The Total Economic Impact™ Of Adobe CX Enterprise

Employee Productivity On Customer Experience Projects

Evidence and data. Among survey respondents, 77% saw efficiencies in their end-to-end timeline for content production from Adobe CX Enterprise. A range of Adobe applications accelerated production efforts, including Adobe Experience Manager (65%), Workfront (56%), and Firefly genAI (50%) throughout planning and ideation, production, and launch phases. Time to finalize digital assets and/or digital experiences with Adobe CX Enterprise was “significantly faster” for 49% of respondents and “moderately faster” for another 33%.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) provides users with templates and assets to build pages as well as features to expedite daily processes. For example, the product manager at a technology company described how they take thousands of pictures annually to use across promotional and branded efforts but must attach tags to each of the images. AEM streamlined that with AI-powered smart tags, the interviewee said: “One of our photographers took 6,000 photos, and that can take upward of 300 hours to manage between adding metadata and tagging each image so people can find them within our portal. With AEM’s smart tag AI, it automatically generated titles and descriptions for the uploaded images. Altogether, this took an hour and a half to review.”

Adobe Workfront was instrumental for managing workflow efficiency at interviewees’ organizations, with it providing greater visibility of workstreams. The demand generation leader at a manufacturing organization said they use Workfront to manage all of their demand generation requests, including webpage updates, email campaigns, and connecting a personalized email experience to a webpage.

With Adobe Firefly, interviewees’ creative employees could be more ambitious to create materials that power engaging digital experiences without having to loop in design support. The product manager at a technology organization said: “Firefly is an extension of skills. A designer who historically didn’t have the skills to build a 3D image can [do so] now. There is some time saved, but what we really saw was an enabling of a broader set of designers to do the type of work that [only] a select few used to be able to do.”

Adobe Express also helped non-creative employees build and iterate on assets by leveraging its genAI templates, which are trained on their branded materials. Instead of fielding requests with the design team to create assets and waiting for support, employees across departments could do it themselves. The product manager at a technology company said: “Adobe Express is a lightweight design tool that different marketers can use and don’t have to go and request work from creative teams. We’ve seen adoption grow quickly; some business stakeholders are bought in and seeing the value. They’re building out governance and templates to make it easier for others to use.”

Modeling and assumptions. For the composite organization, Forrester assumes the following:

• The number of FTEs (both power users and part-time users) working with Adobe CX Enterprise applications increases from 150 in Year 1 to 200 in Year 3 as the composite organization establishes and shares best practices for each application.

• “New customer experience projects” refers to planning and creating projects across marketing, content creation, and digital experiences. The FTEs dedicate three-quarters of their time (1,560 working hours each) annually to these projects. The efficiency recognized in this work climbs incrementally from 20% in Year 1 to 35% in Year 3 as the composite organization becomes more mature with leveraging Adobe CX Enterprise applications and as more employees adopt them.

• Each FTE dedicates one-quarter of their time (520 working hours each) per year to iterating on customer experience projects. They gain 35% efficiency working on these projects in Year 1, which increases to 50% in Year 3. This gain is driven by the creation of low-code templates, Firefly-created visuals, and reusable assets. As employees at the composite organization create and add more assets that can be repurposed for later use, they realize more time savings.

• The average fully burdened hourly rate for each employee using Adobe CX Enterprise is $65.

• Employees rededicate 50% of their time savings toward additional work, and they use the remaining 50% to take longer breaks or work fewer late nights, which qualitatively improves the overall employee experience.

Risks. Differences across organizations that may impact the benefits include the following:

• The types of Adobe CX Enterprise applications and the complexity of projects that influence timeline length.

• The number of employees who adopt Adobe CX Enterprise for digital experience projects.

• The hourly rate for employees.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $8.0 million.

Customer Experience Performance Analysis Efficiency

Evidence and data. More than two-thirds (68%) of survey respondents agreed that Adobe CX Enterprise increased data visibility for them to generate actionable insights. Alongside Adobe Analytics, critical to improved analysis were Adobe Customer Journey Analytics and Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) powered by Adobe Experience Platform, which surfaced customer-level insights and streamlined management of customer data.

The IT director at a manufacturing organization said: “We do analytics more efficiently [with Adobe]. With real-time analytics of the customer experience, we can do things like gauge how frustrated a customer may be and make different pricing offerings to proactively counter their experience.” The interviewee described the more complete view they have on customers through tracking engagement across channels. They added Adobe Customer Journey Analytics earlier this year and were already seeing its value. The IT director said: “That’s been useful in terms of providing dashboards to give us insights on the customer journey, right from them clicking on an ad on some other site and landing on ours. We have a lot of ad dollars in the upstream funnel, and CJA helps us track all of that.”

