Customer engagement is all about knowing about a customer’s likes, dislikes, and habits. With the introduction of the Adobe Experience Platform, you can construct a unique customer profile. Updated in real-time and combining online and offline activity, this is the next generation of customer management.
Here, we outline all you need to know about maximizing personalization with the Adobe Experience Platform.
What is Adobe Experience Platform?
The Adobe Experience Platform is the latest offering that comes as an addition to the Adobe Experience Cloud. Designed as a complete customer tool it can be used for marketing, analytics, customer experience, and advertising. It allows the creation of individual customer profiles, which are constantly updated in real-time, taking data from multiple sources.
The Adobe Experience Platform is an attempt to move forward from older CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or Data Management Platforms (DMP). It is designed on an open API (Adobe IO) framework. This is important as it allows data scientists and engineers to operate within the software. They can also develop the software and enable it to integrate with external applications.
Putting personalized customer experience into practice with identity stitching
No matter what you are selling or offering, customer experience is paramount. Therefore, creating an accurate and up-to-date profile of a customer is vital. Creating a 360-degree profile of a customer allows you to know their habits and wants. This helps hugely to reduce inaccurate messaging.
To achieve this, you need to collect different types of data – demographic or behavioral information – from multiple sources. CRMs and DMPs are useful but often static. Data is too often siloed into either offline or online data. Or only from specific types of data, such as financial or behavioral. The key to moving towards a 360-degree profile of a customer is to combine all the different types of data from multiple sources into one place.
Identity stitching enables you to collect and collate the information you have. This can come from different data points and systems about a customer. It can then be drawn together into a unified customer profile. The data is taken from the disparate sources, cleaned, and then used to populate the profile or Customer Data Platform.
Customer Data Platforms: Why they’re a must
Within the Adobe Experience Platform, you have access to a Real-time Customer Profile. This is Adobe’s offering of a Customer Data Platform (CDP). A CDP takes all the cleaned data from different online and offline sources and combines it in one place in real-time.
The benefits of this are vast. The most pertinent of which is the scope it gives the user to engage customers. From a marketing and advertising perspective, the customer can be engaged across multiple channels, including social media, e-mail, direct mail, and call centers. These interactions are also fed back into the CDP.
The Customer Data Platform also has great advantages for data governance. With data about an individual spread across multiple locations, it is not an easy task for it to find its way into the wrong hands. With the Real-time Customer Profile, you also have a unified central storage unit for the management of their data. Furthermore, you can have tools to track data across different channels. With the growing importance of transparency and privacy, Adobe gives you controls on data usage.
The Experience Data Model (XDM): The key to it all
The thing that sets the Adobe Experience Platform and other CDPs apart from other customer data management tools is their ability to take in different types of data from many sources. This can be transactional data from an item somebody has bought in a store. Or, what websites someone has visited. However, collating all this data about someone is notoriously difficult.
Behind all this is the Experience Data Model (XDM). The XDM is what allows the system to function, through the collection, cleaning, and standardization of different and disparate data types. What was siloed in different databases before can be unified into one customer profile.
Adobe Experience Platform: A Step Above
Adobe wasn’t the first player into the CDP game, with many other companies already on the market. However, its arrival with the Experience Platform was eagerly awaited. And it hasn’t disappointed.
One of the main benefits is its integration with other software and applications. Within the Adobe ecosystem, the Experience Platform can be used in conjunction with the likes of Target or Campaign. However, that isn’t that special. It’s the integration with external products is what sets it apart.
Utilizing REST APIs, the Adobe Experience Platform can connect to a number of products. For example, Excel, Microsoft Power BI, Qlik, Looker, and Tableau can all be linked. This has been achieved through building on open software and allowing developers and data engineers access to the Data Science Workspace.
Within the Adobe Experience Platform, the Data Science Workspace is the space where those with sufficient technical knowledge have the option to design methods to integrate with other software using new techniques or pre-built models. Adobe gives these developers access to their large capacity of machine learning and AI, to push the product forward. This leads to greater connectivity and faster data gathering. What is more, these modifications and upgrades are available to all users.
With its new platform, Adobe also optimizes Customer Journey Analytics (CJA). Building on existing functionality within Adobe, the Experience Platform pushes it forwards. Giving access to real-time customer data, it enables analysis and visualizations with cross-channel data.
Finally, the last word needs to be given to the benefits of accessing real-time data. Previous versions of customer data management in the cloud were hampered by an approximate delay of 24-36 hours. Users reported significant impacts this delay had on their service. Using slightly outdated data increased the volume of non-relevant interactions.
Summing up
The beauty of the Real-time Customer Profile is that it enhances the user’s ability to truly personalize its services. Customer experience is built upon an up-to-date and accurate knowledge of the customer. His or her behavior, likes, dislikes, wants and past actions are all added to their profile almost immediately. When using Adobe Experience Platform, any engagement with the customer such as advertising is likely to have a more positive response.
