Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) Value Realization Series - Session 1 Roadmap to Value with AJO

Transcript

Thanks all for joining. We will be getting started in the next couple of minutes. Today’s session, Roadmap to Value with AGO, will be led by Principal, Solution, Customer Success Manager, Thomas Levitt. We’re going to wait just another minute for attendees to filter in and then we will get started.

Thanks for joining and we will be getting started in the next couple of minutes. Today’s session, Roadmap to Value with AGO, will be led by Principal, Solution, Customer Success Manager, Thomas Levitt. We’re going to wait just another minute for attendees to filter in and then we will get started.

I got the question here, should we be able to see anything? Yes, you should be seeing blue screen.

You were sharing your screen, right, Thomas? Correct. Now it seems like it’s showing somebody. Thank you.

Please do change the slide.

While we wait for some attendees to filter in, I wanted you to know that we do have several other sessions coming up this month that are open for you to attend as well.

For those who are interested, I will put those links in the chat here.

Like that. Then I think we are ready to go, Thomas.

Hello all. Welcome and thank you for joining today’s session, Roadmap to Value with AGO. My name is Friedrich and I work in Adobe’s Ultimate Success Team as a Senior Customer Success Manager.

In Ultimate Success Team, we focus on assisting Adobe customers to get as much value as possible from their Adobe solution.

I’m going to go ahead and kick off our session today. First and foremost, thank you for your time and attendance today. Just to note that this session is being recorded and a link to the recording will be sent out to everyone who has registered.

It’s a live webinar in a listen-only format. But as we go through the content in today’s session, feel free to share any questions into the chat or Q&A pod. Our team will answer as possible there. In addition, we have reserved time to discuss questions at the end of the session. If there are any questions that we do not get to during the session, the team will take note and follow up.

Also, I will be sharing at the end of the presentation that we would love your participation in to help shape our future sessions.

I’m joined here today by our presenter, Thomas Lefite. His title is Principal Solution Customer Success Manager.

Thomas is a Customer Success Manager with a passion for data and analytics. Today, Thomas will take a close look at why a strategic approach to rolling out use cases is critical for realizing value. Also, he will give some practical guidance and real-world examples. The goal is to help you build your Agio use case roadmap and unlock value.

With that short intro, I will go ahead and turn things over to you, Thomas, to get us started.

Thank you, Frederic. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining the session today.

I’m Thomas Lefite, part of the Ultimate Success Team in EMEA, Principal Solution CSM, and my role focuses on strategic engagement on Adobe solutions, and especially on Agio. Today’s presentation is designed to be practical and immediately applicable to your program.

So this is part of a series of webinars we’re going to have, and the reason we are doing this is Adobe has conducted an interview with executives across industry to identify what gets in the way of delivering value from AP and apps platform.

The findings are consistent. Failure often happens because of a lack of strategic planning across these five critical pillars. If any pillar is missing, it becomes a root cause of underperformance.

Today we will focus on the first pillar, building a roadmap to value, the ability to define and prioritize key transformative use case. And this is foundational. It connects technology capabilities to business outcome. And as I said, we’re going to do it focusing on Agio.

So two main topics. The first one is with Agio, we want to develop customer experience. So we’ll go through what the data is saying and what do we need to think when we move to Agio. And the second part is about the roadmap and use case best practice. So roadmap definition and ownership, best practices to build employee and customer experience use cases, and critical steps to build your own map.

So let’s start with one of my favorite topic. How can you supercharge your marketing strategy with customer experience use cases? And when we don’t do that, we leave value on the table. So customer communication are noisy. Average customer will receive around 139 brand messages per week across channel. And that’s quite a lot. Not only is the volume is high, but a large share of these messages are very generic, poorly timed, or inconsistent across touchpoint. And the result is not what we want. We spend days and weeks building this communication, creating the audiences, making the content, proofing, scheduling, sending, and a large majority of the messages we send are deleted or ignored without reading.

