of came up with their math. And you don't have all that at your fingertips anymore. Yes. The kids now also have a clear opinion about the didactic qualities of their teachers, compared to what YouTube is doing. And what about at work? Adobe closed its own offices on March 13. The offices around the world a little bit later. But in Europe, we haven't done anything for a while. All customer appointments are canceled. All trade shows and events are canceled. We canceled our biggest event, the Adobe Summit. Even that event, when we first talked to diva-e about it, was planned as a face-to-face event and I think there probably would have even been a small reception. And now, nice to have you there. It's nice that we can still talk about customer intimacy and customer relationship. But I think what I just said in the introduction has an impact on customer intimacy. Has an impact on togetherness. I'm CTO at Adobe Central Europe and it's a dream job. Because I'm responsible for strategy and at the same time I get to know many, many customers, I have the chance to look into many, many industries. That's something I'm really interested in. I love to see different business models. I see big companies from the Dax. I see very small companies, medium-sized pharmaceutical companies or smaller companies from other industries. I see the manufacturing industry, of course. Mechanical engineering and other things. And I just find it incredibly exciting to experience how that works. And the secret of all these companies and especially these hidden champions, which I like so much, is this personal closeness. Symbolized here quite well by the handshake, and yet we now flinch and say handshake? We're not allowed to do that! There is a limit! And what was commonplace, this closeness to the customer that characterized many companies - probably also many of those listening today - is suddenly no longer possible as we know it. I'm a big fan of this book by Hermann Simon, I don't know who knows it. It's 20 years old or so. The Hidden Champions of the 21st Century.

I still think that's the best business book I've ever read. And the research around this research group around the Hermann Simon, showing how these mechanisms that drive these companies - often family owned, maybe even generations of ownership - move these hidden champions. That is sustainability in action. And this ability to be close to the customer is, of course, absolutely crucial for these hidden champions. It's probably crucial for many of my colleagues and the audience here on the call. Because these companies are, after all, distinguished by innovative products. Their long-term orientation and the customer relationship. And that has something to do with each other. Customer proximity enables innovation. Innovation is the engine for long-term development. And long-term success is unthinkable without customer proximity. But still, something has changed. When I mentioned the lecture, in planning, customer experiences are the new currency, I would say, phew, what's new about that. Actually, we have to say, customer relationships have always been critical. Being close to the customer and understanding the customer has always been critical. I would like to introduce you to someone and I don't know who knows him, it's a bit difficult now because I can't look into the room and see if anyone is raising their hand. Maybe the Simon or the Torsten know him. This is Shantanu Narayen. Shantanu Narayen is my boss. And why am I mentioning him now, when I just talked about Hidden Champions? Precisely because Shantanu has this special role that is unthinkable in Germany. He is Chairman of the Supervisory Board and Chairman of the Board of Management at the same time. In other words, he doesn't really have a boss. He runs the company the way hidden champions are run.

Learnings

And sometimes I think there are enough elements in our self-presentation at Adobe where we are still hidden champions, where we are not known for what we do. But what he did is make a decision a few years ago that we were going to completely change our business model for Creative Cloud. We used to sell boxes with software in them, and they would be at the Apple Store or Media Markt. We distributed them through a traditional sales channel and we didn't really know our customers. And then we decided that we could also do that directly. That we offer it for download. That we can of course also offer value-added services. What happened is that we really got to know our customers and we discovered some very surprising things.

For example, we learned that most Photoshop users are not photographers at all. I find that anyway, so an extra loop I want to shoot: there aren't quite as many companies that have created verbs. We blow dry our hair, who might know, blow dry is a trademark of AEG, which doesn't even exist in that form anymore. We google. We also know where it comes from and we photoshop. So these people who photoshop, they're not photographers, they're mostly designers. Those are the insights you get when you get closer to the customer. Of course, we have many, many, many customers, and this gives us the opportunity to learn more about what works. To learn more about what is important to these customers. And thus, of course, to tailor the software more specifically to the needs of the customers. But when we rent out software, it also means that we need a very long-term model in the customer relationship. It doesn't work if you think in the short term, because if someone is no longer satisfied, they can cancel the software rental agreement. And we are very fortunate that this does not happen.

So when we say customer proximity, and then the mind kicks in and says: But customer proximity is just not. Customer intimacy is at best a webinar now here with video. Then you can say: Ah, this is how it looks at the king's home, he has a whiteboard hanging there and somehow he has procured an Adobe stand so that the whole thing doesn't look so bare. But that's not real customer proximity. And I think this is where the question of what digitization means comes in. So yes, measures that were perhaps seen as a gimmick by the Chief Digital Officer are now crucial. Now it's suddenly about resilience, it's no longer the marketing department that's taking action, it's really about the question of how can we get closer to our customers again? How can we reach our customers better? Send relevant messages. Reading customers' digital body language and then ultimately responding. So what message is relevant right now, to these customers. How can I convince a prospect to leave their data right now and contact the sales team? Where can the user of my solution, find the necessary tricks and tips that can make the current project successful?

