Real-Time Customer Profile overview

In this video, we’re going to introduce you to the real-time customer profile in Adobe Experience Platform. Every business wants to communicate with their customers in a way that feels personal. Responding to customers in a coordinated, relevant way, across an increasing variety of channels is a monumental challenge. And most companies struggle with the scale and velocity these experiences demand. Adobe understands that challenge and has developed real-time customer profile to power cross-channel personalization at scale, through each phase of the customer journey. In this video, we’ll give you an overview of how Adobe Experience Platform assembles and updates the customer profiles and show you how to access and use these profiles and Experience Platform. We’ll start with the identity graph. Building a real-time customer profile that spans multiple devices and channels starts by recognizing a person across those devices and channels. When that person interacts with your brand via your website, mobile app, call center or brick and motor store it’s critical that we recognize that behind these disparate identities is one individual. Unfortunately, tying all these different identities together to form a single view of a customer is no easy task. Previously attempting to do this required multiple teams and significant cost for companies and the results were not guaranteed.

At Adobe we recognized how hard this could be and we’ve developed a streamlined system for managing and stitching identities across the various channels in which you interact with your customers. We call these identity namespaces.

In Experience Platform we provide a handful of standard identity namespaces out of the box. And we also allow you to add your own namespaces to suit specific business needs. For example, say a web user browses your site for a few minutes before logging into their loyalty account. Once they log in, the ID service can link the anonymous web ID to an email address and CRM profile for that known person. A login from their mobile app creates additional links between identities. As new relationships form between IDs and various namespaces. The ID service continues to add to the identity graph for that individual. This is the first key step in building the real-time customer profile. So why is this important Well, data about your customers flows in from various sources and each of these presents a slightly different fragmented view of a given customer. For many companies this makes a single customer view and consistent messaging to that customer a significant challenge. Using the identity graph Adobe dynamically assembles these profile fragments into a consolidated view, which can then be used to build more accurate customer segments and deliver consistent right time experiences to that individual.

Looking up a customer profile and Experience Platform is easy. Navigate to profiles and select the browse tab. Then select the merge policy, identity, namespace and identity value associated with a profile. The merge policy selector automatically selects the default merge policy for your organization. If you don’t wish to use that merge policy you can select the X beside the default policy to open the select merge policy dialogue and choose a different policy. Next, we want to select our identity namespace. Using the search function, I can quickly find the namespace I am looking for. I can also click on it and view the details before continuing after selecting an identity namespace, we return to the browse tab and can enter an identity value. This value is specific to an individual customer profile and must be a valid entry for the namespace provided. For example, selecting the identity namespace email would require an identity value in the form of a valid email address.

When we view the profile for that individual the profile service uses the current ID graph to gather all the profile fragments associated with that person, combining them into a single consolidated view. In this example, the data we’re looking at is a combination of information coming from a web application form, a customer loyalty program, and other sources. We can also see the various IDs and namespaces which make up the identity graph. Additionally, we have access to the consolidated interaction history across devices for this profile. We can also see what segments this profile belongs to by selecting the segment membership tab, making it easier than ever to see what’s happening holistically at the customer level and respond appropriately.

In real time customer profile, we organize all customer data into two main categories, record data or attributes or things that describe a person generally independent of time. Examples include first and last name, account numbers, gender, and so on. The second category is time series or event data. This data captures interactions with your customers. Timestamps are a critical piece of information here because they are used to describe the sequence of events or interactions that occur over time. Understanding the differences between these fundamental data structures is especially helpful when looking at questions that might blur the lines somewhat for example, take loyalty status which is represented in both places. Here are two example questions marketers might ask around loyalty status. First, give me all gold customers. In this case, we’d be using record data to find all the customers with attribute loyalty status equals gold. But what if we ask a slightly different question, give me all new gold customers this month. Here, we’re actually looking for an event occurring this month where the status changed to gold. So we’d use our time series data for that. With Experience Platform and time customer profile we provide the technology and the ability to deliver at the scale and velocity these experiences demand. In this video, we focused on the UI experience, but remember Experience Platform was built using an API first approach. So everything you’ve seen and more is also possible via platform APIs. At Adobe we’re committed to helping businesses deliver consistent, relevant experiences to their customers. And we can’t wait to see what you’re able to accomplish with real-time customer profile. Thanks for watching. -