And if the message is not relevant for the customer along his relationship with the brand, he will unsubscribe. And that means you constantly have to invest in your acquisition strategy. And this is very relevant. Now we enter the peak season. Customer want to hear from brands they like, they have the newsletter they subscribe to, that they want the messages to be relevant, timely, and contextual. And it’s better if it’s based on where they are within their buying process, so they can make the advice decision to purchase the product.

Now, this is not about eliminating broadcast communication entirely. But when we look at this study, which has been done last year in 2024, only 44% of marketers use lifecycle email to engage across the customer journey. Even fewer, 25% use one-to-one triggered message.

And when you have a platform like AGO, it is a big missed opportunity.

So we notice that during the customer lifecycle, broadcast communication are very, very relevant when you want to provide information about your brand values, your product catalog.

But when the customer enters a conversion funnel, we see that customer experience-driven messaging are more meaningful and lead to both you and the customer objective. So it’s not choosing one or the other. It’s about supercharging your marketing strategy with more lifecycle emails.

One comment I often hear is, we have the tools, but we are not using their full power. We are underutilized. And I do see three main reasons for that. For many, many years, marketers did not have access to any real-time data when they were building their campaign, their communication. Second point, the approach was the bigger the list, the bigger the target, the more people I get in front of my website and the biggest the conversion volume I’m going to get.

And if it was required, they will also add a channel. So if they didn’t have enough volume on emails, they would expand to SMS to make sure they reach out to as many people as possible.

And the last one, and we have a full webinar on this topic, is there are silos in the organization, and it’s making it very, very difficult to deliver consistent experience. I’ll give you a quick example. I work with a company to build customer experience use cases. We were using Adobe Campaign for email, SMS, and website personalization, RT-CDP for advertising, and Pega for push notification. And building use case that is consistent across all of these platforms for customer experience was a real, real challenge. So this is why I believe we have issues to get the most of the solution.

They are different. Customers only supercharge your podcast campaign, and the sales. When I started to work in marketing years ago, engagement was mostly a monologue. Then started to announce product promotion, sales, telling the customer what they thought the customer should know. It was all about the brand’s perspective. It was list-driven and one-off. So that brings me to the first topic.

You cannot design your communication the same way with AGO when you do customer journeys and when you do broadcast campaign.

Broadcast campaigns are scheduled. They are called spray and pray. Typical example will be in a month’s time, we will receive the Black Friday sale teaser email, the Black Friday sale reminder email, and the Black Friday sale today email, following by the next promotion. And this is based on the brand’s calendar, not on the customer context. Now, customer journey on the other hand, we have a series of personalized message that will follow a logical sequence and serve a purpose for both the customer and your organization.

And the main reason we can do that is because the data ingestion has evolved. Broadcast campaigns were on platforms that will get back in data extract for contact and personalization. This was a lot of data every day, and it was only once a day usually, and it was not even in a friendly format. It had to be manipulated.

When you have a customer platform like AGO, you will get your data via streaming, and this allows to easily use live event-based data to qualify your customer into audiences and act across channel in real time. And that’s what drives relevance and responsiveness.

So when we design our campaign, we have to start to change. Broadcast campaigns, I believe many, many times, so you have a date when they will be executed, and they will be executed on one date. You define a selection criteria. You have a volume. If the volume is not enough, you change your selection criteria.

You build some reminders, and you look at how many emails I’ve sent, how many have been clicked, and how many sales did I do. Whereas customers only, they will have a go-live date, and then they will be always on for a period of time, for two, three months. People will enter the journey via audience qualification, and they will be multi-touch and through cross channel, so the right communication on the right channel at the right time. And because they are not one-off, you will have KPIs which are looking at the impact on the business. So by having this journey for one, two months, three months, you can analyze the impact it has put on increasing the revenue.

And finally, the job has changed. The campaign manager, before they were getting their data, they were starting their data workflow to clean their data. They went through an approval process and then scheduled the campaign, sending the campaign, usually within the morning or within the day, and it was very repetitive. Every day they were doing that. Now, when you work in building customer journey experience, you operate in a small project mode.

