A Guide to Adobe Customer Experience Orchestration Solutions
Connect content, workflows and insights to deliver consistent experiences at scale.
Why Digital Experience Matters More Than Ever
Digital experiences are the front door to your organization. Customers, students, patients and constituents expect fast, relevant and consistent interactions across every touchpoint.
When content, data and workflows are fragmented, teams struggle to keep experiences aligned across channels, move quickly to generate new content for growing audiences and gain meaningful insights to what is resonating.
At the same time, expectations are rising. People want experiences that feel relevant in the moment, not generic pages and one-size-fits-all journeys. They also expect continuity across channels, whether they start on a mobile device, continue through email or access self-service options.
52%
of customers said they stopped using or buying from a brand because of a bad experience.1
Meeting those expectations takes more than a website refresh. It requires the ability to manage content at scale, connect individuals’ data across channels, attribute insights to decisions and continuously improve experiences.
96%
of consumers say they’re likely to purchase when brands send personalized messages.2
Digital experience applications help organizations:
- Manage content at scale to improve consistency across brands, business units, locations and channels
- Publish faster with stronger governance using templates, workflows and approvals
- Enable personalization and journey improvements by connecting content to insights and performance data
- Reduce operational drag by simplifying tool sprawl, integration complexity and support effort
- Prepare for AI-enabled experiences by strengthening content operations and the data foundation
Defining Terms With Digital Experience Applications
Digital experience solutions are the platforms and capabilities that help teams manage, publish, personalize and measure digital experiences across channels. They bring together content operations, workflow management, data-driven insights and experience delivery so organizations can move faster while staying consistent and governed. These solutions typically span web experiences and campaign/journey execution, but many lack meaningful analytics. As a result, teams may struggle to understand what is working, which is critical for improving performance over time.
Adobe Customer Experience Orchestration (CXO)
This is a suite of digital experience solutions that can serve as a foundation for orchestrating personalized journeys, integrating customer, patient or constituent data across platforms and increasing engagement. Adobe’s Customer Experience Orchestration solutions help organizations manage content, activate campaigns and journeys, and measure experience performance across channels. Solutions include:
Digital Experience
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) — a platform that helps teams build and manage web and digital experiences. In plain terms, AEM supports core needs like web content management plus capabilities like digital asset management (DAM) and forms so teams can publish consistently, scale content operations and maintain governance. Adobe’s flagship AEM offering is a cloud-native solution, but legacy cloud and on-premises deployments are also available. Capabilities within AEM include:
- AEM Sites — a web content management capability that helps teams create, manage and optimize websites and digital experiences. It enables marketers and content teams to author pages, reuse content, maintain brand consistency and publish more efficiently across channels.
- AEM Assets — a digital asset management capability that helps organizations organize, govern and distribute images, videos, documents and other creative files. It makes it easier for teams to find approved assets, manage versions and deliver content where it is needed.
- AEM Forms — a forms and document workflows capability that helps organizations create, manage and optimize digital forms and communications. It supports use cases like applications, onboarding and service requests while streamlining data collection and reducing manual work.
Adobe Commerce — an e-commerce platform that helps organizations build and manage online storefronts and deliver personalized shopping experiences across web and mobile. It supports B2C and B2B commerce with capabilities like product and catalog management, merchandising, checkout and payment integrations, and order management. Teams can connect commerce with content, data and analytics to improve conversion and customer lifetime value.
Adobe Target — an A/B testing, personalization and recommendations solution that helps organizations optimize digital experiences by delivering targeted content across digital channels using customer behavior and attributes and machine learning.
Adobe Analytics — an analytics solution that measures online behaviors of customers across web and mobile experiences.
Marketing Automation
Adobe Marketo Engage — a marketing automation platform that helps teams manage and automate lead and account engagement across channels like email and web while supporting lead scoring, nurturing and lifecycle tracking. It’s commonly used to align marketing and sales around pipeline by routing qualified leads, measuring campaign impact and integrating with CRM systems to deliver a more cohesive sales experience.
