Figma Acquisition and Genie launch attack problem from different angles
It was a big week for the customer experience market, with two major marketing tools players swinging to take the idea to the next level. The combination of two moves could bring the customer experience closer to reality after a long period of ambition.
“Customer experience” is a rather vague concept. The idea is that you want your customers to feel good every time they interact with you, both in person and online. You know for sure when that’s not working well, but it can be more subtle than just a big smile in person or a successful result online. It’s more about taking an extra step to anticipate problems before they arise or design a product in an elegant way to reduce friction.
It seems that with all the data we have about customers today, companies should be doing better at generating positive experiences. In fact, there is so much data from so many sources that companies like Adobe and Salesforce have created customer data platforms (or CDPs for short) to collect all that data in one place with the goal of delivering optimal customer experiences based on the knowledge you have gathered about customers.
Two of the largest companies involved in collecting and using this data are Salesforce and Adobe. While Adobe doesn’t have CRM, it certainly has marketing tools, and the $20 billion purchase of Figma was all about designing great products, which should ultimately lead to a better customer experience.
At the same time, this week at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual customer conference in San Francisco, the CRM giant announced a new approach to data integration on a platform called Genie. While it works with the platform of tools itself and with third-party partners such as Snowflake and Amazon, the ultimate goal is to use the massive amounts of customer data to generate the best possible customer experiences when they are needed.