It’s use case based. So you build once, you demo, you push it live, and then you monitor. And a big part of the work is to identify and apply area of improvement in this journey so you can have three months later a better journey optimized.

When you implement AGO and customer experience practices, this means you need to change how you communicate and operate. It’s not just a campaign calendar with the emails you’re going to send at this date. It’s about use case, outcome, and continuous value. And that’s why we need a clear roadmap to focus on the right priority and stay aligned with what we truly want to deliver.

How do we actually do that? How do we build the roadmap in order to get value? In this part of the session, I’m going to cover three things. First one is a definition of a use case roadmap for AGO.

Then I will go through the Adobe use case framework that turns ideas into something that is measurable and understood across your organization and the third, some primary steps to build your roadmap effectively.

When we talk about building value with AGO, I often hear the common question on the left of this slide. And I just heard them recently. The first one is, what are the upcoming release for AGO? What is on the product roadmap? And the second is, what are real-world use case implemented by other clients, ideally in the same industry? And these are good questions. It’s important to understand both the evolution of the solution and how others are using it successfully. But when we build a roadmap together, our focus is different. We want to meet your key business objectives, strengthen what is already working, and position your brand as a reference in the six within your industry. So it’s really about leveraging what you already know and do the best and turning that into measurable outcome with AGO.

So why do we need a use case roadmap? First, it will ensure that the use case you’re going to deliver has a measurable impact. It is aligned with your company’s priority, with the investment in our solution, and the delivery of each use case.

Second, it will bring coherence to the use case we plan to deliver, making sure all initiatives connect logically and that the rollout sequence builds efficiently on previous steps.

Third, prioritization, helping us to focus on the use case that will deliver the highest business value. And finally, by having this structured methodology, we will bring more clarity and we will enable stronger collaboration between the leadership, the architect, the practitioner, and it will ensure adoption when we will move to the execution of the roadmap.

So here is the definition of the use case roadmap. It’s a strategic planning artifact. It provides a time dimension for key initiatives and improvement that will be delivered over a different period. It offers visibility to the stakeholders, to the leadership. They can look at it and immediately understand what will be done, what will be the impact, and how it aligns with the strategic goal.

The owner, the AGO product owner, is the owner of the roadmap. He needs to collaborate closely with the stakeholders of the use case, the architect, and the practitioner to build this roadmap.

And it’s not something that you set and forget.

It needs to be reviewed monthly or quarterly to keep it relevant and aligned with your evolving priorities. In short, it’s a living strategic tool that you’re creating.

A new roadmap will be made of use case. And when we create this use case, we want to make sure that they are clearly defined, they serve a purpose, and they have an impact.

So we at Adobe have developed this framework and we have done it for two categories of use case, the employee experience use case and the customer experience use case.

And when we are going to develop these use cases and building our backlog, we will rely on the Adobe use case framework.

And the framework ensures that every use case is structured in a consistent way across the organization. That way, when someone is looking at a use case, he can quickly understand what the use case is, what it is designed to achieve, what it solves, and its impact.

So let’s start first with the employee experience use case. My use case here is I want to fast-track issue resolution. My team is spending too much time to fix and work on their issues.

So to define employee experience use case, I’m going to go through the six questions.

Why is the use case worth delivering? Who is the employee personnel? What workflow is impacted? Why in the organization does it happen? How Adobe technology helped me to activate this use case? And how will I measure the impact and the success of my use case? And that’s my ROI.

So my business objective, I want my employee to solve their issue faster.

And the use case description will be, I want to enable the EGO AI assistant. This is the technology that will help me to build my use case. So EGO practitioner, that’s the employee personnel from sales and marketing team, that’s where in the organization does it happen. So it’s for the business practitioners, not for the data architect, for example, can unlock simple and basic issue faster and without freezing ticket. That’s a what. So workflow impacted is, I want people to unlock themselves quicker without creating ticket.

