The shift to digital channels is something that hit every industry during the pandemic.

If a business wasn’t a digital business, then they were out of business. Because of this, there’s been a huge demand for better, less frustrating and superior digital customer experiences. As expected, this puts a lot of pressure on companies and their marketing departments to deliver, and IBM iX, one of the largest digital and design consultancies in the world, and Adobe Workfront, a work management platform, are helping businesses navigate these fast-moving challenges.

Matthew Candy (pictured, left), global managing director of IBM iX, and Alex Shootman (pictured, right), chief executive officer of Workfront, spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during IBM Think. They discussed the marketing trends driving enterprise success in an increasingly digital landscape. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

Could you talk about the shifts … in the past year — customers’ expectations, how they changed and how you guys responded?

Candy: What a year, right? We have been very busy helping clients across just about every industry accelerate their digital transformation efforts. And I think what has been absolutely clear is digital, mobile — all of these ways of engaging with customers through channels — has been an absolutely critical way in which businesses have kept going and survived over this time.

And certainly, we’ve seen that transformation accelerate … and companies shifting from face-to-face interactions from a B2B sales perspective into a kind of online B2B commerce, etc. So, really it’s become digital by default, and I think customers [are] really demanding personalized experiences and wanting to make sure that these companies really know you in how they deal with you.

So how are IBM iX and Adobe Workfront working together?

Shootman: Companies started realizing that work was a tier one asset inside the marketing team. If you go back in time, and you look at financials in a company, people thought, ‘Wow, this is really important to us. We should put a system in place to manage financials. And all of this complexity that Matt talked about caused enterprises to realize that the work of marketing was as important as some of those other activities in the organization, and so they started investing in a marketing system of record like Workfront.

This notion of a marketing system of record is really interesting. It’s relatively new, isn’t it? So, why does it matter so much to marketers?

Shootman: [Workfront has] been able to serve 3,000 enterprises around the globe. We serve all 10 of the top 10 brands, half of the Fortune 100, and what has created the need for “the new” … are the challenges that start arising when you implement the concepts that Matt talked about.

Consider one of the largest private credit card issuers on the planet, and you think about delivering that personalized experience all the way to an end customer. You’ve got a private credit card issuer; they do business with hundreds of thousands of companies, their account managers are interacting with those companies — and all of that lands back on a marketing organization that has to jointly plan promotions with those companies to drive the private credit card business. That marketing team needs visibility to the work that’s happening.

So then, Matt, paint a picture. A lot of people may not be familiar with IBM iX. Talk about where you add value and how you work with Adobe.

Candy: So IBM iX sits within the services business at IBM. We have designers, experienced strategists, engineers basically able to deliver kind of end-to-end digital and customer experience solution right from the creative all the way through to the technology platforms and the operations. Adobe is one of our key strategic partners across IBM, and certainly within my part of the business. And so we couldn’t have been more delighted when Workfront joined Adobe through the acquisition there. So we already had a strong relationship with the Workfront team.

But what is absolutely clear [is] … this need for a marketing systems of record as this landscape becomes more complex, as the velocity of change increases the need to not just focus on the customer experience and how a customer interacts with the brand, but the need to get the workflows and the processes within the organization that sit behind that organized and executing in the correct way … in order to make sure that you can deliver on that customer promise. And so this is absolutely critical to drive this kind of workflow improvement, the productivity improvement and put intelligence and automation into these processes across the organization. So there is … a huge opportunity together in the market to help clients transform and to deliver the value in this space.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Think. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for IBM Think. Neither IBM, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE