Earlier this year it was off to the races, with Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP all working on the challenge of creating a “single source of truth” platform, with real-time updates to customer profiles across their suites.
Today, Adobe announced the general availability of the Real-Time Customer Data Platform, powering personalized customer experience management within the Adobe Experience Platform. The CDP comes with data governance capabilities.
I spoke with Ronell Hugh, head of go to market strategy and product marketing, Adobe Experience Platform), and Nina Caruso, product marketing manager, Adobe Audience Manage, about the release.
“The Adobe Experience Platform was announced back at Summit,” said Hugh. “It’s the industry’s first open, extensible, real-time platform. What we mean by that is, we’ve developed the platform to be at the center of providing customer experience management capabilities, and driving those real-time, contextual experiences as scale for enterprises.”
The platform allows import of data from any source to inform the real-time customer profile. Adobe will standardize the data, whether it’s brought in by streaming or batch. “The real-time customer profile can be leveraged in many different ways, through our applications or through non-Adobe products. Now we have that data centralized, we’re able to inform in the better way the actions that we take.”
Appropriate use of data is also important. “Customers need to classify the data, and understand what it is,” said Hugh. Adobe will manage the data in accordance with applicable regulations, e.g. GDPR and CCPA. The platform has in-built enforcement capabilities, Hugh explained. “Different businesses will have different needs for how the data is managed, but the key here is that our customers need to have that capability built in.”
“We’re building Real-Time CDP really with the marketer in mind,” added Caruso. “Inside of CDP, marketers will be able to see marketing-specific dashboards and workflows. They’ll also be able to see easy to use AI and ML tools.” While data-savvy team members will be linking to sources of data through the Data Science Workspace, the same environment also offers accessibility to marketers to work with the data. “We want to put this capability in the hands of our marketers so that they can make decisions based on the use cases they have, and the requirements of their specific industry.”
The CDP also creates the possibility of real-time activation through coming integrations with email providers, CRM tools, and social platforms. The aim is offering real-time experiences that are also consistent across channels.
I asked whether these developments created opportunities for digitally mature audiences to do 1:1 targeting. “Absolutely. A marketer could send something to a mobile messaging platform, and facilitate some very personalized messaging. They key there is maturity in building out the audiences, but we have the capability of support that.”
To this mix, Adobe is adding Customer Journey Analytics (generally available today), inspired by Photoshop. Just as Photoshop images are built on many image layers, so this new analytics offering is built on layers of data. “These data sets are important in terms of how we drive meaningful insights or details about how a customer is engaging with the brand. Brands can curate metrics like orders, conversions, visits; all of this driven by Adobe Experience Platform, by dragging and dropping layers of data to uncover new insights.”
Finally, Journey Orchestration will be driven by the real-time customer profiles, using AI-powered understanding of customer behavior to automatically steer next best actions on the journey
More from Adobe about the developments here.
