Adobe Ultimate Success is a subscription service that delivers strategic, proactive guidance to help organizations maximize the value and performance of their Adobe Experience Cloud solutions. A team of designated experts, consisting of a Customer Success Manager, Support Service Manager, and Technical Account Manager, partner with an organization to align technical and business roadmaps to the organization’s priorities and execute against strategic objectives. This designated team deploys Success Accelerators, which are short engagements with Adobe experts, to assist in driving technical readiness, organizational readiness, and capability adoption. Launch Advisory, one of the Success Accelerators, provides assistance with newly licensed or never-deployed Adobe Experience Cloud solutions to launch best practices and provide customer-specific guidance from planning to go-live.

Adobe commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Adobe Ultimate Success.¹ The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Adobe Ultimate Success on their organizations.

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed five decision-makers with experience using Adobe Ultimate Success. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the experiences of the interviewees and combined the results into a single composite organization, that is a global, industry-agnostic (e.g., B2B2C, multiple business lines across industries), enterprise-sized company with $10 billion in annual revenue and 20,000 employees.

Interviewees said that prior to working with Adobe Ultimate Success, their organizations had Adobe Experience Cloud solutions in place but training and adoption of the software among employees was moving slowly. Teams didn’t have bandwidth to educate colleagues on best practices and expected value of the solutions. As a result, each team continued to use their legacy solutions, which prolonged siloed operations across the organizations and made it difficult for employees to collaborate. Interviewees also had limited internal technical support for launching Adobe Experience Cloud solutions, which concerned them given technical challenges that could arise from poor implementation. These challenges contributed to interviewees’ organizations’ inability to meet business goals and justify their investment in Adobe.

After partnering with Adobe Ultimate Success, the interviewees mapped out objectives they wanted to realize in the near future, including expanding adoption of their current Adobe Experience Cloud solutions, addressing any technical challenges, and driving business growth from improved operations. Adobe Ultimate Success helped increase the usage and maturity of Adobe Experience Cloud solutions to create more engaging digital experiences that drove greater business results. The interviewees’ teams were able to successfully deploy additional Adobe Experience Cloud solutions with the support of an Ultimate Success-provided Launch Advisory Success Accelerator. Their Technical Account Manager helped accelerate time to resolution on technical challenges, allowing the interviewees’ organizations to avoid critical issues and downtime altogether. By working with Adobe Ultimate Success, the interviewees’ organizations maximized the impact of their investment in Adobe Experience Cloud.

Quantified benefits. Three-year, risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits for the composite organization include:

• Doubling the number of trained users of Adobe Experience Cloud solutions who each deliver 10% more revenue. The Adobe Ultimate Success team helps train users at the composite organization with classroom-style training programs, educating them on best practices for how to effectively leverage Adobe Experience Cloud solutions. These learnings continue with desk-side coaching and feature guidance. With employees trained on the solutions, regular usage and alignment increases, enhancing their ability to build and iterate on compelling digital experiences that drive value for the composite organization. Additional revenue grows from $3.8 million in Year 1 to $11.9 million in Year 3, offering the composite a three-year present value profit of $2.1 million.

• Shrinking spending on legacy software by 2.5% and on services by 5%. With the Adobe Ultimate Success team helping the composite organization expand and improve its usage of Adobe Experience Cloud, the organization can move away from legacy digital solutions over time and recoup 2.5% on software costs. As a result of greater maturity and centralized operations with Adobe Experience Cloud, the composite organization also reduces spending on third-party (excluding Adobe) support for digital solutions by 5%. Altogether this totals $1.9 million in three-year present value cost savings.

• Improving time to resolution on noncritical events by 33%. The composite organization experiences five noncritical incidents per month that range from “important” to “urgent.” Time spent on resolving these incidents decreases 33% with support from its Support Service Manager through Adobe Ultimate Success and a better understanding in how Adobe Experience Cloud supports their architecture. The annual time savings on this work totals over 2,000 hours by the end of Year 3 and the three-year present value for this efficiency is $234,000.

• Shrinking the length of critical downtime events by 50%. Critical downtime incidents occur several times over the course of a year for the composite organization, negatively impacting operations (e.g., website outages or inactive page buttons) for as many as a few hours per incident. Ultimate Success’ Support Service Managers investigate each incident and manage resolution, providing updates along the way until they are resolved. This cuts resolution time in half and mitigates the impact of each downtime event. The composite organization avoids nearly $4.0 million in revenue losses in Year 1 and nearly $8.0 million by Year 3. The three-year present value of profit from this benefit is $1.6 million for the composite organization.

Unquantified benefits. Benefits that provide value for the composite organization but are not quantified for this study include:

• Privileged access to product and engineering teams within Adobe. The Adobe Ultimate Success team connects key stakeholders at the composite organization to experts like product team leads on the Adobe side who can influence product roadmap and feature development. These engagements help stakeholders communicate areas of need that would help them to see even greater value from Adobe Experience Cloud.

• Customer advocacy on behalf of the Ultimate Success teams in interactions with Adobe. The Adobe Ultimate Success team acts like an extension of the composite organization’s business by advocating for it with internal teams at Adobe to prioritize technical support for their client. Without the support of their team, it would have to spend time trying to find the right person at Adobe to help with its problems. This advocacy contributes to faster ticket resolution for the composite organization.

Flexibility. An organization might implement Adobe Ultimate Success and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including

• Greater support for measuring and reporting value on Adobe Experience Cloud Solutions. The Adobe Ultimate Success team takes an active role in tracking the value that the composite organization receives from Adobe Experience Cloud. They regularly report and share analysis on value delivered by digital experiences built with the solutions, as well as identifying opportunities for additional business. These insights and KPIs help the composite organization justify its investment in Adobe Experience Cloud to budgetary decision-makers.

Costs. Three-year, risk-adjusted PV costs for the composite organization include:

• Onboarding costs for Adobe Ultimate Success. Key stakeholders from the composite organization meet with their Adobe Ultimate Success team to map out key business objectives over the course of several weeks. These are weekly or biweekly, hour-long meetings where the stakeholders discuss the current deployment of Adobe Experience Cloud solutions and how they would like to mature by leveraging them at their organization.

• Annual costs for Adobe Ultimate Success services. The composite organization pays an additional cost of $1.0 million per year for support from Adobe Ultimate Success. This figure is based on the organization’s level of investment and usage of Adobe Experience Cloud in its operations.

The financial analysis that is based on the interviews found that a composite organization experiences benefits of $5.8 million over three years versus costs of $2.6 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $3.2 million and an ROI of 120%.