Adobe launched its Experience Platform at the end of 2019 in Europe. With this platform, Adobe announces its own Customer Data Platform (CDP), and it definitely sounds promising!
Explore what a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is and what new exciting features Adobe brings to the table through our seven key questions about Adobe Experience Platform.
1. What is a Customer Data Platform?
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is defined by the CDP institute as a “packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems”. It enables you to connect all types of data sources (like behavioral or financial) into a real-time unified profile of your customers that you can use to create actions on your various channels. These actions could range anywhere from email automation, customized content for websites or newsletters, or to create Facebook Custom Audiences.
2. What’s the difference between Adobe Experience Platform, CRM and data management platforms?
CDPs go beyond Data Management Platforms (DMP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms. Where a data management platform (DMP) is mainly based on third party data and is primarily used for advertising channels, it lacks a unified view of your customers. With the recent announcements by web browsers Firefox and Safari to start blocking third party cookies, a DMP certainly has its limitations.
On the CRM side, systems usually focus on offline CRM data and lack integration with behavioral data, and often they aren’t real-time either.
While both types of platforms have interesting features, they fail to create a complete unified profile of your customers and their journey with your brand. Adobe Experience Cloud Platform combines the best features of both these types of platforms.
3. What is a unified customer profile (UCP)?
Many companies deal with siloed data approaches. Different systems and departments often store different types of information about customers and no one has a single, complete view of their customers. Adobe helps you truly build 360-degree profiles of your customers by seamlessly connecting all types of data (behavioral, financial, transactional, operational or third-party data) into one view - a unified customer profile (UCP).
The Adobe Experience Cloud platform doesn’t work with a single unique identifier, but with different types of identifiers that are progressively added to each user’s profile. Where a lot of other systems tend to put the internal customer ID as central, Adobe sees it only as one of the identifiers in the profile. Email address, mobile phone number or internal customer id, can all be linked to the same profile in a progressive way.
4. Why is real time data important?
While the current Adobe people core services also allowed some sharing of profiles and segments across the Adobe Experience Cloud, the main shortcoming was that this wasn’t happening in real-time. Most commonly, a delay of 24-36 hours was prevalent. When building customer journeys this can be a massive delay, which can have a severe impact on the relevance of what content you can bring to your target audiences.
With the launch of the Experience platform, data is ingested real-time, automatically building real-time customer profiles that can be used in real-time segmentation and activation.
5. Are there improvements in data governance across the Adobe ecosystem?
The different data sources are being put centrally within Adobe Experience Cloud. This implies that the data only needs to be ingested once so it can be used by various outbound channels and tools.
In the current way of working of Adobe, if different Adobe products were to use the same data type, it needs be ingested into each of them separately, leading to overhead and potential inconsistencies. This change is definitely a plus for overall data governance, consistency and maintenance of customer data.
6. How does Adobe Experience Platform integrate with other Adobe products and custom applications?
With the launch of Adobe Experience Platform, the data becomes actionable to the literal meaning of the word. Real-time profiles can be added to real-time segments which can be activated in real-time on a variety of channels, like Adobe products (for example, Adobe Campaign or Target), custom applications, or third-party tooling.
This end-to-end approach can help marketers to build more meaningful and richer customer journeys through the creation of personalized content.
7. How does Adobe Experience Platform help improve customer experience through data science?
Adobe Experience Cloud allows the integration of Data Science Workspace which helps speed up the process from gathering data to getting valuable data insights. Data scientists or technical users can develop, train and deploy their models within data science workspace. Next to that, they can also bring their already built models through repositories or use pre-built recipes by Adobe.
For the first time, enterprises can bring proprietary algorithms to their Adobe ecosystem, taking advantage of Adobe’s powerful machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities to help marketers automate targeted multichannel digital experiences.