A customer-centric engagement strategy — turning interactions into enduring connections.
Building loyalty through empathy and data-driven personalization.
Every organization strives to win more customers, increase loyalty, and ultimately drive growth. In this guide, we explore the critical role of empathy in a successful customer-centric engagement strategy. You’ll learn how the right solutions with built-in AI and automation tools use data and insights to help you create and manage real-time profiles, audiences, content, and omnichannel journeys. This combination of organizational mindset, strategy, and solutions allows you to deliver more experiences that resonate and turn one-time customers into long-term advocates.
Build personalized adventures into your customer engagement strategy.
Let’s say you’re in the market for a new laptop. You can:
A. Order from a popular online retailer.
B. Visit a cutting-edge electronics store.
Adventure A
You decide to browse the online retailer's website. It's user-friendly, with categories that make it easy to find the perfect laptop for your needs. Detailed product specifications and customer reviews help you make an informed decision. The website provides a secure checkout with various payment options and speedy shipping, and you receive real-time updates on your order's progress until it reaches your doorstep. If any issues arise, the customer support team is just a click away, providing prompt assistance via live chat or email. This digital experience offers convenience, efficiency, and a hassle-free way to purchase products from the comfort of your home.
Adventure B
You enter the store and are greeted by interactive screens showcasing the latest tech innovations. Each laptop has its own digital display with detailed information, including videos and demos. A mobile app offers personalized recommendations based on your preferences and browsing history. After finding the perfect laptop, you scan its QR code using the app, add it to your virtual cart, and complete the purchase digitally. You stay connected with the retailer by participating in their digital events, where you learn about emerging technologies and attend live product demonstrations. This immersive experience creates a memorable and distinct journey that continues as you explore more new tech.
Now, which adventure did it best? Answer: It depends on the customer’s preferences.
Today’s customers expect personalized, highly relevant, and consistent experiences everywhere they interact with a brand. But too many brands use a campaign-centric approach that lacks personalization and efficiency. Customer-centric engagement, in contrast, is an approach that uses empathy to put the customer first in every interaction and build long-term loyalty. Customer-centric engagement is one of the major pillars of unified customer experience.
Beyond personalization of content, unified customer experience is a holistic approach to customer-centric engagement that enables organizations to unify around the customer, transitioning from a one-time mindset to a lifetime-value mindset. It uses a single platform of solutions—with AI and automation tools—working in harmony to connect data sources, technologies, and customer profiles. This approach provides a single, unified view of your customers and their behavior at every stage of their journey, allowing your teams to orchestrate sophisticated customer journeys and deliver consistent, highly personalized content experiences across channels and devices.
Customer-centric engagement starts with an empathetic customer journey management strategy.
Focus less on channels and more on data.
Brands often struggle to identify which customers and audiences to target to most effectively drive new customer acquisition and growth. The common result is wasted marketing spend, higher acquisition costs, and lower conversion rates. Adding to the challenge, today’s customers are engaging through more channels than ever, and brands are expected to know what they did last, and what opportunity to offer them next.
In response, it’s tempting to focus more on channel engagement, but a single or even multi-channel approach can lead to disparate technologies and inconsistent data. Without real-time customer context — and the data-driven insights from customer activity — brands are left to target potential customers through broad, large-scale marketing campaigns that inundate them with sales-oriented messaging that’s disconnected and lacks in-the-moment relevance.
Taking a more empathetic approach requires a deeper understanding of your customers’ needs and preferences. It begins with connecting data from all touchpoints and unifying customer profiles. With a comprehensive view of your customers and their journeys, you are better positioned to segment your customer base and tailor your approach to each audience’s specific characteristics, preferences, and behaviors. You can then deliver more cohesive messaging, personalized content, and real-time responses at scale for true omnichannel engagement.
Effective customer acquisition also relies on a strong and scalable first-party data strategy, as well as trusted second- and third-party data partners that don’t rely on third-party cookies. This holistic strategy provides a deeper understanding of customers while respecting their privacy concerns.
TSB Bank
“Our digital strategy is all about serving customers well and building trust across channels, but that doesn’t mean anything if we don’t listen to the five million people and businesses who bank with TSB each day. From online reviews to Net Promoter Scores, we take every piece of feedback to heart.”
Mike Gamble, Director of Analysis and Design, TSB Bank
Create authentic, personalized connections.
Great customer engagement requires creating tailored experiences at scale across the customer lifecycle and fine-tuning with each successive interaction. Whether you’re marketing through email, social media, mobile apps, in-person interactions, or all the above, your customer journey management strategy should be flexible and adaptive.
Empathizing with your customers means striving to understand why they come to your brand in the first place, and why they choose a particular channel at this stage of their journey. With better data and insights into your customers’ previous behavior, it’s easier to serve their current needs and predict future behavior. Data-driven insights allow you to personalize your communication tactics and deliver offers that resonate in your customers’ preferred channels.
"We achieve a business outcome by listening, collecting knowledge, and delivering a consistent experience. And we do that across any channel, any touchpoint, and with every interaction.”