The senior VP of e-business at an insurance company shared that the Customer AI propensity model in Adobe Experience Platform helped them identify business opportunities they otherwise wouldn’t have caught. In one example, they shared how a business partner typically targeted messaging toward families in vacation areas to purchase insurance while traveling. When they saw some traction in weekend drivers renting a car to leave major cities for the weekend, they realized there was additional business there. The interviewee said: “We would have never prioritized targeting those customers. That would’ve taken us forever to figure out, but Customer AI in AEP actually built propensity models based on customer data. We could make just as much from weekend rentals than people traveling in vacation areas. That was a cool learning.”

Users of these applications also moved faster in creating audiences to target with relevant experiences. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of survey respondents saw increased self-service among employees in customer profile data management. Marketers and sales teams didn’t have to rely on analysts to piece together customer data to build audiences. The demand generation leader at a manufacturing organization said their analysts still owned the process for building audiences, but educating marketing and sales teams on the CDP got them excited for its targeting potential. The interviewee said: “Adobe Analytics tools are huge for us because of what we can do with experience targeting based on X, Y, Z requirements like whether the customer visited in the last three months or made a purchase. There’s tons of potential for what we can do with it.”

Modeling and assumptions. For the composite organization, Forrester assumes the following:

• The number of employees who manage customer data and analysis increases from 10 in Year 1 to 20 in Year 3 as more departments adopt Adobe CX Enterprise.

• Analysis efficiency improves by 25% in Year 1 and increases to 45% by Year 3 as teams grow in maturity with the applications and collect greater insights from customer data.

• The average fully burdened hourly rate for a performance analyst is $75.

• The composite organization sees 75% in time savings based on the assumption that reduced manual effort around data management allows employees to take more breaks.

Risks. Differences across organizations that may impact this benefit include the following:

• The amount of customer data being analyzed with Adobe CX Enterprise applications.

• The number of analysts at the organization and their hourly rate.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.4 million.

Developer Productivity On Customer Experience Projects

Evidence and data. Sales and marketing team members relied less on developers to assist with building technically challenging customer journey projects because of the ease of use of Adobe CX Enterprise features. Among survey respondents, 54% self-serviced Adobe Experience Manager’s low-code templates to build pages, and 43% built out agentic support for customers with limited support. Specifically for AI agents supporting customers, 31% found that Adobe CX Enterprise streamlined the creation and maintenance of agents.

Interviewees noted how Adobe Experience Manager’s templates, assets, and connected architecture simplified building out digital experiences. The IT director at a manufacturing organization shared that edits that users make to one webpage are propagated across different channels in the omnichannel experience. They said, “We are able to reuse a lot of design and development components [with AEM Assets] across our webpages that we couldn’t do earlier with our previous CMS, which helps us with cost optimization.” Instead of repeatedly turning to developers for support for each digital experience, users could scale these experiences on their own. This helped to free bandwidth for technical teams to work on new projects for the organization.

The simplicity of Adobe’s template coding also made for fewer issues that could lead to downtime and require developer support. The IT director at a manufacturing organization shared: “There’s no outage whatsoever. A frustrated customer, whether it’s page performance or site downtime, will go to a competitor. Adobe has helped us with uptime with these applications that contribute to site traffic.”

Modeling and assumptions. For the composite organization, Forrester assumes the following:

• Twenty developers are tasked with supporting digital experience projects. They are looped into projects when needed and allocate one-fifth of their time to these projects.

• In Year 1, developers spend 15% less time supporting projects, and by Year 3, they spend 25% less time as more employees are able to self-service tasks with Adobe CX Enterprise.

• The average fully burdened hourly rate for a developer is $80.

• Forrester did not apply a productivity recapture rate to this efficiency because the small scale of the time savings means that nearly all the saved time is reallocated to other work.

Risks. Differences across organizations that may impact this benefit include the following:

• The number of developers who support digital experience projects and amount of time allocated to the work.

• The hourly rate for the developers.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $293,000.

Efficiency In Advertising, Marketing, And Technology Costs

Evidence and data. Interviewees and survey respondents who relied on various third-party technologies to manage CXO found they could accomplish that work with the end-to-end capabilities of Adobe CX Enterprise, allowing them to avoid costs by consolidating their operations around Adobe. Alongside costs saved on individual solution licensing, organizations avoided costs from IT administrators managing integrations between applications and ensuring systems ran as expected. According to survey respondents, 68% saw IT teams experience efficiencies around maintaining integrations, and 51% became more efficient in applying updates.

