EY embarked on a strategy to connect its global digital technology platforms to create a single, 360-degree view of a client that integrates sales and marketing needs. Alongside customer relationship management, EY is taking the next step to look at customer experience management to firmly ensure that client satisfaction and client experience remain at the center of everything it does. Managing consent is a major factor in ensuring that the digital client experience is aligned with the client’s preference and gives them greater control over what they receive.
As an Adobe Experience Cloud customer, EY had already transformed its digital marketing landscape with Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Marketo Engage. The journey to onboard Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Adobe Customer Journey Analytics was a first for both Adobe and EY, as teams worked in partnership to develop Adobe’s first B2B version of the CDP. This provides EY with added visibility that supports more relevant, timely, and custom communications with prospects, key account executives, and other individuals.
Elevating service with a global view of clients
Adobe’s real-time customer data platform brings together data from across EY client teams, including data stored on proprietary EY platforms. “The fact that the CDP is platform agnostic was a big selling point for us,” said Mackie. “The ability to connect across a variety of platforms was critical in successfully integrating our data.”
“Previously, we needed teams to manually analyze data, connect executive profiles and activity, and create actionable insights,” says Mackie. “By automatically bringing information together using Adobe Real-Time CDP and providing a complete view of clients’ marketing signals in a single platform, we estimate seeing substantial efficiency savings annually.”
The holistic view of a client is critical for global client service partners (GCSPs) working with EY’s largest multinational clients. These clients typically work with EY teams across multiple geographies and receive a variety of interactions, from event invitations and newsletters to targeted social media campaigns. For the first time, GCSPs can quickly and easily understand everything that is being communicated to a client and how the client reacts to those messages.
EY can analyze the profiles on both an individual and account level as well. This provides account teams with instant insight into key individuals within the account who are highly engaged and influential or zoom out to see an aggregate view of interests across the company. This helps client service teams uncover new opportunities to provide proactive service or new solutions.
“We had one client that primarily engaged with us for risk and tax consulting,” says Mackie. “But when we started to look at the bigger picture, we saw opportunities for a broader engagement into other issues and service areas. By providing more visibility into clients’ preferences, Adobe helps us elevate customer service while increasing sales and revenue.”
The insights also extend to prospective clients and new accounts. With a 360-degree view of client interactions with Customer Journey Analytics, account teams can piece together all information to identify potential decision makers or uncover areas of interest — all without needing intensive support from analysts. By collating this information, account teams can avoid a great deal of time-consuming analysis and immediately start having more meaningful conversations with clients.
“I’ve always had a vision of looking at marketing data from a more holistic account perspective — not an easy task when dealing with global teams across global corporations,” says Karen Hopkins, Global CMO at EY. “Adobe solutions work together to help us connect teams and their data to find better ways to connect and proactively engage with clients.”
Global consent in one location
One of the most important pieces of client information in the CDP is consent. There are many different privacy regulations around the world, and EY takes compliance seriously. Previously, that consent information was often distributed in databases around the world, so regional teams would need to search through multiple databases looking for opted-in clients to construct a contact list. Now, teams have one location where they can discover whether clients have consented to receive marketing information. The Data Usage Labeling & Enforcement (DULE) framework makes it even easier for teams to manage marketing consent by allowing them to categorize different types of consent or apply labels across an organization.
“Adobe Real-Time CDP is a big win from a marketing data and compliance perspective,” says Mackie. “Account and marketing teams can focus on having the right conversations with clients, knowing they are compliant. The real-time profiles also help ensure that we see changes to privacy settings immediately so that we can respond to client preferences as quickly as possible.”
With a common, central source for customer information, teams across EY connect to the CDP to help create even more value for marketing, sales, communications, and more.
Marketers use the aggregated data to deliver relevant campaigns to different audience segments. With the CDP, they can create segments based on both individual and account traits, such as approaching all sustainability leaders across the energy sector and have confidence that they are only communicating with contacts who have provided consent. This allows marketers to create more relevant communications and nurture leads ready to have deeper conversations with account teams, further linking marketing activities to opportunities to improve quantifiable measurement of success.
“The global Brand and Marketing Communications team creates more than 9,000 marketing qualified opportunities per month using a combination of data sources and marketing automation in Adobe Marketo Engage,” says Hopkins.
Web and digital teams also plan to use CDP to power personalized web experiences. EY is currently migrating its website to Experience Manager Sites as a Cloud Service, which will help the organization scale quickly and take advantage of the latest features as soon as they are available. Once migration is complete, teams will integrate the CDP with Adobe Target to take advantage of real-time customer profiles for personalization at scale across its digital properties.
As digital personalization efforts expand, EY will also need to scale content creation efforts to keep up with the demand for custom messaging. EY is considering if Adobe Workfront could support this content orchestration, leveraging integrations with Experience Manager Assets and Adobe Creative Cloud to increase visibility into content creation and encourage more collaboration between creative teams and marketers to deliver stronger personalized messaging.
“Data is one of our most important creative resources because it helps us determine what content and messages resonate with clients,” says Hopkins. “Adobe solutions give us the visibility and insights to understand our clients and find solutions that together help us build a better working world.”
