3 ways high-tech IT professionals lead the way for personalized experiences

IT leaders at high-tech companies are increasingly playing a larger, more strategic role in supporting the delivery of experiences at every stage of the customer journey. As an IT leader, you need to free your teams from menial tasks and provide efficient pathways for customer-facing teams to create compelling, innovative experiences.

When data is stored and managed in disparate systems, your customers get experiences that feel disjointed, irrelevant, and, all too often, downright irritating. The piecemeal approach — manually stitching together data sets and deduplicating records — doesn’t scale. Unfortunately, it’s also fraught with potential security and compliance issues. And it takes your developers away from high-value work they could be doing to solve business problems and improve the customer experience.

Adobe Experience Platform is an open and extensible platform that helps you bring together and manage all of your customer data, no matter where it comes from or which team owns it. When your data is centrally managed, teams across the enterprise — from marketing to sales to customer support and beyond — can use it in ways that benefit your customers and your business.

1. Bring together data from diverse sources to create unified customer profiles.

Experience Platform lets you combine data streams from all the systems your company uses to manage customer experiences, such as:

• CRM
• Email marketing
• Content management
• Web analytics
• Digital advertising platforms
• Offline channels (such as call centers)
• Second- and third-party data sources

After ingesting customer data from all of these sources, Experience Platform links records identified with a visitor to build a unified customer profile and then stores these profiles in a way that allows for easy segmentation and activation.

Customer profiles are complete in the sense that they reflect all the data your company has compiled about a customer at a given moment in time. But profiles are constantly evolving — since they include both static and streaming data — which means they can quickly move from one audience segment to another. Constantly weaving together attributes and behavioral data to create a dynamic, 360-degree view of each customer ensures the right experiences are delivered.

For example, at Adobe, where we use Experience Platform, customer profiles have transformed our own marketing efforts. Profile data is now refreshed every 14 seconds instead of every 72 hours. This type of continuous profile updates make it possible to deliver timely, highly relevant experiences based on specific behaviors to specific segments or even to individual customers.

Unifying your data into real-time customer profiles dramatically changes how data gets analyzed and used in your company. This approach allows for a single view of a customer that can be shared across the enterprise. The insights and measurements developed independently for various business needs all come from a centralized source. Of course, you’ll need to put some guardrails in place. But teams that are responsible for one stage of the customer journey can now look upstream and downstream to understand what they need to do to improve the total customer experience.

2. Govern and protect your data to make sure it’s used in appropriate ways.

When you start combining customer data from multiple sources for use in different channels, governance becomes critical. In recent years, IT leaders have played a key role in interpreting and complying with consumer privacy laws.

From this perspective, one of the main benefits of Experience Platform is its built-in data governance capabilities. We’ve automated key aspects of data governance to help you keep pace with evolving privacy laws, while also enforcing your company’s own policies, as you work to deliver real-time experiences. The built-in governance system is based on the Data Usage Labeling and Enforcement (DULE) framework, and also includes an API-based framework to help you navigate the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. By using the end-to-end data governance capabilities embedded in the same platform you use to manage customer experiences, you can build and maintain customer trust.

Of course, governing your data does more than mitigate legal and brand risk. Governance is also about classifying your data in a consistent way. Experience Platform provides the tools you need to convert incoming data into a standard taxonomy, the Experience Data Model (XDM), which makes the data easier to analyze and activate.

3. Enable marketing to deliver highly targeted experiences at scale.

One of the main benefits of a unified customer profile is that it opens the door to delivering real-time customer experiences. Analyzing upstream and downstream data helps marketers design better experiences and having more complete profiles helps them deploy batch programs tailored to specific segments. But to deliver timely experiences based on new data about a customer, you need automation and AI.

In Experience Platform, machine learning capabilities with off-the-shelf algorithms make it relatively easy to power predictive insights. Instead of writing custom code to support one-off marketing programs, you can use AI to help your marketing colleagues conquer needs such as scoring leads, delivering the next best offer, or automating the delivery of content tailored to dynamic audience segments.

For example, based on a customer’s attributes and behavior — and the behavior of other people with similar attributes — marketers can predict when a prospect is ready to buy a certain product and then set up a trigger to deploy the right offer at precisely the right moment. On the flipside, they can identify and proactively engage customers who may be likely to cancel their subscriptions.

DXC Technology, an IT services and solutions company, for example, is building ML models to complement a set of rich reports from Adobe Experience Platform. The company has unified its data to achieve 360-degree views of contacts and accounts to build models for real-time personalization

The video below illustrates how you can manage and govern customer data with Experience Platform:

Get more value from your data, give more value to your customers

When all the available data about your customers is linked together in a real-time customer profile — and stored and managed in a secure, compliant way — everyone in your entire company benefits.

IT leaders can manage data more efficiently and focus more on strategic initiatives that move the business forward. Technologists can spend less time stitching together data sets and more time improving the customer experience. Data scientists can spend less time normalizing data and more time mining it for useful insights. And marketers can design tailored experiences and deliver them while they still matter to your customers.