Adobe Campaign — a marketing automation platform that helps teams plan, execute and optimize outreach and experiences across channels like email, web and mobile messaging. Campaign supports audience targeting, campaign workflows, testing and measurement so experiences feel more connected and timely.
Adobe Experience Platform (AEP)
AEP is Adobe’s core platform for ingesting, mapping and storing customer data from a variety of different channels and data sources. AEP offers dozens of native source connectors, plus streaming, batch and API-based ingestion. Services built on top of AEP include:
Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (RT-CDP) — leverages the data capabilities of AEP to build a unified customer profile based on stitching identities across multiple customer touchpoints. Profiles can be segmented and activated to destination systems such as personalization engines, marketing automation platforms, advertising platforms, etc., by activating profiles and segments to personalization tools such as Adobe Target and Adobe Journey Optimizer.
Adobe Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) — an advanced analytics and reporting solution that leverages the power of AEP to ingest online and offline data, enabling business users to measure experience performance across channels and touchpoints. Instead of viewing interactions in isolation, CJA helps teams analyze how users interact with content and move through journeys by combining previously disparate data to help identify drop-off, optimize flows and improve outcomes.
Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) — enables organizations to orchestrate and deliver personalized, real-time customer journeys and campaigns across channels such as email, web, mobile and in-app by leveraging unified customer profiles and audiences built on AEP.
Work Management
Adobe Workfront — workflow management capabilities support planning, intake, prioritization, approvals and cross-team coordination while providing insights into team and campaign performance through robust reporting. This is especially important for digital experience work where content, creative, IT and marketing must align to publish consistently and improve continuously. Workfront is the cornerstone of Adobe’s Content Supply Chain story, integrating with AEM Assets, AEM Sites, Adobe Campaign and GenAI workflows.
Supporting Solutions That Make It Work
Even the right experience platform can fall short without the supporting capabilities that connect the ecosystem and drive adoption:
CRM and Customer Experience
Connect experience tools to customer systems and operational platforms so data and workflows can support end-to-end journeys.
Data Management
Centralized data is critical for aligning identities across solutions to support analytics that allow personalization to be activated across channels in near-real time.
AI Enablement
AI can accelerate personalization, profiling and content operations, but it relies on integrated, governed content and clear processes to deliver meaningful results.
Change Management
To maximize adoption and value realization, organizations need change management support that helps users build confidence, adapt processes and embrace new ways of working.
Building the Right Foundation: Alignment and Assessment
Digital experience initiatives succeed when organizations align business goals, experience priorities and the technical foundation before selecting or expanding a platform. An assessment phase helps you clarify what you need to deliver, where your current approach is falling short and what it will take to scale consistent experiences over time.
Start with the experience goals that matter — begin by defining the business outcomes and use cases you need your digital experiences to support. That might include faster content velocity, improved self-service, stronger conversion, higher satisfaction or more consistent experiences across brands, regions and audiences. Clear goals help teams prioritize what to build first and how progress will be measured.
Map the ecosystem and identify friction — digital experiences rarely live in one system. Assess how content and data move today across web platforms, analytics tools, campaign systems, CRM, identity, support and back-end applications. This is where many issues surface, including data gaps and inaccuracies, duplicated content or assets, inconsistent templates, manual handoffs and limited visibility into performance.
Evaluate content operations and governance — solutions cannot fix broken processes on their own. Review how work gets done across the entire content supply chain, from intake, approvals, compliance and publishing through ongoing optimization. Strong governance enables speed by standardizing templates, workflows and guardrails so teams can scale without sacrificing quality or consistency.
Assess data readiness and measurement — you can’t improve what you can’t measure. Nor can you personalize to audiences that can’t be defined. Identify the data sources that matter, the events and attributes you need to capture and the reporting that stakeholders require. This is also where AI becomes practical: Responsible automation and personalization depend on reliable data, clear definitions and governance.
