As more companies move ahead with digital transformation projects based around customer digital experience, there are a number of options for choosing technology platforms and technology services firms to help implement them.

In two recent reports, Forrester Research provides an in-depth look into what it takes companies to deploy digital commerce, marketing and content systems from Adobe Inc.—including the Magento Commerce ecommerce platform—to digitally engage successfully with their customers.

“Adobe is one of the most important digital experience platforms, but it doesn’t work out of the box,” Forrester says in the report, “The Case Study Bonanza of Adobe Implementations,” by Forrester’s Ted Schadler, vice president and principal analyst, and Xiaofeng Wang, senior analyst.

That report provides extensive details on 42 case studies, including the Adobe implementations at manufacturers Siemens, DuPont, Honeywell Aerospace and agricultural machinery maker AGCO. It complements an earlier report, “The Forrester Wave: Adobe Implementation Services, Q2 2020,” also by Schadler and Wang, which reviews the services of 12 digital consulting firms: Accenture, Adobe, Cognizant, Deloitte, Dentsu, HCL Technologies, IBM, ICF Next, Infosys, Publicis Sapient, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), and WPP.

Ranking firms on 24 criteria

In the Wave report—which ranks each of the 12 agencies against 24 criteria covering their market presence and the strengths of their deployment service and strategy—Schadler and Wang provide several tips on what companies should consider when choosing an implementation services firm, including:

• Expertise in deploying particular Adobe products combined with an understanding of the client’s business. The services firm should “complement their Adobe skills with vertical expertise, understand clients’ business priorities and challenges, and bring in prebuilt assets, accelerators, and industry-relevant best practices,” the report says.
• Expertise that marries design, strategic consulting and implementation. Services firms should provide “resources beyond implementation, including strategic consulting and design.”
• The ability to integrate Adobe products with internal and external ecosystems. Success in Adobe deployments typically relies on “enterprise collaboration” across four areas: marketing, technology, digital customer experience and commerce, the report says.

In the report on case studies, Forrester lists the Adobe deployment services and “key outcomes and metrics” for the 42 companies grouped by industries: manufacturing; consumer products and services; travel and transportation; telecom and utilities; media, entertainment and sports; automotive; and financial services and “other sectors.”

Among the nine companies listed under manufacturers, for example, it includes under key outcomes “better customer engagement,” “increased page views and site visits,” “increased digital content availability” and “lower content production costs” resulting from such projects as an ecommerce platform launch, a customer portal redesign, content management, and analytics and automation.

For each case study, the report includes links to an online presentation by the client company. The Honeywell Aerospace presentation, for example, tells how the company deployed its GoDirect Trade online marketplace for aerospace parts to foster engagements between buyers and sellers with accurate content on pricing and inventory availability. The presentation by AGCO, a manufacturer of agricultural machinery, reveals how it provided a digital customer experience to make it easier for buyers to research and purchase complex equipment.

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