Now, I have a targeted KPI of two hours saved per month per employee when I will deliver this use case. And my KPI is backed up by a benchmark that I’ve seen on Adobe’s documentation, which is by enabling AI assistant, we have seen 96% of reduction in time taken to troubleshoot issues.

I can confidently target this objective and I will review it later in 3, 6, 9 months time.

Now we go to the customer experience framework.

Here I have a use case, which is the second purchase accelerator. I want my customer who just did a purchase to quickly buy a second product. So I go with six very similar questions. Why is the use case worth delivering? Who is qualified for my audience? That’s the customer. What is the call to action? Why is the experience delivered? How are EGO capabilities helping me to achieve this use case? And what will be the KPI? How will I measure the success in 3, 6, 9 months time? So I want to reduce the time to second purchase to grow revenue per customer. So when I look at who will be qualified for this use case, it’s for first time buyers who have returned on the website within a month of their initial purchase.

What is the call to action? They will have recommendation on related product and accessories to complete their setup. And this will be delivered on multiple channels, email, push, SMS and onsite.

I target a KPI of increased sales by $1 million.

And I have the backup in the other side.

Now I will look at which capability will help me to do that. How I will do that. And when we talk about customer use case, we have more capabilities than employee experience use case.

Here I have a list of seven capabilities that are going to help me to build this use case. Some are already available thanks to previous rollout.

And two, experience decisioning and experimentation will need to be configured for this phase.

Now what I like to have, this is nice to have for me, is we must have audiences. So I will look at how I will qualify people to enter into my journey. So I have my entry audience, which will describe the part a bit more in detail. That makes sure that I have the data schema available to do this audience. And it gives me a volume of how many people will enter this journey based on my previous analytics and my analysis.

Exit, people will exit the journey as soon as they have done two orders. And then I put the suppression rules.

So that’s part of the framework minimal qualification, but you can go a bit deeper into the definition of your use case.

So what I also like to do, I look where we are coming from and where we are going. So this is something I already do for my brand. I do three post purchase email when someone has done the purchase. They are pretty generic and the last one has a fixed offer of 20%. What I’m going to deliver with this case is a true omnichannel journey with intelligent optimization and decisioning. I will add a lot of personalization in the touchpoint based on the first purchase, the persona, what you have seen on the website. And experience decisioning and experimentation will do two things. They will ensure the next best offer are displayed on all the channels and it will help me improve my margin by testing different discounts.

Another thing I like to do is I start to build the flow. So here I did it in a flow chart software, but you can do it on a JWOD directly. And I think it gives a great visibility of the sequence of the use case and it also helps me to map the next journeys. So when someone will exit the journey, I’m sure I’m not missing to put him in another journey.

And finally, I go on the business case. So I look at some online information and I’ve seen that campaigns with 3 plus channels have 250% higher engagement and conversion.

I know based on my audience entries that 3,900 people will be qualified per month on this journey. I already have 10% conversion with the existing flows of home and I expect 80% uplift in conversion on top of this 10%. So 18% total conversion. I have my average product and then I go to my TPI, how much I think I’m going to do within a year with this use case.

So by leveraging this methodology, I now have a use case which is not what I see sometimes, a random description of a campaign or a journey or the name of a capability. It is qualified, it is structured so that anyone in the org can quickly understand it and it has a quantifiable impact linked to my business objective. So that’s the Adobe use case framework.

Now I know how to build use cases so I will start to build my roadmap.

It all starts from the KBOs. Every year we receive KBOs, we know what we have to do and these are typical examples that we often with our customers. So we want to increase efficiency and that would be more on the employee use case development or we want to grow revenue or increase customer retention.

Let’s start with a cost optimization employee experience use case or not.

So the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to build my use case catalog and I’m going to do it with a team. It’s not the product owner of the roadmap which he’s doing by himself. He goes into a room, set up a meeting with the architects, the stakeholders, the leadership or the practitioners and they do a whiteboard session to ideate on the use case they want to deliver.

