Adobe Experience Platform: The Next Chapter

It’s a thrilling, albeit tax­ing time to be a brand. Peo­ple today expect seam­less and per­son­alised moments with each com­pa­ny inter­ac­tion, made even more appar­ent with the pro­lif­er­a­tion of devices and com­pe­ti­tion for atten­tion. Deeply under­stand­ing each customer’s jour­ney can’t be over­looked, and it’s often the dif­fer­ence between a brand’s fail­ure and suc­cess. To cre­ate those com­pelling, per­son­alised moments, or expe­ri­ences, brands need to inte­grate con­tent and data quick­ly and effec­tive­ly, and at scale. But many com­pa­nies miss the chance to sur­prise and delight due to their siloed data, which cre­ates an incom­plete view of the cus­tomer. 40% of brands note that obtain­ing a holis­tic view of cus­tomers across all inter­ac­tions is a top mar­ket­ing challenge.

Com­pa­nies have his­tor­i­cal­ly bought and imple­ment­ed a mul­ti­tude of tech­nolo­gies across busi­ness lines to solve for dis­parate prob­lems. In an age where cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is the cur­ren­cy for brand loy­al­ty, that approach sim­ply won’t work.

Enter Adobe Expe­ri­ence Plat­form, the industry’s first open and exten­si­ble plat­form that stitch­es data across the enter­prise, ulti­mate­ly enabling enter­pris­es to deliv­er impact­ful dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences in real time. Ear­li­er this year, we made Adobe Expe­ri­ence Plat­form avail­able, to help com­pa­nies accel­er­ate their busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion. With the goal to deliv­er busi­ness val­ue that is cen­tral to cus­tomer needs and their spe­cif­ic imple­men­ta­tions, we are announc­ing the first four use cas­es of Adobe Expe­ri­ence Plat­form that brands can lever­age to make expe­ri­ences mat­ter and deliv­er on the promise of cus­tomer expe­ri­ence man­age­ment (CXM).

1. Real-time Cus­tomer Data Platform

The cus­tomer data plat­form (CDP) has emerged to help solve one of the most dif­fi­cult chal­lenges fac­ing any brand today: deliv­er­ing great cus­tomer expe­ri­ences across all touch­points. While a num­ber of point solu­tions have adopt­ed the CDP moniker and claim to solve this prob­lem, the real­i­ty is that sep­a­rate tools strug­gle to accu­rate­ly deal with the com­plex, nuanced tech­no­log­i­cal chal­lenges that come with uni­fy­ing data and acti­vat­ing it across channels.

With Adobe’s Real-Time Cus­tomer Data Plat­form, brands can bring togeth­er known and unknown cus­tomer data to acti­vate cus­tomer pro­files, and get access to intel­li­gent deci­sion-mak­ing through­out the cus­tomer jour­ney. This helps bridge mar­ket­ing and IT siloes so they can find mean­ing in dis­parate data sets, and achieve a more holis­tic cus­tomer view with­out com­pli­cat­ed inte­gra­tions of cost­ly workarounds.

As a key use case for the Adobe Expe­ri­ence Plat­form, our Real-Time CDP helps brands tru­ly cen­tralise all con­sumer data in one loca­tion. And because it is built as an open and exten­si­ble ecosys­tem, enter­pris­es can use APIs and tight inte­gra­tion with the rest of Adobe Expe­ri­ence Cloud to con­nect with oth­er tech­nolo­gies in their mar­ket­ing stack.

2. Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence Appli­ca­tion Development

Organ­i­sa­tions are con­stant­ly try­ing to find new ways to deliv­er more val­ue to their cus­tomers through more time­ly and per­son­alised inter­ac­tions. Expe­ri­ence appli­ca­tions can be devel­oped to achieve this busi­ness objec­tive, but most brands don’t have the required spe­cialised cloud infra­struc­ture. For exam­ple, brands strug­gle with cre­at­ing, look­ing up, and acti­vat­ing com­plete, real-time cus­tomer pro­files in event-dri­ven, exter­nal sys­tems to deter­mine and deliv­er a rel­e­vant cus­tomer experience.

Adobe Expe­ri­ence Plat­form is an open and exten­si­ble cloud infra­struc­ture, built from the ground up to cen­tralise data from any source, cre­ate and access real-time cus­tomer pro­files, and inte­grate all required sys­tems via APIs, allow­ing cus­tomers to quick­ly devel­op inno­v­a­tive expe­ri­ence appli­ca­tions to inter­act with con­sumers, faster and at scale.

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3. Cus­tomer Jour­ney Intelligence

Obtain­ing the right data is just the first step to impact­ing the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence in a pos­i­tive way– a brand also needs to under­stand what to do with it. But with end­less amount of facts and fig­ures, the act of mak­ing your data action­able in a time­ly fash­ion is near­ly impos­si­ble. Com­pa­nies are spend­ing a for­tune invest­ing in teams focused on data cleans­ing, seman­tics, and pure data col­lec­tion. It typ­i­cal­ly requires skilled data sci­en­tists who con­duct inten­sive and time-con­sum­ing data explo­ration, paired with engi­neer­ing, to devel­op machine-learn­ing mod­els for a brand. Net net: process is lengthy, the tech­nol­o­gy is com­plex and skilled data sci­en­tists are in demand.

Adobe Expe­ri­ence Plat­form gives brands data-dri­ven method­olo­gies, best prac­tices, AI and busi­ness intel­li­gence to enable real-time deci­sions and actions. By apply­ing machine learn­ing and AI to cross-chan­nel data, brands short­en the time to insights, ulti­mate­ly unlock­ing the pow­er of the data and opti­mis­ing process­es com­pa­ny-wide. Data sci­en­tists of all skill lev­els will achieve insights faster to deliv­er more effec­tive dig­i­tal experiences.

4. Deliv­ery and Cross-Chan­nel Experience

All of us, as cus­tomers, expect time­ly and rel­e­vant inter­ac­tions with every brand we do busi­ness with. With­out the knowl­edge of each customer’s path, from tablet to mobile to desk­top for exam­ple, brands are blind to spe­cif­ic cus­tomer queues, and paral­ysed from cus­tomis­ing moments.

With Adobe Expe­ri­ence Plat­form, brands can enrich the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence by acti­vat­ing cen­tralised and stan­dard­ised data across the enter­prise via mul­ti­ple chan­nels in real time. Through inte­gra­tions across Adobe Expe­ri­ence Cloud, brands can now have access to real-time and rel­e­vant expe­ri­ences from stream­ing seg­men­ta­tion with behav­iour­al data. As an API-first plat­form, data can flow freely between Adobe solu­tions and third-par­ty soft­ware, empow­er­ing brands to build their own dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence work­flows. With Trig­gered Jour­neys, mar­keters can set up mes­sag­ing that’s ini­ti­at­ed by cus­tomers’ actions, and tai­lor each indi­vid­ual inter­ac­tion based on past experiences.

Adobe is an inte­gral part­ner with brands around the world, to tru­ly trans­form their cus­tomer expe­ri­ences, and each moment. Adobe Expe­ri­ence Plat­form is a key piece solv­ing for that puzzle.