With Adobe CX Enterprise facilitating a content supply chain for organizations, admins were able to eliminate repositories where assets resided. Individuals working on creative projects were able to find what they were looking for with Adobe Experience Manager’s (AEM) smart tags, which improved searchability of readily accessible assets and templates across AEM and Adobe Express. The product manager at the technology company said they removed four separate repositories for assets, as it was now easier for users to find them in their network.

Interviewees also became more efficient with their ad dollars due to insights from Adobe’s analytic applications, which provided guidance on where to target customers and shortened buying cycles by serving more relevant content. Whereas customers may have been exposed to more ads in the past to drive a conversion, it now took fewer ads to convert because of effective targeting. As a result, ad dollars were reallocated toward other customers. The senior VP of e-business at an insurance organization said: “Real-Time CDP data is more powerful than anything we ever had in the past because we can see the full end-to-end of the customer experience. Did someone submit something online, and did they buy it? Did a quote or lead go to an agent, and did that convert? We see all those trails and how to best reach customers in real time.”

Modeling and assumptions. For the composite organization, Forrester assumes the following:

• Avoided legacy solutions and support costs total $500,000 in Year 1 and increase as more solutions are offloaded and operations move to Adobe CX Enterprise.

• The composite organization has $20 million in digital ad spend that can be optimized with ads delivered repeatedly to the same customers with little impact. After adopting Adobe CX Enterprise, advertisers leverage insights from its applications to more effectively target customers with unique, relevant messaging that accelerates customer journeys. The composite organization becomes more effective with its advertising spend by 20% in Year 1, and this increases to 25% by Year 3 as it continues to lean on data insights to guide spending.

Risks. Differences across organizations that may impact this benefit include the following:

• The size of the organization and scale of customer experience operations before adopting Adobe CX Enterprise.

• The organization’s budget for advertising, marketing, and technology.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $10.4 million.

Profit From Additional Digital Customer Conversions

Evidence and data. Improved brand visibility, greater insights about customers, and the ability to engage them in real time with relevant content helped drive greater conversions for organizations. Among survey respondents, 63% saw an increase in conversions since adopting Adobe CX Enterprise applications, 55% experienced growth in leads and prospects, and 48% reported greater reach per month.

The IT director at a manufacturing organization turned to Adobe Customer Journey Analytics to understand how they were performing with agentic engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO). Many business buyers leverage LLMs in their research process; improving visibility in LLM results can drive opportunity for organizations. The IT director said: “The main goal is to see how agents are viewing our site, the content of the page, and what is being indexed. Citations are a big deal, and if we can improve content tagging and all that, it makes it more relevant from an agent’s perspective. That’s what we are looking for this tool to provide.”

Once arriving at a business site, integrations with applications like Adobe Commerce and its ability to quickly load pages and incorporate customer insights to personalize messaging accelerated steps in the customer journey. Reduced friction for customers created smoother experiences, and according to 39% of survey respondents, monthly site and business traffic increased with Adobe CX Enterprise.

For the senior VP of e-business at an insurance organization, the range of capabilities available with Adobe CX Enterprise helped connect the dots when building experiences. The interviewee said: “We’ll take one tool, test it out, and watch the results to see how conversions are impacted. For example, we tripled the conversion rate when we used Customer AI in Real-Time CDP to deliver personalized experiences.” They continued: “We’ve also used customer data from Real-Time CDP for targeting with email sends in Adobe Journey Optimizer. We can only talk to customers so many times, so we have to be able to do it at the right time. Without customer data from Real-Time CDP, that would be nearly impossible.”

The interviewee factored in Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target to maximize the impact of Adobe Advertising Cloud. Users got statistical validation in the form of clicks and conversions from two different versions of advertising sent to customers. The senior VP added: “We have end-to-end visibility [with the solutions] and can look at dollars spent all the way through to transaction. The level and degree of the information we get support our philosophy on testing being more scientific than it is creative. If we see consistent 20% wins on our tests over time, that’s massive and a great return on investment.”

Modeling and assumptions. For the composite organization, Forrester assumes the following:

• The size of the digital audience reached is based on the number of individuals who have visited the company site in the past 12 months. This total is 750 million for the composite organization. The size of the audience grows in 1% in Year 1, 1.5% in Year 2, and 2% in Year 3 as the composite organization becomes more efficient with reaching audiences with relevant messaging.