And if we look further, there are of course an infinite number of possibilities today and I want to show and discuss a few of them. And this is far from being complete. But I have seen in a chemical company that service technicians use augmented reality as a matter of course to understand the three-dimensional structure of a chemical plant, which I don't understand. Of course, we want to use digital training today, and we would also like to see this in schools, which is what I said at the beginning. Of course online marketplaces play a role. Mobile devices are a matter of course and we can't imagine life without them. We see end customers who say, "Wouldn't it be great if I could buy from the manufacturer? They also want to be close to the manufacturer because they say, "This is a local brand, and I want to support it in difficult times. We have the opportunity to use an incredible amount of data, we have the opportunity to do predictive maintenance and react to data points. We can create new business models, I just mentioned that. And of course, the Internet of Things gives us tremendous opportunities.

Making digital a core competence

But all of this is not just a nice to have, it's all necessary! These are the expectations that are there in the market today. I've pulled together some data from various studies. Over 70 percent of business-to-business customers expect a customer experience that corresponds to their experiences in B2C, i.e., their everyday life, their personal experiences. They want to shop, like Amazon. 75 percent of the workforce, that's global population, will be Millenials in 4 years. So these are digital natives who have grown up with digital technology. Unlike me. I can still remember when I wrote my first email. My daughters don't even know that, whereas they don't write emails. But that's another story. B2B decision makers don't respond to cold calling. And what's happening is, they're getting information long before they contact the vendor, for the sale. Fifty-seven percent of the procurement process has happened before anyone talks to you, as a company. And what's causing it to fail? It certainly doesn't fail because of motivation alone or bad luck alone, but it fails because of the deficiencies we have. We have also asked ourselves what goes wrong. And there are many things that go wrong, but at the very top there is a lack of people who can and want to do this. That's then the second line. So can and will as a weakness.

Nevertheless, if resilience, this digital becomes a core competence, then we can all take action. What are the issues that are becoming important now? Focus on the customer experience. And what does that mean? If I can no longer meet customers at the trade show or take them out to dinner, then that all means focus on optimizing and analyzing digital interactions. How can I actually address the individual or even the company specifically? Through a personalized message, through a relevant message that fits the company now and what that company or those employees need right now. Can I perhaps also distinguish roles? Between buyer, between decision maker in the business department or someone who uses the software or the solution - it doesn't always have to be software, hopefully - to give them maybe a completely different level of information. Marketing is changing, this role as a cost center to somehow make events and maybe send models and examples around. I just had dealings with a manufacturer of fire engines, who in the past of course drove their fire engines to some trade fairs and then exhibited them there. That changes to the question of how can you actually use marketing optimally, digitally and can then organize the cooperation in the sales team. New models into the go-to-market. Opportunities are there. E-commerce offerings, whether business to business e-commerce offerings or direct to consumer, D2C.

And also just these business models that reorder the relationship between customers and suppliers. For example, as-a-service offerings. One of the most fascinating, although it's no longer new, but I'll mention it again, of these rental offers, outside of software rental, is the tire manufacturer that offers to rent truck tires. And not according to time, but according to kilometers. That is, it combines the price and cash flow with the revenue that the corresponding user has. If I drive, I drive kilometers, then I have to pay for the tire as well, according to those kilometers. And then the brand, that also needs to be re-evaluated: What role does brand reach and visibility play? Content marketing is becoming extremely important in order to not only emotionally charge a brand, but also to make it relevant. And then to reach customers, but also the talents. All of this is not easy and we have just talked about it, there are also challenges. That's why the question is about-. Sorry, that was too fast. -is the question-. Why doesn't it click here now? Now it's really clicking. Are a few key elements important that I want to address. So how do I get this right?

Namely, the data that I need that makes the customer experience explainable and optimizable, that makes marketing explainable and optimizable. That help manage risks in new go-to-market models and that also make understanding the success of content marketing. The relevant content I need in all these places, without relevant content, without relevant images, videos, texts, I achieve nothing. And lastly, the artificial intelligence that brings that together. When we say artificial intelligence-, that's such a big promise that the IT industry has been making for many years and that doesn't always go through quite the way it looks In the planning. That's why I would like to give you a few examples of artificial intelligence that are available today and that everyone can use. I have brought along a few examples clustered according to the areas I have just mentioned.

