Tailor-made customer experiences.

Enriching consumers’ lives with digital experiences

It's the simple things that make everyday life a pleasure: fresh laundry, perfectly styled hair, or a DIY project done right. Well-known for its cleaning and beauty consumer brands, as well as its industrial adhesives, sealants, and coatings, German multinational company Henkel is breaking new ground with a digital pioneering spirit to offer all consumers and business customers experiences, products, and services tailored to their needs.

To achieve this, the company created its new digital business platform, “RAQN”, to enable its brands to reach customers individually with consistent communication throughout the entire customer journey. The powerful technological foundation is supported by Adobe Experience Platform, the data foundation for Adobe Experience Cloud.

Creating a unique brand experience

Henkel has long recognized the need to rethink brand communication and respond to the constantly changing needs of customers. The classic linear customer journey is no longer effective today. Instead, it has become normal for consumers to research and buy products using different channels.

Henkel embraced omnichannel marketing to meet these modern customer demands. The company interacts with customers via websites, apps, and social media as well as through online shops and brick-and-mortar retail stores. Its goal is to create consistent, personalized customer experiences across all channels — in real time.

But as the number of touchpoints increases, so does the challenge of reaching customers at the right time, with the right content, on the right channel. Therefore, in 2020, Henkel decided to upgrade its technology with the overarching goal of achieving better scalability, faster time to market, and greater efficiency.

“We are seeing a fundamental shift in customer desires towards on-demand and hyper-personalized digital commerce,” says Michael Nilles, Chief Digital & Information Officer at Henkel. “By partnering with Adobe, we are expanding our technical capabilities and driving our digital business innovation — always with the goal of providing a seamless and personalized experience for our customers across all online and offline channels.”

The solution for Henkel is “RAQN” ― a central digital business platform developed in-house for digital marketing and e-commerce. The platform effectively connects processes for content, community, and commerce, reducing the need for web development and simplifying the provisioning of new offers. At the same time, the modular architecture gives the company’s brands sufficient flexibility to tailor experiences for their own audiences.

Henkel's expectations of the digital platform for customer experience are high. Currently, the company wants to reach customers of more than 30 brands in a personalized way across B2C, B2B, and B2B2C segments. But that’s just the beginning, as Henkel plans to gradually link all its extensive brand portfolio to the RAQN platform. Adobe solutions form the strong foundation for the RAQN platform, providing just the right combination of performance, scalability, functionality, customizability, and intuitive operation.

A custom platform built on a solid foundation

From the beginning of its strategic partnership with Adobe, it was clear that Henkel needed to build on the latest technology. But the company also was not interested in buying an off-the-shelf solution. Working together the companies built the RAQN platform to create a solution perfectly tailored to its needs. Experience Cloud applications have proven to be valuable tools for all aspects of personalized brand communication.

Adobe Experience Manager Sites as a Cloud Service enables the company to efficiently produce extensive website content, reuse it modularly across brands, and tailor it for different markets and audiences. Adobe Experience Manager Assets Managed Services ensures smooth access to centralized digital asset management. Employees can find text, graphics, and video elements that are optimized for all brand channels and meet all compliance requirements. As a result, content creators can use the content immediately and deliver new digital offerings with a faster time to market.

With Adobe Campaign for B2C and Adobe Marketo Engage for B2B communications, Henkel implements a personalized customer approach via email. Adobe Analytics provides meaningful performance tracking for all relevant digital channels. Henkel uses Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform to bundle the insights gained from the user experience into uniform profiles. These are automatically enriched with each new interaction, which helps ensure that brands always have an overview of previous interactions and potential communication opportunities. Based on the history of interactions, Adobe Journey Orchestration allows Henkel to adapt all customer communications based on where customers are in their decision-making cycles.

When looking at new ways to connect with customers, one of the biggest issues that arises is how data is handled. Experience Platform serves as the foundation of RAQN to help ensure the reliable interaction of all data and applications. Henkel follows the principles of privacy by design with customer data collected and processed in compliance with GDPR. Firmly integrated application routines ensure that data is used in accordance with existing legislation.

“We want to offer our customers tailor-made experiences,” says Sascha Wirtz, CVP Consumer, Customer & Market at Henkel. “Adobe apps are so flexible that we were able to easily integrate them into our ecosystem and adapt them to our needs.”

Centralized IT with flexibility for every brand

Adobe apps are now a permanent fixture of Henkel's digital growth strategy as the technological basis for the RAQN platform. With a centralized IT landscape for brand communications, the company can maintain existing customer relationships and build new ones in a more agile and efficient manner. At the same time, the modular architecture makes it easier for brands to plan and implement digital communications to create personalized brand experiences at a high scale and speed.

The flexible scalability of a cloud environment gives Henkel the ability to continue its dynamic growth in the digital sector. With Experience Cloud, Henkel successfully published around 300 web domains from more than 30 brands in over 40 countries within just two years. The company is prepared to meet the needs of all customers in the digital age.

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