• The blended conversion rate before using Adobe CX Enterprise is 2% across all three years.

• The average conversion rate increases as users leverage customer data to effectively engage and enhance the personalization of customer experiences. In Year 1, the conversion rate increases by 10% to 2.2%, leading to 1.5 million additional conversions. By Year 3, the conversion rate reaches 2.3%, representing a 0.3% gain over the baseline conversion rate, resulting in 2.3 million additional conversions.

• The assumed average order value (AOV) or value of customer conversion (non-purchase-specific) is $100 based on the size of the composite organization and number of customers.

• The attribution rate to Adobe CX Enterprise is 33% based on Forrester’s research-based understanding of how people, processes, and technology collaborate to drive conversions. Forrester’s assumption takes into consideration credit given to creative teams, production work, market factors, and general interest in the product itself.

• The 10% profit margin is blended and based on the industries considered for analysis.

Risks. Differences across organizations that may impact this benefit include the following:

• The size of the digital audience the organization reaches annually, goals in conversions (e.g., customer page visits, subscriptions, purchases), prior conversion rates, and the value of a conversion.

• The adoption of Adobe CX Enterprise applications and the organization’s overall goals with the platform.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $13.6 million.

Higher Digital Profit Generation

Evidence and data. More than half of survey respondents (52%) agreed that Adobe CX Enterprise has enabled increases in digital revenue for their organization. In terms of scale, nearly one-fifth (19.6%) of their organization’s digital revenue was impacted by or involved with Adobe CX Enterprise. According to interviewees, revenue growth was driven in part by increases in spending among customers who were spurred on by more engaging experiences to spend big on a single item, add more to their cart, or upgrade their membership.

The senior VP of e-business at a manufacturing organization leveraged customer data from Real-Time CDP to specifically target customers on the next visit to their website. They said: “What’s cool about Real-Time CDP is that next hit. If someone goes and does something, we are able to present offers on the next page they land on during their digital experience. We have dynamic offers throughout our site — the customers don’t know that.” The organization saw at least a 30% increase in sales from conversions of those more personalized customer journeys.

Modeling and assumptions. For the composite organization, Forrester assumes the following:

• The number of customers is based on the conversion rate of the digital audience after using Adobe CX Enterprise.

• Revenue per conversion increases by 5% in Year 1 as enhanced customer experiences improve their favorability toward spending more with the organization. The revenue per conversion grows to a 10% improvement in Year 3 as more of the organization leverages customer data to engage customers.

• In Year 1, an additional $5 spent per converted customer totals $82.5 million in additional value. The additional value per customer climbs to $10 in Year 3, leading to $172.5 million in additional value for the organization.

• Assumptions about attribution and profit margin are the same as those in Benefit E.

Risks. Differences across organizations that may impact this benefit include the following:

• The number of converted customers and the average value of each customer.

• The organization’s offerings that could lead to increases in customer value.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $8.2 million.

Profit From Improved Digital Customer Retention

Evidence and data. Interviewees leveraged their end-to-end view of the customer with Adobe CX Enterprise to understand how best to reengage customers. Customer interactions with their organization’s site, as well as competitors’ shopping sites through third-party data, helped to illustrate to users how to maintain their engagement and loyalty. The senior VP of e-business at an insurance organization said: “How we’re able to follow customers is different with Adobe. We can stitch together insights on customers from sites they’ve previously visited, and we can make assumptions from there. That allows us to close a loop on finding out if it’s someone we hadn’t seen or is a returning customer.”

According to survey respondents, 70% reported an increase in customer engagement since adopting Adobe CX Enterprise. Users incorporated customer insight learnings to personalize pages through applications like Adobe Commerce to make for a more relevant experience.

Users also leveraged data to identify bottlenecks in the customer experience where business with the customer was at risk. The IT director at a manufacturing organization said: “If a customer makes a call with our call center expressing their frustration, when they come back on our website, we can counter that experience with an offer. That’s our ultimate goal here. In Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, we have dashboards giving us insights on every step of the customer journey. It helps us keep track of all that.”

Modeling and assumptions. For the composite organization, Forrester assumes the following:

• In Year 1, the composite sees 16 million returning customers. After accounting for customer churn and newly added customers from the previous year, there are 13.2 million returning customers in Year 2 and 13.5 million in Year 3. Forrester did not factor in additional customers retained after using Adobe for the following year’s returning customer base to avoid double-counting their value.

