Get on to an e-commerce store, pick out a water bottle. Not sure, how tall the bottle is? Click around a bit and, voila , the bottle is now standing on your desk and you can judge how it looks there. Not happy with how the red bottle looks on your desk? Click it, and it turns green and seems better.

That’s how Augmented Reality (AR) will help you shop and this was on demo at the Community pavilion at the Adobe Summit.

AR and Virtual Reality (VR) are getting integrated on to Adobe Experience Manager, helping retailers give customers a real idea of how a product would look in their homes.

Every year, at the Adobe Summit at Las Vegas, you feel you are inching that much closer to an exciting future of unbroken customer experiences. This year, watching fascinating demos and listening to power-packed keynotes by Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly and Chegg’s CEO Dan Rosenweig, one felt that the future was already here. Last month, Gartner in a report had said that AR and VR have the potential to shake up the customer experience by individualising retailers’ offers and enabling customers to visualise products in different settings. One saw that at the Summit.

Here are the other key takeaways on consumer experience :

Retention is the new growth

We are long past the days of using digital for customer acquisition. The idea is to serve such superlative experiences to the customer that you engage and hold her interest and get her to buy again and again. Shantanu Narayen shared Adobe’s own digital transformation journey, from a time when the company sold creative desktop software to customers with slow product refresh cycles, to a cloud-based subscription model where it put customer experience front and centre and delivered product innovations continuously. “We became a company that relies on data as much as creativity,” Narayen said, describing how Adobe created a data-driven operating model (DDOM) for running its digital business. The DDOM dashboard became a single source of truth for the company as it mapped the entire customer journey of discover, try, buy, use, renew. That Adobe’s website gets 9.2 billion visitors every year is testimony to how engaged the customer is to the site. “Adobe.com is the hub of customer engagement for us,” said Ann Lewnes, CMO Adobe. Lewnes described how the company experimented with every single channel — email, social, video — to provide engaging experiences to the customer. As Shantanu Narayen said, “Retention is the new growth. Customer engagement is what leads people to renew.”

Create Epic Experiences

Steve Lucas, SVP, Digital Experiences, Adobe and former CEO of Marketo, the marketing automation software company that Adobe acquired, stressed that a great customer journey is the propeller that can lift a company’s business. “The marketing is in the experience, the selling is in the experience. And because the experience is powerful and palpable, you keep coming back for more,” he said. “Experience is the main differentiator, it’s the line between epic and epic failure,” he said dramatically.

The big new idea at the Summit from Lucas was that it was no longer enough for companies to think just B2C or B2B.

To adapt and survive, organisations need to begin thinking B2E — Business to Everyone — as the dynamics with customers, partners and stakeholders are rapidly changing. “Twenty years ago, Airbnb and Uber did not exist. These are the new institutions in our lives. And these are not only B2B, but they’re also B2C,” said Lucas. Basically, what Lucas said was that while in B2C marketing, companies get a unified view of one customer, in B2B, you only get a view of the account and the business you are dealing with could have a team of 20 people. The solution: a partnership with LinkedIn, which will enable account- based experiences (ABE) on the platform. The next frontier for ABE, said Lucas, was going to be conversational ABM, which will help marketers deliver personalised experience at scale to businesses.

Customer Zero approach

You can only deliver great experiences if you put the customer at the core of your business. This thought was repeated in different ways by different speakers. Satya Nadella talked about empathy being the way to unlocking great customer experiences, citing the example of how X-box developers created adaptive controllers for differently abled gamers because they got close to this community and understood their problems.

Both Lucas and Narayen talked about a customer zero approach leading them to understand new needs and resulting in product tweaks.

For Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly, putting themselves in the shoes of the customer as well as creating a sense of purpose is what mobilised change in the organisation. This is what led to a miraculous turnaround of the retailer that everyone had predicted would die. Today, when a customer walks into a Best Buy store, they can use the store’s digital services to compare product features and see which products are stocked.

Thinking about what customers needed also motivated Best Buy to get into services. For instance, it started a Tech Advisors service wherein consultants would be sent to customers’ homes to help them decide which appliance, or which Wi-Fi service, would best suit their needs, and then get personalised product recommendations. Best Buy also uses AI to monitor senior citizens to trigger assistance when they are in need. This ability to enter people’s homes has also led Best Buy to understand more about customers’ wants and needs and stock accordingly.

Another glimpse of the future

While AR and VR are already part of the consumer experience today (by 2020, 100 million consumers will shop in AR online and in-store, forecasts Gartner), the future is one where artificial intelligence will take retail to new heights.

On the Summit stage, David Nuescheler, Adobe Fellow & VP of Enterprise Technology, demonstrated how Adobe’s Sensei AI could transform physical retail. A store front was created on stage using American sportswear retailer Foot Locker’s products. Typically when a customer goes in to shop, she looks at the designs and then asks the manager for one in her size. Often times, the right size would not be available.

In Nuescheler’s demo, the minute the customer walks into the store, custom shoes appear on the shelves as well as a real-time warehouse inventory of the product. Now, isn’t that a magical customer experience?

Well, the future is not just AR-infused digital experiences but one overlaid with machine learning as well.

The writer travelled to Las Vegas at the invitation of Adobe

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