First thing I do is I look at the activity that the employee is going through when building a journey for example and I start to ideate use cases against each of the steps of the activities that is going through. And I do that for two reasons. First one is that I’m not only solving one problem. I’m not just working on the content part. I’m working on the full activities he’s doing. And the second part is the opposite. I don’t miss any opportunity to add use cases.

I like to have must have and inspirational use cases. Must have are usually the ones which are pushed by the business. Inspirational will be things I read about or things someone has experienced from the team and he wants to have in the catalog.

I use Miro. I’m working online so I use collaboration tool to ideate use case with my team mate. And the second recommendation already set.

So now I have my catalog. I’m going to use all of these use cases and build my use case backlog which will be qualified based on the use case framework.

So for each of the use case I will have who the team person is all of the person which will be impacted. What is a workflow impacted. Why is the org the use case deliver. How it will be delivered. The metrics. A benchmark if I find one and if I foresee any challenge. And I do that for all of my use case.

I stop here for the employee use case as it’s a bit. The next step will be similar with a customer experience case. So I go to the customer experience use case building.

So here it’s a different KBO we are looking at. We are looking to grow the value per customer increase average order value and purchase frequency.

Similar process for step one just to be different. I’m now looking at the customer journey with a brand. And I’m going to start with my team to build the catalog of use case we want to deliver.

Same thing must have an inspirational use case. Now I identify my top use case and I review them quarterly.

And that’s a use case which will bring the most value based on my framework and those are the ones which are going to bring the most value.

And same thing I do it on collaboration tool. I identify key personas if I need to have some variant. I try to understand and make sure that I have all the data available for personalization. And I do that pretty early because then I have to engage the data team as a data architect and it may delay the creation of the use case.

Second step, same thing. I use my catalog to build my use case backlog qualified for this specific use case. And I make sure all the cells have information. Otherwise I’m not sure I’m putting the use case. I must follow the framework. That’s how we see the result.

Now I put, I look at, I split my use case in my top use case. I know the ones which have very much more value than the other ones. And the other one will help me to beat my target. So here I have a clear view of my top use case and the additional ones.

That brings me to the next steps. I can now do a value versus effort matrix and having my top value low effort use cases prioritized for the first rollout. The second rollout will be a mix and the third rollout will be the other use case that may be more complicated to do.

Step five, I’m going to make sure that my rollout doesn’t involve too many capabilities development. I like to use this chart. It’s usually in the form of an Excel. On the first column, I will have the list of capabilities. I will flag for the first rollout of my roadmap the capabilities I already have and the ones that will need a setup. So the one which I already have, that’s a little start. And I make sure I have a balanced holdout that is leveraging capability already available and allows me to develop new capability, but not too many. And it does a second thing. It allows to make sure that over time I’m going to implement all the capabilities of AGO so I get also more value from the software. And these capabilities are available for the business to operate.

Now the last steps, I’m going to map all of my use cases against my focus area. And for each of them, I will have a status. Am I building them now? Am I building them in the second rollout or in the third rollout? A quick view if there is any blockers to address before we develop them. And the result of the value map, which is value versus level of effort.

And that’s how I get to my final product, my use case roadmap for value. For each KBOs, the three ones we had at the beginning, I have identified a set of prioritized and qualified use cases. Each map with its value and effort and position with a coherent rollout plan. And this document gives everyone in the organization a clear view of what is coming next, the expecting impact, the sequencing and the rationale behind each step. If needed, the team can also go back to the supporting documents that I have created to make sure they understand the business impact.

So by investing time and effort in building this roadmap, I’m sure to prioritize what matters most. I’m sure to deliver measurable impact. And I build confidence across the team from the leadership to the practitioner.

So a quick recap. First steps, the use case ideation with your teammate on a collaborative tool or in a room. I do it. This is one I’ve done on a mirror board. I have the personas, marketing objectives, tactics, the KPIs. Where does it fit into the customer zonies and the data available at this stage? So use case backlog supported by the use case framework, which allows to have qualified use case.