When it comes to data. Artificial intelligence can help to better understand data. Detect anomalies in data streams. Trigger alerts when something changes. And not just at blunt thresholds, but much more intelligently based on anomalies. Develop segments of possible audiences to address. To compare these segments with other segments in order to optimize them, so that advertising can then be targeted, for example. To analyze and better understand the attribution of marketing activities across different channels. How much has what paid in on the website through my ads that I'm running, on social media, and what other contacts that I have? Or similarity modeling around the question: who else can you reach with a message that has reached others successfully. Content management has been a big challenge. Here, artificial intelligence can help to first keyword it. One of the big issues is that there is an infinite amount of content that no one can find, or that creative employees and knowledge workers spend a lot of time searching for content. But also, for example, intelligently cropping images and highlighting the essential content for the various display formats on the mobile device and on the large screen, and the whole thing not only for images but also for videos. Automatically summarize texts. A search that helps me find similar images or even converting forms that exist in some form into new, intelligent, digital form also have.

And other services that are relevant. In personalization, you can even leave that completely to the machine if you have enough traffic. You can have product recommendations developed dynamically, out of the data streams. You don't even have to come up with it yourself. There is a way to help formulate subject lines of emails or develop suggestions that lead to a higher open rate. Or, for example, optimizing search engine scheduling. All this, artificial intelligence can do today and is already available today. If we think about this again, we say that it's about bringing as many good messages as possible to the customer in these 57 percent of the buying process, before he hopefully contacts the brand at some point. Contact with the sales team. And then of course I can bring in the quality of the advice, the quality of the well-trained people that I have. If we take a look at this topic, it's about these moments of truth.

Hundreds or thousands and that's not without. I said every channel, every device, no question and if it's Alexa. What makes that moment relevant? How can I maybe save the customer time as well? Simple, intuitive. And just these complex buying scenarios. Especially in B2B, which we know. Someone invests and wants to think about it. And then there are different roles involved. When we look at that, I want to focus on two topics in particular today that I think are important at this time - maybe also under the impression of the changes that we're going through right now. One topic is lead management. So the question, how can I play on this 57 percent until someone then actually comes to the sales department. And the second is closing online. So e-commerce. If we look at lead management, then let me say again that this is the point. 57 percent of the buying process is completed before someone talks to me.

So it's important that sales and marketing work very closely together. And create a relevant approach. Through the various contact points. This is just as much about outbound, i.e. e-mails that I send, messages that I send via any channels. It's also about the necessary personalization and the relevant content, for example on the website or offline. The second thing is the interaction between marketing and sales. How do you ensure that customers who qualify because they have been to the website more often and have read certain content can actually be passed on to sales in a meaningful way, perhaps in order to implement classic sales scenarios in complex investment processes? Not everything can be sold online. I can't market everything in an e-commerce store. And then just this ability to communicate on a personal and individual level. Whoever can do that best will keep the customers.

In the end, it's also about emotional decision-making. It's also about being taken seriously as an individual. And many of you will know it, I know it all. Every day you are approached by someone, often on LinkedIn, who wants to sell you something. And it helps if they have read through where I work and what my title is. And then maybe offers me things that have something to do with me, otherwise I will ignore it just like any other cold calls are ignored. Second topic block that is important to me. Commerce. What is important in Commerce? It is the ticket to the digital world from my point of view. It's particularly important today. You have to be careful here, because I'm sure there are people here, participants in the seminar today, who have long since been using commerce solutions. We can talk about what omnichannel commerce means in a moment, I'll come back to that in a moment, maybe there is still something to do. And there are others who have nothing. We've had quite a few customers approach us in the last two or three months. They've said, wow, I should have stepped on the gas a lot more with my Commerce project. I really need to get going now.

We have a manufacturer that makes some complex printing solutions. They sell their printing lines for lots and lots of money, certainly not online. But the consumables and simple spare parts, yes, easy. Of course I can sell them online. And that's why I now see ecommerce as a very, very important entry ticket. I think a lot of brands have caught up, especially in the direct-to-consumer business, but also in B2B. A commerce solution that you start with today should come from the cloud, it should start very quickly. So Gartner says: Four weeks go-live must be the goal. No longer. In four weeks from the decision to the first site being live and then actually having deals. And then you can learn. You can learn and grow with this solution. But still, you should look at the architecture beforehand and make sure that you have good integration of the backend systems and an order management that is able to use, for example, inventory from stores, from suppliers, from partners, to fulfill orders and not run into a shortage. That is capable of something that we call Click and Collect in Germany. In America, Buy online, Pick up in Store. So I find the click and collect almost more elegant, it's also kind of English.

