The Future is Now—How AI Enhances Customer Experience Management at Adobe

Image source: Adobe Stock.

Customer Experience Management (CXM) offers the next big breakthrough for companies looking to build stronger, lasting customer relationships. With customers expecting even more personalized experiences from brands, marketers must connect with each customer in ways that feel useful and natural—and do so at the rapid pace and enormous scale of modern business. This challenge is top of mind at Adobe.

“ Customer Experience Management (CXM) is at the core of everything we do,” says Anthony Ching, Adobe Sensei Product Management at Adobe. “There’s a lot of talk in all businesses about digital transformation, and that is a critical step. But the next phase is to successfully use a digital transformation to achieve a customer-centric business transformation.”

To help companies step up to the CXM imperative, Adobe continues to expand on artificial intelligence (AI) services that enable personalization at scale, including three new Adobe Sensei services currently in beta—Customer AI, Attribution AI, and Journey AI.

Adobe marketers themselves are among the beta testers and early adopters of the services, and they’re already unlocking deep insights into what customers want and how to deliver. Here are a few ways AI and machine learning are changing customer experience at Adobe.

Connected data at the center

Data is at the center of any CXM strategy, and only when the data is connected can companies start to extract real value. The Adobe team relies on unified customer profiles that pull together data from across channels, devices, and data sources, including Adobe Analytics, Adobe Advertising Cloud, and Adobe Campaign. These profiles provide the raw materials for personalization, and Adobe Sensei makes sense of it all—determining how best to engage customers and build better experiences.

Better answers to critical marketing questions

Precise measurement is essential if marketers are to build better customer experiences. Adobe marketers use the Attribution AI service to go beyond traditional attribution models in determining just how effective each touchpoint is at driving sales.

“Most marketers really use reporting, not true attribution,” says Matt Scharf, Integrated Marketing Analytics at Adobe. “Attribution AI gives our marketing initiatives much more value by showing how much revenue each marketing channel contributes to each sale. This allows us to shift the conversation away from marketing as a cost center towards marketing as a valuable sales driver.”

The result is a much more meaningful view of what works and what doesn’t. For instance, marketers might find that a small paid search campaign promoting Adobe Premiere Pro effectively nudges people toward purchase, even as they’re just beginning to research video editing software. Or they may discover that a high-volume monthly email push doesn’t significantly contribute to subscriptions—and in fact turns customers off. That kind of insight is invaluable to a marketing team committed to constantly refining the experiences they deliver.

Seeing customers more clearly—and predicting their next move

To deliver truly personalized experiences, marketers need a deeper understanding of customers. Adobe marketing teams are using the Customer AI service to understand not just who their customers are, but what they are likely to do next and why.

“We’ve found that the propensity scores generated by Adobe Sensei Customer AI services have been good at predicting customer behaviors,” says Ching. “Customers in the top 10% of churn scores were nearly 4 times more likely to stop using our products than the average customer. By using Adobe Sensei artificial intelligence to build out customer profiles, we help marketers pinpoint opportunities so that they can target messaging with much greater accuracy.”

The AI-powered algorithms generate 1.5 billion propensity scores every day, analyzing customer interactions, behaviors and demographics to determine the probability of churn, purchase, upsell, and dozens more attributes. These powerful insights enable Adobe marketers to stay a step ahead—delivering a relevant experience that is likely to convince a person to purchase a subscription, for example, or persuade an existing customer to renew.

Unique journeys for every customer

Coming up soon, Adobe marketers will use the Adobe Sensei Journey AI service to build end-to-end customer journeys that are unique to an individual. That could mean adjusting email frequency based on a person’s tendencies rather than trying to find the optimal frequency for the entire customer database. It could also include finding the best channels of communication and best time of day to send messages.

Combined, hyper-focused personalization helps Adobe marketing teams deliver experiences that feel more natural and relevant to customers. This approach is ultimately the key to becoming a CXM leader and why Adobe invests so much in Adobe Sensei—applying AI and machine learning to the challenge of continually improving tomorrow’s customer experiences.

Adobe marketing teams are advancing CXM by using Adobe Sensei. Learn more here.