I identify my top use case, the one which will become a priority. I find my priority. It has a use case map, the value and effort.

This one is just a check that I’m going to have successful rollout and not too much stressful rollout. So I align all of my prioritization with a capability rollout. And then I have a summary on the KPIs.

As I said, during all the presentation, here I use slide to showcase you this example. And it’s a format I also use when I’m talking to some leaderships. But when I work with my team, it’s a mix of Excel spreadsheet, Workfront or Jira or Miro.

Two examples that I think are a bit different in the use case development. Well, there are two information that I didn’t have in mind. So here I have a status of the use case. Where are we at? So you can see it’s like a small project. The use case is planned. The use case is demoed. The use case is live. And then I check against the value. All the other things are very similar to my template. And this one is a use case type. So is it a journey or is it a broadcast campaign? I found it very helpful to have it here because they don’t require the same level of effort.

So this is the end of the roadmap to value presentation. The next step is for you to go with your team and start to ideate on the list of use case to improve your workflow for your customer experience or for your employee.

Do it in a room, do it on Miro. Start to craft your roadmap. And if you need any help, you can contact your Adobe Icom team for any support to help.

As we get into the Q&A portion of our event, there will be two questions for launching to get your feedback and help shape future sessions.

And Frederick, do we have any Q&A in support? No, I’m just double checking in the Q&A here.

Perfect, thank you.

Now, Kim has a question. I’m sorry, Sarah, you have a question, right? You want to come off mute or? For the AGO business practitioner certificate, what concepts would you recommend focusing on? We can come back to you. I’ve done it. I usually use the documentation for the practitioner certification.

And I did look a bit on the technical part, but not so much.

Any other questions, Frederick? I cannot see the screen.

No. We can wait two minutes.

There’s another question. How can we use models externally to make this more dynamic of a journey? To build a use case, I suppose.

How can we use models externally to make this more dynamic of a journey? Choose channel text versus email.

So each channel in the use case will have its own purpose based on how people have reacted. So it will be all based on the audience qualification. So let’s say I’m receiving an email about a complimentary product. I go to watch this. I click on the link and I go on the website. On the website, I can have here personalization about the product. If I have no open at all on this email, that’s when I like to trigger a quick SMS or push notification to try on another channel to reach to this customer.

And what we did also for top of the shelves product, we go to the call center and then we get a call to the consumer to try to convert him.

So it really depends. Based on the interaction and the events from the customer, we are going to decide what is the next best channel.

Does it answer your question? I hope to get an answer to that. Fred, did that answer your question? And the way we do it, we have a list of audiences which are pre-built and based on the data we receive, you will qualify directly in the audience. And that’s when we will decide what is the next best communication for you and the best channel to do this communication.

So it continues here, Thomas. So channel progressions are one thing, but what if the actions change day over day? So I’m not sure I understand fully the question, but if you get, you don’t want to, first you don’t want to spam. So your customer will receive only the message that you think are relevant. If you think we need to wait two or three days after an interaction before sending the next message, you can set that up to reduce the noise. And then what will happen is because the data is streaming in AGO all the time, you always get customer events. You need to make sure that you have enough audiences.

That’s where most of the work is done. The audiences are at rest and the data is flowing in the audiences to send the best message.

And you can decide to pause. It’s not like when you do traditional marketing, trigger messages. Here we have a decision capability.

Does this answer your question or do you want to come off mute? If you misunderstand the question, we can just get back to you. We can get back to you. As I said, you can set up a meeting with your account team and we would be very, very happy to help you.

He says he has a meeting in an hour.

No problem.

That’s great. Any more questions? I’m not getting any more questions.

Thank you very much for your time. I hope this was helpful.

See you in a week for the next one on the North Star Architecture.

Thank you so much and thank you for a great presentation, Thomas. Thank you. Bye. Bye.