I think it's important to support these scenarios when considering them. Customers don't want to spend a lot of time searching. Customers who come to this commerce solution want to find quickly. Shopping lists, being able to buy things I've bought before again. Maybe custom catalogs as well. If you have B2B maybe larger catalogs. Simple reordering reduces effort and the larger organizations just want to be able to centrally manage purchases, credit notes and invoices. And lastly, omnichannel. This is really about serving every channel! Online, mobile, Google, Amazon, B2B marketplaces. Really being open. Commerce is not just your own website. An example of one of our clients that has implemented Commerce is this fancy company with the backhoe. And that's another company, the Liebherr company. So a company where we have to clearly say, they're probably not going to sell the excavators in Ecommerce like that. What they have done is to say that we want to sell spare parts and we want to do it really well. And they do it really well. I can then log in and they already know what I have bought. They show me a scaled catalog of the parts that really concern me and fit my products, my excavator. The ability to order the initial spare parts directly from an exploded view, for example, is of course great, because it also reduces the number of support calls. I'd just like to say that they've built a really complex solution. Eight departments to support them. Six languages? A huge product catalog and the whole thing in six months. As I said, we can probably do it even faster, depending on what it's about and what we have in mind. That's just an overview. What's important to me right now, as I said, there are many possibilities and I'm sure we'll have a question or two about that in a moment in the discussion. Thank you very much.

Simon Buß: Great, thank you very much Hartmut, for the exciting presentation. Let's see if there have been any questions already. Now would be the opportunity. We'll do a second question session after the presentation, which we'll have in a moment.

Torsten Green: Is also very exciting Hartmut, so especially the go-to-market time in the Adobe Commerce area. So four to, well, one to six months is quite a statement. So that's quite sporty.

Hartmut König: Yes, but we have really put together packages because it is particularly important to us right now to really say that we want to achieve this in four weeks. And yes, that's not slaying all the possibilities in the world at once. That's not omnichannel. But that's-getting started now, being live now, and growing from that. Because if I have this problem that I don't have the skills, that I don't have the experience, then I can learn by having something that's sinfully set up. Must be already professional but that I then learn from it and then grow. And then I think I can build skills, can build good solutions. But solve my problem that I might have now because I can't visit my customers anymore. Because I can't have my conversations directly anymore.

Simon Buß: Now let's get a question in here.

Is there an ideal starter setup that Adobe would recommend to their customers? So I guess the products or solutions that would make up the core of that now.

Hartmut König: Yes, I've just mentioned two areas that seem particularly important to me. I can say that there are also products from Adobe for marketing automation or lead management. And for commerce. One is Marketo Engage, which is an Adobe product. And on the other hand, there is Adobe Commerce with the commerce solution. But I think I think the question is almost more exciting to go back to you guys, so our partners. Where do you typically start with your projects?

Simon Buß: Well, from our point of view, the basic framework is the triad of content, i.e. Adobe's Experience Mmanager, analytics and target. This is a foundation, Digital Fondation. That's what Adobe calls it. In other words, it's an offer where I can basically provide content, where I can measure what the customer is doing there, on the platform, and where I can automatically implement decisions based on this, which can then lead to conversion optimization. So that's what I would think of. Yes, those are the basics.

Torsten Green: I think the topic of commerce is just coming a bit, at Adobe at least, they brought it relatively late the add-on, the last big add-on, if you are realistic, but with all the more power just felt. And that is also super important from our point of view, and the Adobe customers that we have, the long-standing ones, they also ask about it and of course want to know where the interfaces are, where my added values are. Of course, we also try to serve that.

Hartmut König: I'm glad to hear that, by the way.

Torsten Green: One more question has come in now.

When are we going to learn more about the Experience Cloud?

Hartmut König: That sounds like: That was not enough Experience Cloud. I deliberately didn't make a product pitch today and somehow go through what the Experience Cloud can do. But it is clear that the Experience Cloud brings together the various topics that Adobe has. In one solution, in one content, which is really easy to use for users, in order to lower the hurdles and enable consistent workflows. This goes from the Creative Cloud into the Experience Cloud as far as digital assets are concerned. It's about management, about playing out the assets. It's about understanding how do assets work, how do customers work through the data. We're going into personalization. I hope that Phillip will say something in a moment that will explain this again, but I have not yet prepared the eight solutions that we have given a product name in the Experience Cloud and then to list their partial solutions here again. But if we have another two hours, I can always find a PowerPoint.

Simon Buß: We can certainly go into this a bit more afterwards, otherwise I would like to hand over to Phillip, so we will illuminate some of the products in the next part. Phillip Tolstych is also with us today, he is a colleague of ours who looks after German asset management. He is a system architect and has been working on the project for one and a half years. He has a great insight and overview and is now showing us how we introduced data-driven marketing in principle and how it works, how it worked, and what advantages have arisen.