• With Adobe CX Enterprise, retention improves by 4% in Year 1. The rate improves to 6% in Year 2 and 8% in Year 3 as the composite organization fine-tunes engagement with the customer based on the increasing amount of data available to them.

• Each retained customer goes on to make purchases in successive years at a higher AOV rate. The retained customers in Year 1 are converted in Year 2 and Year 3, while retained customers in Year 2 are converted in Year 3 and generate $110 in value each. Additional customers retained in Year 3 generate value that falls outside this study’s analysis parameters.

• Assumptions about attribution and profit margin are the same as Benefit E.

Risks. Differences across organizations that may impact this benefit include the following:

• The number of customers who spend on the composite organization’s goods and services annually.

• The lifetime value of customers.

• The likelihood of customer churn.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.9 million.

Profit From Additional Offline Conversions

Evidence and data. The holistic, unified view of the customer provided by Adobe Real-Time CDP, as well as the ability to identify offline touchpoints (e.g., location-based advertising and notifications) through Adobe Journey Optimizer, drove additional value for organizations. According to survey respondents, two-thirds (67%) saw an increase in conversion rates, and more than half (53%) saw gains in business or foot traffic. This had a meaningful impact on their organizations, with an average of 14% of their offline revenue being impacted by Adobe CX Enterprise.

A key factor supporting offline engagement is the types of customer data that can be analyzed. According to survey respondents, 74% incorporate CRM data, 62% use call center data, and 40% leverage in-store data. These data points help inform sales teams about opportunities to engage with customers and which steps of the customer journey involve digital and offline interactions. The senior VP of e-business at an insurance company shared: “We can see in our data if a lead came from a marketing campaign and if it was closed with an agent offline. We’re following their path all the way through with device and identity data management.”

Modeling and assumptions. For the composite organization, Forrester assumes the following:

• Offline revenue totals $3.5 billion each year, and 20% is impacted by transactions that originated from digital interactions.

• The customer transaction rate increases by 1% in Year 1 and improves by 2.5% in Year 3, driven by Adobe CX Enterprise helping users to identify opportunities to effectively engage customers offline.

• To account for people, process, and technology influences, 33% of the value is attributed to Adobe.

• The global profit margin for offline revenue is 10%.

Risks. Differences across organizations that may impact this benefit include the following:

• The scale of offline business as a portion of total revenue.

• Investment, adoption, and maturity of Adobe CX Enterprise applications like Adobe Real-Time CDP, Customer Journey Analytics, and Journey Optimizer.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $821,000.

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees and survey respondents mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were unable to quantify:

• Shared ecosystem of CXO solutions. The interconnection of Adobe CX Enterprise solutions let users scale out their CXO approach without adopting third-party solutions that might require their own custom integrations and management. Users could collaborate and share assets without having to convert them to file formats that fit the solution; access to customer information was also enhanced with data sitting in one centralized platform. Integrations with platforms like Adobe Commerce also meant that personalization changes to customers’ digital storefront experience could be automated with ease. Interviewees leveraged around 10 of the applications that are part of Adobe CX Enterprise, taking on more as they gained maturity with each application.

• Enhanced day-to-day employee experience. Interviewees commented on the ease of use of Adobe CX Enterprise being a win for employees, which helped increase self-service in building customer experiences. Employees did not have to wait as often as in the past for developers and designers to support them. The IT director at a manufacturing organization said: “In terms of features and functionality for our content authors, the user interface usability drove a lot of our decision [to invest in Adobe]. We could build stuff and reuse it multiple times without having to redo content again. That was a big driver for us.” The demand generation lead at a manufacturing organization also appreciated how Adobe Workfront helps colleagues to keep track of their colleagues’ bandwidth and amount of work coming through so they are more informed about who is busy and who is available to provide support. The interviewee said. “Workfront touches many people. It allows us to capture tasks and people assigned to them, so everything is tracked. It’s very insightful for me and other leaders to to know what’s going on with the team.”

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement Adobe CX Enterprise and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Agentic AI-powered operations. Adobe CX Enterprise offers agentic AI to automate tasks within all of its applications, helping to accelerate operations and scale customer experiences. Among survey respondents, 26% cited platform agents as helping to enable efficiency with their organization’s end-to-end timeline for content production. Another 34% cited Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant, about which 43% agreed it made them significantly faster in their time to map out and orchestrate each project. AI Assistant’s ability to summarize documents and provide traceable citations accelerated users’ ability to find information in documents.

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Total Economic Impact Approach).