Real-Time Interaction Management – Simple Terms For a Tall Order

Have you noticed? Real-time interaction management (RTIM) is picking up steam to become one of the top marketing buzzwords of 2017.

Yet, I’d argue that the concept of real-time interaction management is worthy of our attention and useful to all marketers. Why? What’s the big deal? Real-time interaction management represents a golden opportunity to deliver value to customers in their immediate context. And let’s face it: even when marketing messages and offers are personalized and orchestrated across channels, marketers often struggle to predict when customers will experience them—which makes it nearly impossible to deliver experiences that anticipate what customers want, in the moment they want it, wherever they are.

In his Forrester’s 2017 Wave for Real-Time Interaction Management report, analyst Rusty Warner provides a formal definition for RTIM:

“Enterprise marketing technology that delivers contextually relevant experiences, value, and utility at the appropriate moment in the customer life cycle via preferred customer touchpoints.”

Put simply, in RTIM, a system delivers the next best offer or action at the right time, coordinated between channels, based on current context and a high definition view of a customer’s behavior, history, and preferences.

Simple terms, but a tall order.

That’s why Adobe is particularly proud to feature as a Leader in this year’s Forrester RTIM evaluation. Lauded for “bridging the martech/adtech gap with channel-focused RTIM”, Adobe Campaign — the solution that allows marketers to plan, orchestrate, and measure personalized, contextual, real-time, cross-channel offers and messages — and sister solutions from the Adobe Experience Cloud help customers leverage real-time analytics and insights and orchestrate contextually relevant interactions, across anonymous and authenticated channels.

In the report, Adobe differentiates in three ways:

• Our truly integrated cross-channel capabilities. We integrate functionality from our marketing, analytics, and advertising cloud portfolios to enable RTIM on a channel-by-channel basis. Adobe Campaign received perfect scores for both “Inbound channels” and “Outbound channels.” This includes everything from mobile app to email to SMS and even wearables. Additionally, Adobe scored perfectly on “Emerging channels” (such as IoT) and “Paid advertising channels.”
• Our cross-solution integrations. A customer reference quote reprised by Forrester says it all. Adobe was credited for doing “a really nice job of integrating its acquisitions to create a complete solution.” The integrations across cloud and solutions work and deliver value. Forrester also recognized the predictive and machine learning capabilities associated with Sensei as a strength across the Experience Cloud to see patterns and predict next best actions/offers.
• Our vision is rock solid. With perfect scores in vision, technology road map, performance, supporting services, and partner ecosystem, Forrester believes in our market, solution, services, partner and roadmap strategy. RTIM is a crowded field, with heavy hitters who have been around for a long time, but Adobe’s strategy and vision sets us apart time and again.

Customers already expect real-time interactions, where brands deliver what they need in the moment they need it. The brands that will win in the future will go even farther than this, continually raising the personalization and contextualization bar, delivering experiences that anticipate audience desires. Done well, real-time interaction management has the potential to blow customers away. It is consistent across digital and offline channels, populated with relevant and engaging content, and delivers meaningful and elegant experiences at just the right time.

To learn more, download the full report The Forrester Wave™: Real-Time Interaction Management, Q2 2017.