Using the Adobe Experience Cloud at DVAG

Phillip Tolstych: Right, thank you first of all. Thanks for the transition Simon, thanks for the introduction. And thank you Hartmut for not talking so much about the Experience Cloud, then I have the chance to say a few more words about it now. Exactly, I will now try to present to you in the next 15, 20 minutes the use case of how we do data-driven marketing in the financial sector. For this purpose, our customer, DVAG, has allowed us to take you into the internals a bit. And present the project to you and that's what we're going to do now. Exactly. As I said, I'll say two or three words about the Experience Cloud at the beginning. What is it in general, what products does our customer use from the Experience Cloud to be able to do all these topics also in data-driven marketing. Then on the next slides, I will take you from the beginning of the project, to where we are right now, explain to you how did we get there, what obstacles did we overcome. What obstacles are still ahead of us to make sure it's completely everything. How can this perhaps also be integrated into the topic of the user journey? These would be the topics for the next few minutes. And finally, of course, I would like to give you a little preview of how our project will continue. Maybe that will be something that will encourage some of you to say, "Okay, that sounds interesting. We have similar conditions, even though it's a completely different industry. But maybe we can think about it there. Exactly. I will hopefully list all the products from the Experience Cloud now. The most important ones have already been mentioned from my point of view, that's AEM, that's Analytics and that's Target. You can complement that very well with systems like Campaign or Audience Manager.

What does the Experience Cloud do?

Content & Analytics

You can use it to collect meaningful data, for example, how users move around on websites. You can create target groups very well in order to say, okay, I can classify this user in this group based on certain characteristics. I have the option of using the Campaign Tool for this crosschannel marketing. And I can personalize. This topic is more than present these days. And I can orchestrate user journeys with it. Exactly. And with our customers, we now use the three products, Adobe Experience Manager, Analytics, and Target. In our setup, Experience Manager is actually the central platform for everything that is content. Be it assets, be it things written by me, be it documents or, which will be important later on in this presentation, be it efforts that we use, for example, to then be able to play out some new experiences in Target, tailored to a certain customer segment group. But importantly, that's our central point in the project, where the customer does all the maintenance of things and doesn't have to re-input things in other systems. So our central building block in this project is the AEM.

The second important component when we talk about data-driven marketing is, of course, analytics. Because analytics is the only way I can get data. Analytics gives me the ability to track the user on the page. Where does he click, how does he move through the page. Which things are interesting for him. Where might he leave information that is important to us later on, so that we can somehow assign him, for example, in the form? These are all topics that we can record with Analytics. And the Target product is a relatively new development for us. On the one hand, we use it for exciting topics such as AB testing. How do we find out, for example, whether a new feature that exists in variants performs well? And which variant of the feature performs well? That's what we do with Target and AB testing. And the second topic, as I said, often mentioned today, personalization. How did we start with that project. We've been doing that since the end of 2018, and we found an AM62 project there that had very, very little analytics portions. We had, as you might see in the top right corner, a user journey approach. It was very important to the customer that the user journey was also a central component of these projects. A good user journey naturally leads to the generation of leads and conversion. What we had found was, I would say, somewhat defective. But then, not all products were in use yet. The first half year in the project was simply a technical migration, so this whole topic of data-driven marketing, since about the middle of last year, so for a good twelve months now is carried out at the customer. Without us having these things.

So during the time when we were doing the technical migration, we were still looking in the backlog to see where features were in there that the company that had previously managed it, the project, still left because we said that maybe you still need that. And because the customer also said, okay, maybe one or the other feature is already specified, maybe we want to implement it or not. And then we noticed that there are always questions and discussions about this. Okay, which feature has priority now? Why does it get priority? And you couldn't really say, okay, it's important that we first do something for the consultant, for example, or do something for the main page. That wasn't quite clear yet. And in the first somewhat larger management circle that we then had with the customers, these things were also taken up again, okay, with what facts can I now actually substantiate that the expansion of the platform, an investment in new features, an investment in the website really supports my core business? And there was a very, very nice phrase coined that I remember almost every day when I look at the Analytics dashboard again. It was said that marketing is no longer a gut feeling these days. I think you can distinguish that in that way. Certainly, a little bit of gut feeling and also a little bit of how do I feel comfortable with that is part of it. But a lot of what goes on in marketing today, especially in online marketing, is of course very important that you have data to back it up. That it is important that I take this step. And we said in the meeting at the end: Okay, we still don't have a complete user journey. They still have their 17000 consultant pages just under, and they have their websites, all no problem. But we don't have any facts with which we can now say, this, that or the feature is important to implement.

And we then said to ourselves, yes, okay, then let's take this approach. The customer agreed that we should simply determine KPIs, i.e., record the measurement points at which we can then identify the hotspots. In order to derive measures from these hotspots, which development parts or which investments, also in further platform products, are important here. And that's how it started. We did a workshop and there was the first obstacle, I was talking about raising obstacles. People then stood afterwards and asked themselves: Okay, what are actually our business goals with the website? DVAG's core business is that it has a large number of advisors who, in personal contact with clients, find the right product for the client. Whether it's an insurance policy or a financial product. But it is always very important to do this personally with the customer. Of course, you can't just transfer that to the digital world and say, well, then we'll do all the consulting digitally somehow. So nowadays, in Corona times, they also do it via webcams and tools like Microsoft Teams, for example, or Jitsi.

