What Is Adobe Experience Platform? All You Need To Know

The Adobe Experience Platform is an open, extensible system that works in real-time to build robust customer profiles that a business can then act on. It provides integrated functionality for businesses wishing to provide optimal, data-informed customer experience across channels.

Adobe Experience Platform is the industry’s first open and extensible real-time customer experience platform with continuous intelligence and personalization at scale. The platform can ingest a high volume of customer data from different systems and stitches customer identities from various touchpoints.

It also transforms the customer profile data into a single source of truth and creates a real-time customer profile. This helps in delivering personalized customer experiences.

What is Customer Experience Management and why is it so important?

Customer experience management is the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed their expectations. This leads to higher customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

In today’s world, customers expect brands to treat them as unique individuals and know their personal preferences and past behavior to create a more personalized & unified experience. Brands may have different touchpoints and departments, but consumers expect a unified & connected digital experience across different channels.

According to leading industry sources, the importance of customer experience management will grow manifold for businesses. A recent survey by Walker revealed that 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. Gartner predicts that by 2022, profitability will replace customer experience as the CMO’s No. 1 strategic priority.

Also, according to Clicktale, customers who have had an unpleasant experience on a brand website are 88% less likely to return.

Key challenges in delivering real-time customer experience management

Most enterprises do not have an efficient and specialized infrastructure to manage and integrate ever-growing customer data from multiple sources and systems. These systems are not capable enough to activate customer profiles quickly in real-time and personalize at scale.
There is also a lack of normalized or standardized customer data schema. This requires cumbersome data transformation within different connected systems within an enterprise.
With the explosion of new customer touchpoints and channels, enterprises face challenges in maintaining a single view of the customer. The customer data is scattered in siloes within different systems leading to incomplete & decentralized customer profiles of the same individual. Hence creating a single view of the customer is an expensive and time-consuming process for enterprises.
There is a challenge to predict customer behavior or to derive insights at scale. Hence, brands lose the opportunity to provide intelligent & personalized real-time activation of customer profiles at scale.
Current systems lack the capability of a centralized data governance framework. Data collection and data usage practices are constrained by user consent, regulations, and contracts.

Key capabilities of the Adobe Experience Platform

Identity stitching

Adobe Experience Platform stitches together customer identities received from different touchpoints, and generates real-time customer profile fragments. It also handles not only different customer data attributes like their age, first name, or last name but also their past behavior. Companies can leverage this to deliver meaningful insights in real time.

The platform also helps brands create high-value segments based on unified customer profile data.

Data governance and privacy

AEP provides a robust and powerful data governance framework to manage compliance with the regulations and restrictions of data usage.

The framework lets marketers determine how data should be used in the organization, which makes decisions on how to use it, and who manages it. Marketers can apply specific labels to data based on governance and compliance needs, including contractual, identity, sensitive, and GDPR data labels.

The data governance framework based on the customer’s consent can directly impact the identity stitching.

Query service

Adobe Experience platform Query Service enables data scientists, data engineers, and marketers to use SQL to find insights from their omnichannel data in the Experience Platform. The Query Service uses a powerful, serverless, petabyte-scale query engine to query complex data efficiently.

Customers can use different data management tools such as Dbvisualizer, Aqua Data Studio, and others to work with their data in the Adobe Experience Platform.

The query service lets users connect to business intelligence tools like Power BI, Tableau, Looker, and other such tools.

Real-time customer data platform (CDP)

Adobe Experience Platform provides a centralized customer data platform for managing a single source of truth for customer data. It is capable of ingesting a high volume of known and unknown customer data.

The data is ingested into the Experience Platform’s petabyte-scale data lake and can be imported from Adobe solutions like Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target. It can also be imported through Adobe Audience Manager, third-party connectors (Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, S3, etc.), or through the available APIs.

Built on open standards

The Adobe Experience Platform is built on open and extensible cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure). With this, it provides APIs that allow customers to quickly develop innovative experience applications at scale.

The platform services layer is implemented using a microservices architecture having multiple services

Data science workspace

The Experience platform data science workspace provides the capability to apply machine learning and AI. This lets it normalize cross-channel data to enable intelligent customer journeys with real-time decisions and meaningful actions at scale.

The platform comes with a fully managed, secure, and scalable infrastructure which helps enterprises leverage out-of-the-box Adobe Sensei models. They can also create their own models and seamlessly train them without the need for any additional infrastructure.

The data science workspace also streamlines and accelerates data into insights enabling brands to make use of Adobe Sensei.

Real-time activation APIs

Adobe Experience platform provides secured and efficient APIs to easily integrate with any other Adobe Cloud products or any non-Adobe system. Enterprises can analyze and activate the real-time profiles in milliseconds, enabling the delivery of experiences in real-time at scale to any set of devices or channels.

