Adobe, Microsoft and C3 AI team up to help companies effectively manage customer experiences at scale
Today’s consumers and business buyers are more demanding than ever before. They expect companies to know them intimately. And they expect brands to provide contextually relevant information and offers based on their needs at that moment.
Traditionally, a CRM system was thought of as the end all be all for building and maintaining a relationship with customers. But in today’s digital world, CRM alone is no longer enough.
“CRM bolsters sales efficiency and helps companies track leads—there’s no doubt it’s an important part of the tech stack. However, today’s digital environment requires companies to have a more holistic and real-time view of their customers,” said Justin Merickel, VP of business development at Adobe. “Enterprises need to bring together all of their data – behavioral, transactional, financial, CRM, operational, and more – in order to orchestrate and activate impactful, individualized journeys for every customer based on real-time insights on the edge.”
Heeding the call
To help organizations that are digitally transforming today at an accelerated pace, we are announcing a new joint offering between Adobe, Microsoft, and C3 AI, which promises to transform sales, marketing, and customer experience through an AI-powered platform that is built on an industry vertical model. This announcement builds on an already successful partnership between Adobe and Microsoft to unite data, content and processes so that companies can transform their businesses and deliver the great experiences customers expect across all touchpoints.
“Microsoft is the CRM system that helps companies manage and maintain customer relationships,” explained Dave Welch, VP and solution leader for Microsoft solutions at Adobe. “Adobe is providing the customer experience management (CXM) capabilities, and C3 is the vertical modeling that makes this an extremely powerful technology stack.”
This AI-native tech stack combines the power of real-time customer profiles and Journey Orchestration in Adobe Experience Platform with Microsoft Dynamics customer relationship management (CRM) software. C3AI brings their depth of industry domain expertise and acts as the artificial intelligence backbone of the joint offering, which promises to help customers effectively manage customer experiences across physical and digital channels, as well as personalize experiences to individuals—at scale.
Journey Orchestration + experience delivery
What Adobe brings to the partnership with Adobe Experience Platform is that living, breathing, real-time customer profile and Journey Orchestration. Journey Orchestration is a service built on Experience Platform that allows companies to tailor individual journeys for every customer based on their profile. Companies can anticipate individual needs through real-time insight, and then personalize engagement at scale across channels, and finally analyze performance with journey reporting.
Journey Orchestration is an open, API-first service that can integrate with applications like Adobe Campaign for experience delivery, which means companies can create and manage real-time and personalized journeys across email, SMS, mobile push notifications and any other customer interaction channel.
“Think of Journey Orchestration as the means to activate your customer insights,” explained Sunil Menon, head of product marketing for customer journey management solutions at Adobe. “It’s taking all that data in your CRM and other sources of customer data and stitching it to your behavioral, transactional, financial, and operational data to build a more complete real-time customer profile, and then acting on that real-time customer intelligence with personalized, connected, and correctly sequenced experiences.”
AI powering specific industry use cases
There’s no one-size fits all approach to customer experience—and every industry has its own nuances in terms of regulation, customer expectations, and more. The joint offering brings new industry-specific use cases for AI to enterprises.
For example, in financial services, C3AI can help with credit prospecting, churn management and call center predictions. In manufacturing, use cases include dealer management, customer usage and experience, and call center customer service. In the public sector, AI can be applied across case and process management, as well as citizen engagement, and can guide safety and sustainability practices within cities.
“C3 is bringing in AI industry data models, and a surplus of industry data on which those models are built,” Welch said. “Industry buyers no longer want to be treated as the old school procurement organizations. They want to have experiences like they are having as a consumer with consumer brands, and this is influencing their expectations. The key to meeting their expectations is personalization, and AI—to this degree of specificity—is the only way to do personalization at scale.”