About contact with the customer and conversions

However, it's still a contact with the customer. A human-to-human contact, even if it is now done via a webcam, for example. And then also the most important thing to say about it: We don't want to break anything for the consultant, but our goal must be to support the consultant with our goals, which we identify here, to support the business at the end of the day, of course. And that's where we identified, okay, what supports the business? So it has two hard facts that we have now identified first. One is, of course, new leads. So new customers that are trying to reach a consultant. And secondly, also finding new consultants, so careers, that continue to build the business, finding new people who have a desire to do that, to drive the business forward. And after we said, okay, these are our goals now, we looked, okay, what pays towards the goals. And most importantly, very importantly, what is a lead and how does a lead turn into a conversion. And that's where we're at right now, to define that 100 percent. We know what direction it's going in. We know that a consultant contact is a lead and the conversion ultimately, if you think to the end, is it's a product is ordered from the consultant, for example. And that's where we are right now, creating the interface that we can also track that end-to-end. And now that we've had business goals, know what pays into the goals. Of course, it has to be clear, okay, what do we want to measure and why do we want to measure it. And as I said, the first important point was to first measure, okay, how many customers who come to the website want to have contact with the consultant? I mentioned at the beginning that analytics was kind of there in the project, but we were nowhere near being able to do zero measurement.

Zero measurement

Why do you need a zero measurement? Well, if I know where I'm starting from, it's easier to celebrate a success because I know I've improved something. Sometimes it's also the case that you have a failure when you see you've gotten a little worse. But so far, fortunately, we've always had successes. That is, we have tried to define measurement points, like scroll depths. It's important to know, of course. A customer who comes to the site, does he first somehow want a bit of intro in the form of content before he wants to go to a consultant finder, for example. Or is it very important to him that the consultant finder is at the top, that he can immediately find his consultant, in his vicinity, via his postal code. And the content is not interesting for him at all. This says a lot about how the customer structures his website at the end of the day and how much time and money he invests in preparing the content. Of course, the tools from the Experience Cloud helped us a lot here. We worked with Analytics and with a small browser add-on tool, which is not really promoted that much, Adobe, Activitymap. Because with it, you can illustrate quite well, in the form of heat maps, how the customer or how a customer moves on the platform. Which links are clicked often. From where to where does the customer go, so which menu items did he also call up. That was a very, very good tool for gathering initial indications in the process. And then on the basis of these indications, what is a measuring point. So it's adapting data and marketing to that.

A second point, in that context, is of course dashboard and there we had a big obstacle in front of us because, we had a huge amount of stakeholders. And we thought, I think we all come from a bit of a technical background, it has to be a technically clean dashboard, where all the technical data is also included. How often was swiped in some slider and so. And that's where we found when we presented that, that the customer said: Wow, super interesting - what does that tell me about my business. So we learned again, the important thing is, all dashboards that you create always have to be customized to the stakeholder group that you're presenting it to. There are board members who say, we definitely only need a very rough overview. We're lucky enough to have a customer who is very, very interested in numbers and also very numbers-driven. He wants to see a lot of insights, which has led to the fact that we fortunately only had to adapt the technical dashboard a little bit. And where else does the dashboard help us? In hotspots, of course, or as Hartmut called it earlier: Identifying anomalies. That's such a small part, probably AI, which is already in Analytics, which also shows us, for example, on day XY there were suddenly quite a lot of people on the website.

If we didn't consciously know that a campaign was running there, for example, we could of course now immediately ask the customer, what happened there? Did you run a TV commercial or something? So you could very quickly somehow make the experience. Okay, we were able to filter the things where things are not as we expected them to be. And with these hotspots or anomalies, you can then go here and say, we're making hypotheses. And that's actually what led us to success in this project. Hypotheses then lead to improvements, which of course are made on an ongoing basis. At the very beginning, when the analytics delivered very good figures, the question or the hypothesis arose. These high caller numbers on our side, don't they all come from consultants instead of customers. Where we said, that's a very good question.