For example, a consumer may visit a website and add an item to his or her cart, but then leave the website without checking out. Brands can use that data in real time to send an automatic personal email with an exclusive offer.

Experience data model – a single standardized data schema

Adobe has standardized the customer experience data by introducing a common Experience Data Model (XDM), an open data initiative in collaboration with Microsoft and SAP.

All the data that is imported from different sources into the Experience Platform gets curated and organized into this normalized model called XDM. This enables brands to be able to surface new insights quickly and deliver experiences in a faster, more integrated way.

Adds value to Adobe Cloud products

The Experience Platform enhances Experience Cloud products. One such example is Adobe Campaign’s recent functionality “triggered journeys,” which leverages Experience Platform’s real-time customer profile that automatically delivers real-time and personalized messages based on customer interaction with the brand.

With Adobe Experience Platform, enterprises no longer need to have a point-to-point integration within Adobe cloud products. Instead, they can leverage a more robust and centralized integration that centers around the Experience Platform. Enterprises can also use APIs and tight integration with the rest of Adobe Cloud products to deliver more contextual and personalized real-time digital experiences.

Adobe Experience Platform Tools

In AEP, some tools are labeled as “Applications”, some as “Features”, and a few are labeled as “Tools.” This can be confusing, but the thing you need to know about AEP is that it has tools that help you do things.

Here are the five primary tools that help you do things in AEP:

Journey Optimizer

This tool is a combination between Journey Orchestration and Offer Decisioning.

Journey Orchestration determines which point in the purchase lifecycle someone is in and provides the next steps. Offer Decisioning is more about displaying a message to get someone to take an action, while Journey Orchestration is more about contextualizing where they are in a process to take them where they SHOULD be. This is an Application but isn’t a SKU you can buy since it rolls up into Journey Optimizer.
Offer Decisioning is where you play with creative assets to build dynamic marketing offers. For instance, you would build an ad in Offer Decisioning, and then Journey Optimizer would automatically know what to display to the user. Like Journey Orchestration, this is an Application. However, it isn’t an SKU you can buy, since it rolls up into Journey Optimizer.

Customer Journey Analytics

CJA is like Analysis Workspace that gets data from the AEP data lake instead of getting it just from Adobe Analytics. Unless you live and breathe SQL, this is a fundamental product that you’ll need for analysis if you’re using AEP.

Intelligent Services

This tool composes of fancy algorithms that do stuff like assign scores to determine the likelihood a customer will do something you want them to do on your website (propensity models). It can also automatically build attribution models.

The tool itself doesn’t DO stuff with the website. It won’t dynamically display an offer. You would use this tool alongside another tool (like Journey Optimizer) to act on those segments and scores.

Real-Time CDP (RTCDP)

This is a platform that creates segments from profiles and other data. You can set up stuff like segments to send emails to people in certain phases and tie it into other ad tech.

There’s also a B2B and a B2C version of this. The B2B version adds account-based functionality and has built-in connectors to platforms that let you pull in professional industry data (like account status and funnel stage). The B2C version focuses more on the checkout funnel, cart abandonment, etc.

The following are tools that inform the RTCDP:

Identity Graph, which is a visual representation of how different datasets from different sources connect (like offline, CRM, site analytics, etc). It is named that because there is also an unspoken implication that the data is collected and retrieved in real time. For instance, if Adobe Analytics has your ECID and Email and your email CRM has email data – you would use the email as the primary key (or “Identity Key”). Then you might also have ECID in Salesforce for something, where you would also use ECID as a primary key, and suddenly, all those systems can connect. Alert: This is not a product you can buy, as it informs the RTCDP.
Real-Time Customer Profiles help you see a customer’s complete data profile on demand. Usually, it is viewed in aggregate, but you can use it on an individual basis. You can’t buy this, as it rolls up into RTCDP.

Data Science Workspace

This is a data scientist’s playground where you can run code like R, Python, and Scala to do super complicated stuff that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do in Analysis Workspace (or CJA).

Why You Need The Adobe Experience Platform

In today’s digital market, customers have come to expect personalized digital experiences when they visit a website. This means that businesses need to be able to rapidly capture and interpret the data that will allow them to identify the most appropriate content to serve the user.

In a best-case scenario, the data collection, analysis, and application would be done in real-time. However, using technology, real-time processing, and machine learning is unquestionably one of the best ways to deliver impactful personalized experiences that will shape how your customers interact with your business.

A seamless digital experience is critical to customer engagement and loyalty. And effectively putting your data to good use can help you recoup your investment in cutting-edge technology. It also helps you deliver brand-differentiating experiences for your customers and build brand loyalty.

What Is Adobe Experience Platform? All You Need To Know

Table of Contents Hide

What is Customer Experience Management and why is it so important?

Key challenges in delivering real-time customer experience management