Confirm the technical foundation — evaluate your infrastructure, integrations, identity and access, performance requirements and security controls. Given the mission-critical nature of digital experience applications, resilience, scalability and operational readiness should be part of the assessment, not an afterthought. These foundational aspects can also shift as your needs and capabilities evolve, so it’s important to review requirements on an ongoing basis.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
Treating the initiative as a platform refresh. Experience modernization is an operating model shift that requires process, governance and measurement to succeed.
Tool sprawl and disconnected workflows. When teams add point solutions without integration, complexity rises and speed falls.
Inconsistent content standards. Without shared templates and governance, experiences drift across teams, regions and channels.
Discrepancies or gaps in data. Unreliable data undermines audience targeting, personalization, measurement and reporting.
Failing to plan for AI-enabled use cases early enough. AI can accelerate content operations and personalization, but only when content quality, data readiness and governance are in place.
Underestimating integration work. Personalization, analytics and journey execution depend on reliable connections between solutions.
Ignoring operational realities. Supportability, performance, accessibility and ongoing maintenance drive the true cost and success of the experience.
What a Thorough Assessment Should Deliver
A practical assessment phase should result in:
- A clear business vision that articulates key business goals to be achieved, use cases to be implemented and pain points to be eliminated
- A clear experience strategy with prioritized audiences, journeys and outcomes
- A current-state map of platforms, integrations, workflows and technical pain points
- Governance recommendations for content operations, standards and approvals
- Measurement requirements including KPIs, analytics needs and journey reporting
- A realistic implementation roadmap that blends foundational work, quick wins and longer-term capabilities
- A procurement and delivery plan that aligns timelines, resourcing and platform decisions
Why CDW for Adobe Digital Experience
Once you have clarity on goals, gaps and requirements, the next step is building a solution that connects content, workflows, data and insights across the experience lifecycle. CDW helps organizations design and implement digital experience applications with an approach that balances strategy, solution capabilities and operational readiness.
Align on the Experience Strategy
CDW works with stakeholders across business, marketing, digital and IT teams to confirm priorities, define success metrics and identify the journeys that matter most. This phase translates experience goals into technical and operational requirements so solution decisions support measurable outcomes.
Design the Experience Architecture
With priorities defined, we design an experience architecture that supports scale, governance and performance. This includes decisions around solutions, environments, integration patterns, identity and access management, content and data models, and templates and component strategy. The goal is a blueprint that enables teams to move faster without introducing risk or fragmentation.
Implement and Integrate the Foundational Solutions
CDW supports implementation of Adobe’s CXO solutions based on your requirements and roadmap. This work could include:
- Web content management setup with templates, components, content models and publishing workflows in a solution like AEM Sites
- Digital Asset Management (DAM) enablement using a solution like AEM Assets to centralize assets, capture metadata, generate necessary renditions, strengthen brand consistency and accelerate reuse
- Forms modernization via AEM Forms to support high-intent interactions with stronger governance, accessibility and integration into downstream workflows
- Integration with key data sources by leveraging solutions like RT-CDP to integrate with CRMs, data warehouses, marketing automation platforms and other customer data repositories to ingest the data required to build a unified customer profile and support segmenting of customers into audiences
- Integration with core systems like analytics, campaign, journey and personalization tools like CJA, AJO, Campaign and Target so experiences are optimized and remain connected from end to end
- Operationalizing content workflows and governance with work management solutions such as Adobe Workfront to keep experiences running smoothly, including intake and prioritization, approvals, roles and responsibilities, standardized processes and ongoing optimization practices
Enhance the Foundation With Additional Functionality
Once the foundational elements have been established, additional capabilities can be enabled to help realize digital experience goals.
