Reimagining Customer Experience Management with the Open Data Initiative

Digital Transformation has become the mandate for CEOs in every boardroom to compete and win today. Enterprises are focusing on driving digital transformation across all aspects of their business – products and services, operations, employees and go-to-market. However, the companies that will win are putting a laser focus on providing a world-class, end-to-end customer experience. Customer experience is where digital transformation meets growth. Enterprises, big and small, need to fully understand their customers to deliver the consistent, personal, intuitive experiences consumers expect, ultimately driving customer loyalty. A world-class customer experience is what separates the leaders from the pack, and customer data is what will get you there.

CXM and the data challenge

Data is a company’s most valuable resource for success in today’s world, and they need access to it – swiftly and easily. Companies looking to transform customer experiences need customer data that is real-time, intelligent and predictive, to deliver relevant and personalized customer experiences at scale. This is the new world of Customer Experience Management, CXM. Yet, many businesses struggle to grasp a complete view of their customer interactions and operations because they simply cannot get to this data. Some of the information is relegated to internal systems, serving only one or a few functions of an organization. Other customer and company data lives in external silos managed by third-parties, limiting a company’s access, and completely eliminating the benefit of leveraging that data in real-time.

In the past, companies tried to answer the data access problem with massive budgets, attempting to connect to various data sources, all in the hopes they can better serve their customers and grow their business.

Open Data Initiative

Today, we take a huge leap forward in solving enterprise data challenges with the Open Data Initiative. The Open Data Initiative, introduced by Adobe, Microsoft and SAP, will enable a seamless flow of connected customer data – behavioral, transactional, financial and operational – so companies get a true end-to-end view of their customers, for real-time actionability.

What is Open Data Initiative?

Hundreds of thousands of companies around the world use software and services from Adobe, Microsoft and SAP to run product development, operations, marketing, sales, human resources and more. We power mission-critical data solutions globally for our customers. Open Data Initiative brings the three companies together to enhance interoperability and data exchange between our applications and platforms – Adobe Experience Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP C/4HANA and S/4HANA – via a common data model. The data model will provide a unified data store and allow customers to choose the tools and applications for the development and deployment of services.

The Open Data Initiative is based on three guiding principles:

Simply put – Adobe, Microsoft and SAP are coming together to ensure data flows efficiently across organizations, to the right people, and in and out of the right systems. Brands will gain a single view of the customer. They will be better able to pull insights with artificial intelligence and advanced analytics, and use those insights to deliver impactful customer experiences in milliseconds.

Adobe Experience Platform, XDMs & Adobe Experience Cloud

Adobe Experience Platform, formally known as Adobe Cloud Platform, is the data foundation for customer experience management and the way companies will take action on data from the Open Data Initiative. Adobe Experience Platform uses cutting edge data science, leveraging the power of Adobe Sensei, to synthesize all customer data in one place, enabling a true single view of the customer so companies can fully understand their behavior and deliver impactful digital experiences in real-time.

The single view of the customer starts with the Unified Customer Profile, a unique capability of the Adobe Experience Platform that brings together all customer data from across the enterprise. This includes back office data (such as CRM data in Microsoft Dynamics 365) and combines it with data available across Adobe Experience Cloud. Data is unified through our Experience Data Models (XDM), a common data language, and allows faster, more intelligent decisioning through Adobe Sensei. XDMs help Experience Businesses understand, organize, integrate and exchange experience data, enabling applications to interoperate.

To give data scientists the speed and flexibility they need to deliver personalized experiences, today we’re also announcing our open-source approach to XDMs in Adobe Experience Platform. To make certain that XDMs can be used and customized by anyone, we’re releasing 50 semantic schemas as open source, available on GitHub, licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 license, helping ensure XDM functions as a true industry standard.

Adobe Experience Cloud is how customers will directly leverage Open Data Initiative. Adobe Experience Cloud is the industry’s only end-to-end solution for content creation, marketing, advertising, analytics and commerce. Unlike legacy enterprise platforms with static, siloed customer profiles, Adobe Experience Cloud empowers brands to deliver exceptional, real-time experiences across any customer touch point – all while accelerating business growth.

2018 has been a hugely transformative year for us. We added Magento Commerce Cloud to the Adobe family, and today – just days after announcing our intent to acquire Marketo — we’re tackling one of the biggest challenges for Digital Transformation. With the Open Data Initiative, Adobe, Microsoft, SAP and millions of partners and developers are bringing on the future of CXM and helping ensure companies of all sizes can create more value from their data and deliver better digital experiences.

Read more about the Open Data Initiative, and see the press release. Read more about Adobe Experience Platform innovations here and our release of XDM as open source.