Achieving peak success and ROI with Ultimate Support technical account managers

Have you done something out of your comfort zone that is mentally, physically, or spiritually challenging? Well in July 2018, I did just that. I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. Prior to this, I had never scaled a mountain, camped, or pitched a tent, and I was paralyzingly afraid of heights. My reaching the summit was nothing short of extraordinary. It would not have happened without the guidance, encouragement, and support of the Sherpas, three close friends, and support personnel who made sure we had what we needed to prepare for each of the next stages throughout the climb. They had climbed the mountain thousands of times, and without their knowledge and expertise of the mountain, I never would have successfully summited. But that’s a story for another time.

I learned that day that anything is possible — with the right support and expertise.

It’s a lesson I carry with me every day and try to inject into all aspects of life, including at work. As the global vice president of customer engineering and success at Adobe, my job is to create a seamless, end-to-end experience for customers and help them make the most of our solutions to reach their business objectives. And I know better than anyone that achieving this is a team effort.

Guiding you from base camp to summit

In the same way that Kilimanjaro Sherpas won’t just hand you a map and send you on your way, we understand at Adobe that one size does not fit all. Every customer has different goals, pressures, and challenges.

That’s why Adobe’s Ultimate Support team provides ongoing personalized and proactive support to ensure the best possible technical health of your Adobe solutions. We not only help our customers get the best out of our platform after implementation, but we support them through the peaks and valleys of their industries to unlock value and return on investment (ROI) over time.

One key player within that support team is our technical account manager (TAM).

Working as an extension of a customer’s team, the TAM provides proactive technical leadership, customized knowledge sharing, and business-critical insights. They also call on wider support from other Adobe technical solution experts as required to keep our customers’ business steps ahead of any issue.

The technical account manager brings years of specialist knowledge and best practices from the customer’s industry with them. Whether they’re an authority on healthcare and are well-versed in HIPAA data, or they specialize in retail and understand Black Friday best practices, they provide a personalized, holistic experience to ensure a customer’s continued technical and operational health.

This is how they help unlock value and ROI.

Scaling the mountain

When climbing a tall mountain like Kilimanjaro, altitude sickness kicks in at around 14,000 feet. In anticipation, Sherpas proactively help climbers acclimatize — but it’s difficult to predict how the body will react. So they adjust and tailor their game plan to each person during the climb by slowing the place, providing hydrating fluids, or (as in my case) carrying bags to alleviate stress on the body. This personalized approach gives everyone the best chance of successfully reaching the summit.

In much the same way, Adobe brings a new kind of tailored support experience with proactive and flexible problem-solving to help customers achieve peak success.

For example, when Breville, an Australian home appliance company, was looking to expand its eight brands into over a dozen countries, it migrated its websites to Adobe Experience Manager to have the infrastructure to efficiently scale at speed.

The brand also partnered with Adobe Ultimate Support and, following the advice of the TAM, successfully completed the first migration and proactively planned for future site launches and growth. It deployed a headless architecture that reused 60% of its core content across all sites. Breville then only had to customize smaller branding and styling front-end elements to individual markets, locations, and languages. This simplified the approach to launching new websites, allowing the company to cut its time to market in half for a full ecommerce site.

This strategy (of one primary build with reusable components) also helped relaunch over 100 microsites in just a few months, instead of possibly years.

By engaging with its TAM’s technical expertise and Adobe Support plans’ innovative model, Breville successfully expanded into 22 new markets worldwide and avoided time-consuming, complete website rebuilds. It also future-proofed its success, putting in place the infrastructure to allow for future website launches and market expansion. The benefits in terms of time, costs, and scalability are considerable, such as a website launch time that's twice as fast. You can read the full case study here.

It’s a team effort

Could Breville have achieved such success without its TAM and Ultimate Support team? Could I have summited Kilimanjaro without the Sherpas and guides? Maybe — but frankly, it’s unlikely.

I’ve witnessed firsthand the pitfalls of trying to summit alone. A financial services customer chose to implement Experience Manager on its own, without consulting Ultimate Support. Though the company had plans to scale quickly, it set up Experience Manager incorrectly, preventing the brand from achieving its goal. Only when the team launched the new website did they realize there was a problem.

The company brought Adobe in to remedy the situation retrospectively. Had it leaned on our Ultimate Support team from the start, one simple conversation would have prevented this mistake, and the finance brand could have experienced the same success as Breville. Instead, it took months to rectify and reverse course, costing time and money.

Find your guides

Regardless of how much experience you have, it’s essential to follow the guidance of experienced experts with extensive knowledge of the landscape to reach your goals. For me, it was trusting my Sherpas and the wider climbing team. For you, it might be partnering with Ultimate Support and a TAM.

If you’re ready to find out more about how Adobe’s Ultimate Support can become an extension of your team to help you achieve peak success and a greater return on your investment, get in touch with Adobe Support plans experts or reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. I’ll even share my full Kilimanjaro story with you.

Scott Bajtos brings 30 years of experience in the software/SaaS industry with deep expertise in enterprise technical support, global support strategy, and end-to-end customer success. Prior to joining Adobe, Bajtos was chief customer officer at VMware, leading global technical support and paid support, professional services, customer success, and customer advocacy. He also led global support and services at Business Objects and served as EVP for customer advocacy at SAP for 8 years. Bajtos is a customer champion, creating long-term partnerships through proactive support programs and high-impact reactive support performance. Bajtos is a servant-leader with a long track record of leading and mentoring teams to deliver for customers while growing their careers. Bajtos’ mission at Adobe is to leave no customer behind and to ensure they achieve success.