The Future Is Now – How AI Enhances Customer Experience Management at Adobe

Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence Man­age­ment (CXM) offers the next big break­through for com­pa­nies look­ing to build stronger, last­ing cus­tomer rela­tion­ships. With cus­tomers expect­ing even more per­son­alised 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. And the stakes have nev­er been high­er for brands to get it right: accord­ing to Adobe’s recent Expe­ri­ence Index report, one in three Euro­peans are pre­pared to stop buy­ing from brands fol­low­ing a poor cus­tomer experience.

This makes deliv­er­ing amaz­ing expe­ri­ences a top busi­ness pri­or­i­ty – but these don’t just hap­pen. 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 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 per­son­al­i­sa­tion 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 centre

Data is at the cen­tre of any CXM strat­e­gy, and only when the data is con­nect­ed can com­pa­nies start to extract real val­ue. Accord­ing to anoth­er recent Adobe report, Dig­i­tal Trends 2019, 50% of com­pa­nies plan to invest in improv­ing their CX this year. 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 per­son­al­i­sa­tion, 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. 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 per­son­alised 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. 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, analysing 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 per­son­al­i­sa­tion 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.