Kevin Lindsay
Director of Product Marketing, Adobe
Break down organizational silos.
Customer journey management requires collaboration and information sharing across different departments and teams. This means providing employees with tools that give them access to customer data, such as purchase history and browsing behavior. To foster a truly customer-centric culture, organizations need to get leadership buy-in, train employees to prioritize customer needs, and regularly measure customer satisfaction.
Consider these two examples that illustrate the importance of organizational collaboration and sharing.
Lacking empathy — when experiences fail to meet the customer’s needs.
Sarah, a customer, visits an online clothing retailer's website and purchases a summer dress. The retailer, without considering Sarah’s previous purchases or browsing history, sends her promotional emails and ads for heavy winter coats. The mismatched recommendations annoy Sarah because they feel impersonal and waste her time. The lack of thoughtful data curation results in a poor customer experience, and Sarah probably won’t be shopping with the brand again.
Empathetic — when data is thoughtfully curated to meet the customer’s needs.
David, a frequent traveler, likes to stay at a particular hotel chain. The hotel brand collects and analyzes David’s data — including his preferred room types, amenities, and travel patterns — so they can anticipate his needs and preferences. Hotel staff greet David when he arrives and have his favorite room prepared with personalized amenities and a welcome note. The hotel recommends nearby restaurants and attractions based on David’s past choices. This thoughtful data curation creates a superb customer experience, encouraging him to choose the same hotel chain for his future travels.
By combining the right customer engagement platform tools with a customer-centric mindset, your teams can execute an effective customer journey management strategy that builds authentic connections with customers and drives long-term loyalty to your brand. Data is an important place to start, providing the insights needed to understand each customer but data can also be the most challenging aspect of customer journey management.
Set strategy in motion with a strong data foundation.
The continued challenge of fragmented data, systems, and teams.
The abundance of data from various sources, without a single source of truth on the customer journey, makes it virtually impossible to know where the customer is or what they want next. Inaccurate or outdated data can lead to incorrect assumptions and misguided strategies that have a negative impact, so it’s important to regularly audit your data sources and ensure everything is accurate and up to date.
There are, of course, legal and ethical considerations to consider when it comes to collecting and using customer data. Privacy laws, such as GDPR and CCPA, are in place to protect consumers’ personal information, and it’s essential to comply with these regulations to maintain the trust of your customers. While all that may sound intimidating, the right technology makes it possible to troubleshoot these potential data obstacles and risks to make it easier for you and your organization.
Let’s take a closer look at what optimal customer journey management looks like when built on a strong foundation of unified data.
Unify your data sources for a complete view of the customer journey.
Go beyond specific channel engagement data — such as social media engagement or website analytics — and take a more holistic approach for orchestrating customer journeys that keep your targets engaged. To gain a complete view of your customers, you need to integrate data from all touchpoints, including point-of-sale (POS) transactions, ecommerce interactions, social media, customer service inquiries, and demographic information.
In a cookie-less future where first-party data is key, unifying customer-specific information with pseudonymous data in a privacy-safe environment is essential. By combining the wealth of zero- and first-party data with anonymous data that’s identifiable with further analysis, businesses can create comprehensive customer profiles that dynamically update in real time. Real-time customer data profiles provide marketers with immediate access to insights, allowing you to track events as they occur and engage their audience segments across connected channels from a single location, all while opportunities are still relevant.
Home Depot
By unifying our data, we started waking up to the fact that our customers’ trust is an extraordinarily valuable asset. They were telling us exactly what they were looking for, and we needed to be more aligned with ways to help them.
Melanie Babcock, Vice President of Integrated Media, The Home Depot
Streamline your marketing efforts with omnichannel journey orchestration.
Data is incredibly important, but it's only one piece of the engagement puzzle. The other critical piece is insights — understanding how your customers are engaging with your brand across their journey. Customer activity is always changing, and your customer profiles need to automatically update simultaneously. You need to be able to track and visualize the customer journey, and discover insights, in real time.
Working together, data and engagement insights provide a fuller understanding of what your customers are thinking and feeling, allowing you to perform effective customer journey management. With a view of the entire journey, you can quickly identify areas where customers are experiencing roadblocks or drop off. You can make informed decisions on how to optimize the customer journey and provide a better experience for your customers — making changes to your website, adjusting your messaging, simplifying your customer service processes, or even modifying your marketing and sales strategies.
This is the goal of omnichannel journey orchestration — giving your customers the best experiences at every stage of their journey, in real time. And creating personalized campaigns that drive meaningful conversations, engagement, and loyalty.
To unlock the full power of your data and orchestrate omnichannel journeys, your organization needs a unified customer engagement platform. This centralized hub oversees customer journeys across various channels, including inbound interactions like web and in-app, as well as outbound channels like email, push notifications, and SMS. It also enables offers and content delivery across touchpoints such as point-of-sale (POS) systems, kiosks, IoT devices, and social media platforms.