Separate the customers from the consultants

So now we have to somehow find a way to separate the customer or the potential new customer or non-customer from the consultant without dropping the data that the consultant leaves on the website. We were fortunate that there is a portal where consultants can sign up. And since with the Adobe toolbox like Launch, for example, you can now independently of the website system that you're using to play out that website, you can put it into the website through this Launch script, which is like Google Tag Manager, you have to think of it. So did we have the ability on the consultant site, the consultant portal, to use this launch script and sort of tag the consultant. Because it's like the consultant interacts with that website almost daily and so, it was easy for us to say, okay, he was there. The person who was there, it's a consultant. You can of course do any analytics things, like IP filters, but if they have close to 17,000 people in the field-, they don't all have a fixed IP and nobody can maintain that. And so we had our first segmentation, we had our first segment, namely customers or non-customers and consultants. And it was quite interesting to see how these two groups behave differently on the website. Of course now the next step, which we are in the planning stage of now, is to identify who is really a customer and really not a customer from the customer-non-customer segment. Again, interesting thing, we're working on that right now.

DVAG is also trying to provide us with more information via a CRM system. But that's something for the outlook later. Back to the hypotheses. With the hypotheses, it's like I just said. You make them, you make a recommendation on how to implement that. And you say, okay, how can we then measure this implementation. That is, in each improvement step, the topic of measuring is therefore again generate data to provide marketing again with new information and to decide how we can move forward in our development, in our further marketing area, to make data-driven. Those were the easy topics for now, all around. How do we ingest more data? How do we get to know the customer on the site? And a whole new topic now is personalization and re-engagement. So how do we create segments from this group of customers, non-customers, so that we can also address people again. That when we re-enter the website, we can really say, you've been here before, you were interested in topic XY.

There is now topic ABC, which would still be interesting for you, for example, or we have determined that you have broken off somewhere at XY and would like to somehow continue there. Of course, not in this verbal and written form, as I'm explaining it all to you right now, but with, for example, heros that we play out specifically or with some content that we then prepare again for the customer in some articles. So we try to make the customer who comes to this page feel a little bit more picked up, to the first part. And how did we do that, because we don't have a CRM system attached to it yet. Well, the customer who is looking for a consultant who can already carry out a kind of analysis or product consultation individually tailored to him, he has a form on the website where he can fill out, what are his interests, what are his core problems that he may have. Or for which products he would like to have more in-depth information. From this amount of data, we can, on the one hand, map an anonymized user profile, which, if the customer allows us to do so, we can store in the cookie. And of course, as a second end result, we have a process that we can support the consultant and say: Okay, customer X, who will now contact you or has already contacted you, has the following interests, has filled out the following form for you as follows. Here you can already prepare a little better in the conversation. So you see, this pays off on two goals.

We get to know our customers better on the website and marketing. And the consultant, who actually monetizes DVAG's business, now has more data to better advise the customer. Technically, an anonymized profile is created and we have an identifiable customer. And this is where we now use the Target tool for personalization. So you have to imagine it like this. The customer opens the website, Target identifies that he belongs to a certain segment. Here I have two example segments, family and business. If the customer belongs to the family segment, for example, the hero image is now played for the current Corona situation in the family. There are then again CTAs that can forward him or again directly the call to send him also to the financial advisor. If he were now in the Business segment group, the lower Hero would be played out to him. This is a very simple case, but it has already shown that it is relatively interesting. And if you address the customer in a more personalized way, that the customer is also willing to look at the information behind it. A second word that was on the slide before was the topic of re-engagement.

Re-engagement

That's about re-engaging customers where we don't know one hundred percent yet what our real customers and non-customers are, but we have a way to get that out a little bit. To say to him, you haven't been here for a long time or you have product XY, we now have product ABC, which we can offer you in addition. And we are currently in the process of advising the customer that a solution like Audience Manager might be a good idea in order to be able to segment better. So an analytics or a target provides rudimentary segmentation options, but an audience manager is simply better positioned for this.

And secondly, of course, it's about using it with multiple touchpoints, which now includes the topic of campaign management, for example with Adobe Campaign. Where you say, okay, you could pick him up again by e-mail. And you could say: Dear customer, you haven't been here for a long time, the product would suit you. Would you like to maybe get back to your consultant? These are all topics that we now have in the run-up, where we will now tackle in order to simply bring the benefits of the Marketing Cloud that we have here even more into play. What I forgot to mention earlier, because it's written here again, more measuring points. So our development process has also changed in that we don't just think frontend, backend testing. But in every step - be it in the requirements gathering, be it in the discussion of the implementation of the requirements - there is now always someone inside who is there from the analytics area with his questions and also says, okay I need, for example, such and such events in the component, so that I can present the measurement points to the customer again in analytics, in order to generate further insights for him. That is what has changed in the development at our company. That simply this topic of analytics, data acquisition gets much more attention. So. I hope I was able to give you a little insight into how we handle this in the project, how the tools support us there and I thank you for your attention and now I'll hand back to the moderator team for further questions.

