Are You Platform Ready?
Have you ever had the awkward experience of not remembering a co-worker’s name? How about that time you ran into your neighbor at the airport, but didn’t recognize them outside the context of your neighborhood?
That’s what a lot of online marketing feels like these days. Brands are spending millions of dollars to create personalized, thoughtful customer experiences, but too often failing at the basics of relationship building. There are a lot of important factors to consider when building and sustaining relationships with customers, including the role of siloed, fragmented data.
When you fail to greet your repeat customer because they’re using their work email instead of their personal email, or if you have no way to recognize your best online customers inside the context of your brick and mortar storefront, you’re potentially creating awkward experiences, and losing the trust of your customers.
Brands need a better way for customer data to be more connected, dynamic and accessible. Customers need to be recognized, if they chose to be, no matter where they are. Content has to be delivered, activated and acted upon across channels in real time to best serve up the fantastic experiences customers expect.
For this to happen, the science of delivering the experience has to get better. All sources of business and customer data need to be stitched together and mapped into a unified profile that can be acted upon in milliseconds.
That’s the idea behind Adobe Experience Platform we announced last month at Adobe Summit.
A true platform. Not just a series of applications
For years now, the most advanced digital brands have been forced to assemble their own makeshift data platforms out of a puzzle of individual pieces—one pool of data for experience and website analytics; another for collecting transactional, point-of-sale data; and perhaps a third for aggregating 3rd party data. On top of that, there’s all the other applications and services that are needed to build the customer journey, manage targeting, or create and deliver content. It’s expensive, time-consuming and inefficient.
Adobe Experience Platform is the first purpose-built customer experience management platform that brings all these applications together to allow brands to create a unified, actionable customer journey experience for a digital business. With real-time customer profiles, continuous intelligence, and an open and extensible architecture, it brings the complete digital journey together with:
- A customer profile that is stitched and unified on-the-fly with real-time personalization at scale.
Customer data is at the heart of connected, personalized experiences. So, we’re enabling a real-time customer profile that allows brands to integrate their data from both Adobe applications as well as non-Adobe sources.
Adobe has also joined forces with Microsoft and SAP to form the Open Data Initiative. This open and extensible initiative makes it easy for brands to integrate customer data and reimagine customer experience management with a seamless flow of connected behavioral, transactional, and operational data through a common data model definition, built on consumer choice and transparency.
With all your data in a single, actionable view you can uncover more actionable customer insights and deliver real-time stitching and activation of customer profiles at the edge. - An API-first Platform for creating innovative customer experiences.
No customer experience is nor should be the same and you need the agility to adopt or develop the applications that will work for you. Not only is Adobe Experience Platform open and extensible, but it comes with intelligent tools and services — for example, Adobe provides our Experience Data Model (XDM) as well as a variety of APIs that are optimized specifically for custom experience-oriented application development.
Adobe Experience Platform includes Adobe I/O, our developer portal, which includes a wide variety of APIs that make it easy to build custom applications that work seamlessly with Adobe Experience Cloud.
With Adobe Exchange you can find thousands of third-party apps and extensions to customize Adobe products across all clouds in our third-party marketplace and partner ecosystem. - Always-on business insight and process improvements with Adobe Sensei.
As your customers move through their journey your enterprise needs to be ready to take the right actions and deliver the right experience to your customers at the right time. That takes more than allowing you to unify access to your data from data lakes and databases. Adobe Experience Platform lets you leverage predefined, data-driven operational best practices, business intelligence, and the power of Adobe Sensei to enable real-time decisions and more relevant action. - Relevant, targeted experiences through any channel.
Providing experiences at the right time and the right place is core to customer experience management. Adobe Experience Platform works in combination with Adobe Experience Cloud to allow you to design relevant experiences for each customer, then deliver them at the right time through the right channel.
With a unified view of the customer that’s actionable at every step of the journey, you can truly scale your data and personalized experiences. The platform is capable of supporting your customer relationship from the analytics journey, clear through to e-commerce and loyalty.
Customer tested, ready to go
We’ve thoroughly tested Adobe Experience Platform through an extensive beta deployment with leading global brands in multiple verticals, including retail, consumer goods, technology, media, and more. In each use case, beta companies realized the value of a unified profile and leveraged it to drive both insight and results.
We have customers in digital commerce that are using Adobe Experience Platform to act on immediate customer intention. By observing real-time shopping behavior, triggers can be set and executed on in milliseconds, increasing sales and cart value.
Other customers are using combination of Experience Platform Query Service and Data Science Workspace to extend their understanding of the customer behavior across omni-channel experience. Customer data from different channels use to go into different data silos, making it difficult to understand the data and behavior a single customer shares as they moved from device to device or online and off. Now BI, analytics and artificial intelligence can be applied against real-time customer profiles, events and behavior in a governed, and dynamic data lake environment to generate insights and enable immediate business action.
So, now is the time to ask yourself, are you platform ready? How data driven is your business? How are you leveraging your data to deliver value to your customers?
If you understand the need for a real-time, unified and actionable customer profile to create an integrated customer journey-as-a-service across every single customer touchpoint in your business, the team at Adobe is eager to talk to you about the ways you can use Adobe Experience Platform to deliver value to your customers at every step of the customer journey.