A unified customer engagement platform should include capabilities for managing real-time customer data, analyzing rich customer profiles, and providing real-time insights into customer preferences, behaviors, and patterns. These insights can trigger next-best actions based on the desired customer outcome that make it easy for you to schedule and execute targeted campaigns across multiple channels. By tailoring each message according to individual behaviors, preferences, and engagement history, you’ll get more impactful campaigns and higher ROI.
Macy’s
With immediate insights into what customers shop for, we can deliver tailored offers, personalized digital and app experiences, and highly relevant communications. These perfectly timed experiences foster profitable growth, brand love, and loyalty.
Bennett Fox-Glassman, Senior Vice President of Customer Journey, Macy’s
An omnichannel shopping journey engages shoppers with consistent and personalized messages, no matter where the purchase is made.
Build the technology stack for customer journey management.
When it comes to managing customer journeys, choosing your platform is crucial. Your platform should centralize three core capabilities:
- Unified, real-time data for intelligent audience targeting
A unified data foundation that responsibly combines customer information from different sources in real time to create detailed, unified customer profiles. This helps you identify and engage audiences without the guesswork.
- Personalized journey orchestration for omnichannel lifecycle engagement
A system of engagement that uses real-time data to create personalized journeys for customers and deliver highly relevant and timely experiences across channels and devices — especially mobile, which is critical for reaching your customers in the moment. AI decision-making and automation can deliver tailored content to individual customers, allowing you to focus on creating experiences that evoke emotional connections and build loyalty.
- AI-powered insights for optimized experiences
A system of insights that uses AI to analyze data from various channels for a complete view of the customer journey and a deeper understanding of why customers behave the way they do. You can then use these insights to predict their future actions, deliver just-right experiences to each customer, and drive ROI.
Major League Baseball
We’ve gone out of our way to try to create digital tools to improve the fan experience or bring personalized experiences and information to them so that they feel like we know who they are. We know who their favorite team is. We know who their favorite players are.
Kasia Danilczuk, Senior Product Manager, Fan Data, Major League Baseball
The benefits of a unified customer experience infrastructure.
To create a smooth customer experience, you need a flexible customer journey management application that easily incorporates the different channels and touchpoints along the customer journey. When selecting a solution, prioritize those that utilize open APIs, as they enable smooth data flow between systems, leading to the timely triggering of relevant messages, content, and offers.
It’s also important that your systems of data, engagement, and insights are built on a unified foundation, so that they’re interconnected and functioning harmoniously. Customer profiles should update with real-time data from every interaction, providing immediate insights to help you optimize experiences and campaigns. Without a unified foundation, your technology stack can become a disjointed mess of data silos, causing inefficiencies and lacking insights to power memorable experiences for your customers.
The benefits of AI-powered solutions — for you and your customers.
In addition to a seamless infrastructure, it’s important to consider the level of AI powering your solutions. Manually combing through massive amounts of data is slow and requires too many resources. Solutions with built-in AI and automation tools can process huge amounts of data in a fraction of the time, identifying opportunities based on customer interactions, as well as provide insights and recommendations for more impactful experiences across the customer journey.
AI-powered features help you personalize communications, predict customer behavior, and proactively identify issues that could diminish the customer experience. For example, some features use machine learning algorithms to analyze customer data in real time and generate personalized recommendations for each customer.
AI can also help detect patterns and trends in customer behavior, helping you create more meaningful customer experiences with privacy, security, and ethics in mind. A news website, for example, can use AI to curate news articles for each reader. Automating decisions with AI — also called intelligent decisioning — makes this type of hyper-personalization possible, aligning timing, content, context, and channels. It ensures that customers receive relevant offers whether they are interacting with a teller at a retail bank, browsing their email, or logged into their account on the website.
Take the next step in your journey.
With a customer-centric mindset that’s based on a more empathetic approach, your teams can execute an effective customer journey management strategy that builds authentic connections and drives long-term loyalty. Adobe, a leader in digital experience solutions, offers a unified customer engagement platform that ties your systems of data, insights, and engagement together so you can orchestrate a seamless customer journey across channels and devices. Your customers deserve the best, and with Adobe solutions and expertise, you have the power to deliver it.
Learn how to engage every customer on every channel at any moment with Adobe Journey Optimizer.
Learn more about our unified customer engagement platform.
Sources
“Delivering Personalized Experiences, at the Right Time, in the Right Channels — and with the Right Permissions,” Adobe blog, August 6, 2024.
“How Macy’s is Growing Brand Love and Customer Loyalty with Personalization at Scale,” Adobe customer story for Macy’s, January 14, 2024
“How MLB Is Revolutionizing Fan Personalization at Scale - S810,” Adobe Summit, 48:15, August 13, 2023.
“In store. Online. The Home Depot Inspires the Entire Experience,” Adobe customer story for Home Depot, August 12, 2022.
“Innovations in Customer Engagement and Personalized Journeys - S809,” Adobe Summit, 53:39, April 13, 2023.
“TSB Banks on Real-Time Data Personalization for Every Customer,” Adobe customer story for TSB, August 29,2022
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