Torsten Green: Great. Thank you very much Phillip, exciting presi. So I have a question. We'll see if there are any questions coming in from the audience now. So, what I still noticed, huge topic, which we have with other customers, is the topic CRM data. You also said that they are not yet connected. Very often it's like, with the Targets and Analytics tools, AEM anyway, we really pull in the CRM pool data and make intelligent decisions then as well. What can we play out data-based for content then? So not just click-based user behavior, but really data-based. And I think that is definitely a huge potential for DVAG to do this in the future. They have also recognized this and want to move in this direction.

Philip Tolstych: That's right, exactly. However, we are still at the beginning of the talks. But they know that this is very important. After all, they need to know their end customers at the end of the day so that they can address them better.

Torsten Green: Now we got a question:

What do I have to contribute as a customer, or rather what do I have to do-. Again, very briefly. Sorry. What does diva-e/pro!vision take on in this question?

Philip Tolstych: In principle, you first have to be willing to take on the topic and invest time. What do we do? We come and do workshops and tease out this information, the goals, business objectives, measurement points from the customer and then go home with this information and then present a concept on how to implement it cost-effectively and how to get the part on the road in connection with the tools that we then use there.

Simon Buß: That's a challenge, by the way, that we hear from many customers in our discussions. So when we talk about these tools, yes, everything is exciting and interesting and also believe that it adds value to us. But I don't have anyone who can bridge the gap between what I want to achieve in terms of business objectives and how I can transfer that into the tools. I don't know myself, there is no colleague for that and so on. That's why we're willing to make more of a transition so that we can proactively offer this to our customers. To bridge the gap by leveraging the potential that these tools offer, because surprisingly, it's not the technical challenge that's holding things back, the possibilities. But also this gap, I would say, between the-. What do I want business-wise, I actually already know. I also know what the tools are. But how do I bring that together now? And this is an example here, where we provide consulting services on an ongoing basis, i.e. we always look in regularly and make suggestions and so on. And we believe that we can also generate significant added value by providing ongoing consulting services.

Hartmut König: If I may say something briefly. What is always important to me in this context is to realize that this is not a project, but a program. If I want to do something like target introduction and personalization, then it is not finished after a project phase, but I will do it permanently. Target is only relevant and personal if I basically have someone who is regularly working on it and creating new variants. Tests new solutions, plays out new personalized content. Because even the personalized, fancy banner or the personalized, fancy speech, when it comes for the second or third time, it's not relevant at all. And it's relevant the first time and it goes on the second time. That's why it's a change management process to get out over technology adoption.

Torsten Green: We notice that in our projects as well. They are not so much completed projects, but rather permanent companions, where we basically help for years to implement new things, new topics. Therefore, from our point of view, it is very important that we have a partnership with our customers and that we are able to support them in the long term and not just: "Finished here, your project and goodbye. That is not a business model that we are currently pursuing.

Simon Buß: So one challenge is often also-, for our contacts in turn, I'll say, to get budgets for it or I'll say to bring about this mental shift in the company, that this is a sensible investment, to keep it alive on an ongoing basis. So building on what Hartmut also said earlier. So investing in this right now. The willingness increases. And we've already had cases where we've worked out together what the potential is that can be leveraged, and we've also had cases with customers. The other day at the Target webinar with E.ON, for example. That's an example where you can also prove with figures that it really brings in money. So then the boss says, okay, then I'll stand up for it; or you stand up for it.

Torsten Green: Simon I have seen, we have one last question now. Angela, I think we are running out of time a little bit now. Maybe while you're changing the screen, marketers and analytics can also create custom, interactive reports and dashboards. Keyword Google Data Studio. So Phillip, probably to you.

Philip Tolstych: Exactly, so I have to say I'm unfortunately only in the Adobe environment and I don't know Google Data Studio that well. But what I can say, yes you can of course create custom dashboards, they can also be interactive. Where there is a bit of regimentation is on the topic of real-time evaluation. There are also enough things that work, but there are still some tick marks that don't work properly. But otherwise, when it comes to historical data evaluation, you can do really great things. Whether it's a group chart, a line chart. What you can imagine there. You can also adapt everything to the company in terms of color. So you have a lot of possibilities, if that's the direction of the question.

Simon Buß: At DVAG, we also regularly send out, I think in PDF format, so that the CEO doesn't have to log in, he just gets an e-mail with a PDF inside, where he can see the contents at a glance. If he is then interested in it, he can then enter it again and so on. There are actually possibilities for all kinds of information depths and widths to prepare, distribute and so on.

Angela Meyer: Exactly, due to the time, I would end the Q&A session now. But please feel free to ask further questions to our Adobe expert Dominik Bühler. You're welcome to contact him directly, by mail or by phone. And he will be happy to discuss the Adobe topic with you in more detail. Just a quick note about our next webinars. We will be holding weekly webinars with our partners and customers and look forward to your participation. And now, thank you all. Thank you Hartmut and Phillip, Simon and Torsten for your input and say until next time.