- Enable measurement and continuous improvement — CDW helps teams define the KPIs that matter, configure analytics and establish reporting that links experience performance to business goals. With a measurement foundation in place, teams can improve customer experience and journeys over time through ongoing experimentation, optimization and content refinement rather than relying on one-time redesign cycles.
- Apply AI where it adds value — AI can help teams move faster and improve relevance, especially for content operations and experience delivery. It can also help ensure that content reaches the widest audience. CDW helps organizations identify practical AI use cases and apply them responsibly by focusing on:
- Content readiness: Improving content quality, tagging and standards so outputs are consistent, reusable and discoverable, leveraging the built-in AI features of AEM Sites and Assets
- Content optimization: Ensuring that content is accessible and valuable to end users, whether accessed directly or through AI chatbots, leveraging tools such as AEM Sites Optimizer, Adobe LLM Optimizer and Adobe Brand Concierge
- Data readiness: Ensuring the right signals are captured and governed to support AI-driven personalization and insights, using the AI features of Adobe Target and AJO
- Workflow readiness: Embedding AI into processes where it reduces manual effort while maintaining controls and review
- Support and evolve the solution — operational support and ongoing enhancements are essential for long-term success. CDW can provide services that help maintain performance and reliability, support solution maintenance and growth, manage integrations and keep governance aligned as needs change.
3.5x
revenue growth potential when companies align their brand promise with the experiences they deliver.3
revenue growth potential when companies align their brand promise with the experiences they deliver.3
Seven Ways CDW and Adobe Drive Enhanced Digital Experiences
With the right Customer Experience Orchestration solutions in place, organizations can move from reactive updates and disconnected tools to an operating model built for scale. Adobe provides the solution foundation while CDW helps assess your current state, design the architecture, integrate with your existing stack and operationalize governance, measurement and adoption. The result is faster delivery, reduced friction across teams and measurable improvements in experience performance.
Faster time to publish — standardized templates, reusable components and streamlined approvals help teams launch new pages, campaigns and updates with less effort and fewer bottlenecks. Experience-led information architecture, business-friendly authoring templates, component strategy and workflow design make those gains repeatable, not one-off wins.
More consistent experiences across channels — centralized content operations and governed assets help ensure users see the same brand, message and experience quality across web, mobile and connected touchpoints. A practical governance model, taxonomy and DAM alignment keeps teams moving quickly without drifting off brand.
Improved personalization and journey performance — when workflows, data and insights connect, teams can tailor experiences to audiences, reduce friction and improve conversion and engagement over time. Identity and data integrations, audience design and a testing roadmap help personalization work reliably across channels and segments.
Stronger governance and reduced risk — clear roles, policies and controls help maintain compliance, accessibility and security while enabling teams to move quickly with confidence. Security reviews, role-based access and accessibility-by-design practices reduce risk as the environment scales.
Lower operational drag — reducing tool sprawl, simplifying integrations and improving supportability help teams spend less time maintaining the ecosystem and more time improving the experience. Rationalized integrations, improved solution supportability and stability, and ongoing managed services options keep operations steady after go-live.
Better insight into what is working — analytics and journey measurement connect experience performance to business outcomes, enabling continuous improvement based on evidence, not assumptions. A KPI framework, tagging strategy and dashboards align teams on what to measure, how to interpret it and what to optimize next.
A practical foundation for AI-enabled experiences — governed content, reliable data and repeatable workflows make it easier to apply AI to accelerate content operations, improve relevance and support responsible automation. Data readiness planning and AI guardrails help teams move from pilots to scalable, responsible AI-enabled experiences.
Sources:
1 PwC, “2025 Customer Experience Survey,” September 2025
2 Attentive, “2025 Consumer Trends Report: The State of Personalized Marketing,” April 2025
3 Forrester, “Forrester’s Global Total Experience Score Rankings,” June 2025
Turn Your Experience Goals Into Measurable Outcomes
Ready to improve experience consistency and performance at scale? Talk to an expert to discuss your goals and identify the right next step for your digital experience solution strategy.