"Customer experience is the new currency"

MK: Christoph Kull - you joined Adobe at the beginning of the year as Vice President & Managing Director Central Europe. You're joining the company at a time when the focus on customer experience tools is higher than ever. Adobe demonstrates this with cases such as that of the airline Virgin Atlantic. How do you personally assess the importance of this business unit?

Christoph Kull: For me, customer experience is the new currency with which companies do business. When I started my new job, I took a trip with some colleagues through Germany, Switzerland and Austria, where I was able to talk to numerous board members. The tenor is always the same: proximity to the customer is the most important thing. Every bank wants to be the best financial services provider; every car manufacturer wants to be the most technologically advanced - but at the end of the day, it's all about the experience customers have when they interact with the bank or buy a car. At Adobe, what excites me is that we not only provide the technology to create, play out, and analyze end-to-end delightful experiences. But we've created this area of customer experience management from scratch, which didn't exist before. We are still the only provider that can map the entire experience chain.

Where do you still see potential for development?

The current situation is that the individual touchpoints along the customer journey already communicate with each other thanks to Adobe and are logically much better integrated with each other as a suite, i.e. individual solutions. The goal, however, would be to unite the technology of all touchpoints centrally on the "Experience Platform". We demonstrated this at our summit in Las Vegas this year, and we're working on it.

Do you consider a successful customer experience to be particularly important for winning new customers or first-time buyers - or is it also important for maintaining existing customers?

We work with a large company that represents the experience chain I described earlier with an infinity sign. On the one hand, there are the people you want to win over, but on the other hand, they will hopefully become regular customers at some point. You have to take care of regular customers, make them offers according to their preferences, then they will gladly buy something again - and the whole cycle starts all over again. I can give you another concrete example: With an international shoe retailer, we made sure that people who purchase a pair of running shoes there are followed up to match their purchase. Thanks to Adobe technology, they don't just get ads for more shoes that don't do them any good. Instead, they're getting information on how to care for their shoes, sporting events, and running groups in their area. At first, this may not be information that directly benefits the footwear provider in terms of advertising. But it binds customers to the brand and ensures that they'll be happy to come back when they need shoes again - or you launch a seasonal promo at some point.

So the balance between push and pull is what matters?

I would sign that, yes. I understand sales and have nothing against it if someone wants to sell me something. But I want to be approached in a clever way. By the way, this doesn't just apply to B2C examples, but also in the B2B sector. Since we bought Marketo, we have the market leader in B2B marketing on board. Marketo helps our customers optimize their B2B relationships, perfect their business partners' experiences.

You say that Adobe has founded the customer experience management space. What do you think about your competitors' efforts? SAP is increasingly involved in the automated creation of campaigns, SAS is also expanding customer experience analysis.

If you look at the market, you'll see that there are an incredible number of providers operating in different customer experience niches. This confirms what I said at the beginning: that customer experience is the topic of our time. Of course, there will then be smart companies that want to follow suit and do the same as Adobe. Competition will get tougher. However, our position in the market allows us to focus on the products we offer - we let them speak for themselves.

In the area of analytics, Adobe wants to ensure that - for example - marketers can also evaluate the response to campaigns and take appropriate measures without having any special training in analytics. Artificial intelligence and augmented reality will help them do this. This could streamline processes enormously, especially in large companies. What are the developments here?

What we still see today as a vision of the future or even a technical gimmick is, in my opinion, to be taken very seriously. We are researching with augmented reality, we are researching with voice, because we are convinced that a "different" form of interaction with machines is imminent. At the same time, we have already made the shift from predictive analytics to prescriptive analytics in many areas. Trend predictions are now supplemented by concrete suggestions for action - the machine can recommend that the marketeer take certain steps to achieve this or that goal. Of course, the recommendations can be used or not, that is still decided by the human. But the inhibition threshold to work with data is definitely sinking.

How do you interpret the Adobe vision that companies will work across departmental boundaries in the medium term?

Our aspiration is that all divisions of a company can use our tools with minimal training in order to establish a dialog in this way. One example: IT should be able to talk to marketing, in the same language or on the same basis. Technically, this is already possible - but governance is at least as big a challenge. How do you adapt corporate structures so that the departments can really approach each other? Most companies still have a lot of work ahead of them. But they have, I would say, recognized the problem (laughs).

You just said that "in the end, it's the human that decides". This sentence is also exciting in connection with Adobe's creative tools - because your company has announced, for example, that the automatic creation of images with the help of the AI Sensei is progressing rapidly. Will graphic artists, for example, have to fear for their jobs?

No, and I would put an exclamation mark behind that. Creativity is an intrinsic human talent that cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence any time soon - perhaps never. And by creativity, we don't mean adapting the look of a photo to a brand identity. Those are repetitive, automatic steps that the machine can learn. But creating something new, out of nothing, is inherent to humans. It's the same with analytics: algorithms can analyze higher volumes of data faster than humans. But a human has to write the algorithms. Certain job profiles will become less relevant in the future, while others will emerge. That's the case with every industrial revolution. And I think we are currently in the middle of one. But there's no reason to be afraid - what's happening right now brings more opportunities than risks.