How the Open Data Initiative is Fueling the Next Generation of Customer Obsession

Get more from your data and enterprise investments.

Enterprise data comes from myriad sources, all the time. Since the early 1990s and accelerating exponentially in the 2000s, customer data— behavioral, transactional and operational— has grown faster than organizations could wrap their arms around. Most companies do not have their customer data sitting in one place, ready for the application of AI tools to generate insights and action at the speed required for today’s market. Simple obstacles like naming a customer “Doe, Jane M.” in one system and “Jane M. Doe” in another create real limitations to understanding that Jane is the same person, what her preferences are and how to deliver the experiences she cares about to keep her as a customer.

To compete in the Experience Era, end-to-end data management is an imperative. In September of 2018 Adobe, Microsoft and SAP partnered to create the Open Data Initiative to reimagine customer experience management and today at Adobe Summit we shared the progress we have taken to further the vision for what customer experience management should be.

The road to customer obsession with Open Data Initiative

Since September 2018, Adobe, Microsoft and SAP have devoted hundreds of people and thousands of hours to making the vision of the Open Data Initiative real. Built on 3 key principles:

  1. Customers own and control their data
  2. Connected data will power AI-drive business outcomes
  3. The Initiative is open and extensible

We have a clear path over the coming months for publishing, enriching and ingesting initial data feeds from Adobe Experience Platform, activated through Adobe Experience Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Office 365 and SAP C/4HANA directly into a customer’s data lake. This unified data store will enable customers their choice of development tools and applications to build and deploy services.

For those looking to understand how to take advantage of the Open Data Initiative we also announced at Adobe Summit the general availability Adobe Experience Platform where you can not only enhance your real-time customer profile using the Open Data Initiative, but also apply AI from Adobe Sensei to create deeper insights and take real-time action across all channels

The progress we have made is gathering even more momentum in the market. Unilever, a joint customer of Adobe, Microsoft and SAP, shared how they will use the power of the Open Data Initiative to get more from their data and enterprise investments.

How Unilever will use ODI

The Open Data Initiative turns siloed data into a single, reusable resource by transforming it into structured, actionable information that can be extended to a large ecosystem of enterprise solutions. Unilever wanted to create a campaign for their recycled packaging targeted to eco-conscious customers. By marrying their back- and front-end data, using a single data model provided by the Open Data Initiative, they are able to understand data patterns and deliver personalized marketing while simultaneously eliminating food and plastics waste.

To do this, they used Adobe Experience Platform to identify an eco-conscious audience segment and SAP C/4Hana to assess their plastics and food inventory with Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services to analyze that inventory. With those data sets now organized using the single data model from the Open Data Initiative, and while their marketing team was setting up the campaign in Adobe Advertising Cloud, they were alerted to a surplus of avocados at one of their farms. With the help of Adobe Sensei, they can reallocate advertising to match the adjusted supply of Avocado Oil Dressing and targeted it to an audience of already-identified high-likelihood buyers, eliminating food and plastics waste in their inventory by more precisely generating demand where there is strong supply.

By optimizing and acting on their owned data, Unilever is able to use AI-driven insights to meet and exceed customer expectations around recycling and food waste AND deliver the right products to a receptive audience. By focusing on customer experiences, they saved more than just food and plastic, they built a relationship with their customers increasing brand loyalty and facilitating a successful future roadmap of eco-conscious initiatives and products.

Welcoming partners to further enhance the Open Data Initiative

Acting on enterprise data is a big challenge and we’ve got big partners to help. While Adobe, SAP and Microsoft have spent our thousands of engineering hours to make the Open Data Initiative a reality, we also recognize that to be most effective we need many points of view. To that end, we have enlisted the help of key technology partners through an advisory council.

The partner advisory council consisting of 15 partners includes Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Change Healthcare, Cognizent, EY, Finastra, Genesys, Hootsuite, Inmobi, Sprinklr, and WPP.

With the help of these organizations the Open Data Initiative is being brought to market swiftly and with the expertise of those who help enterprises solve data challenges every day.

Learn how ODI is fueling the next generation of customer obsession here.