Key capabilities of Adobe Experience Platform

Let’s take a look at the key capabilities of Experience Platform and how they bring value to your business. At its core, Experience Platform provides a suite of shared, composable services that allow you to flexibly integrate platform capabilities with your existing stack. These capabilities include recognizing and mapping customer identities to create customer profiles that update in real-time, powerful segmentation capabilities to create dynamic and actionable audiences, data collection and ingestion frameworks that allow you to flexibly integrate data from different systems across your enterprise, cutting-edge data insights through query-based analysis, artificial intelligence, and machine learning tools, baked-in privacy and governance capabilities, and an extensive catalog of destinations that allows you to export platform data to your downstream applications. Let’s dig a little deeper into each of these capabilities to get a sense of how they work together, starting with Identity Service. Identifying customers across different datasets and systems has always been a challenge, since there are many different attributes that can potentially identify a customer, and those attributes can be stored differently across source systems. To solve this, Identity Service builds a dynamic identity graph for each individual customer that updates in real-time. For example, let’s say a known customer anonymously visits your website from a new device. Since they’re not logged in, we only have a device ID as an identity value to start with. Now, when that customer logs in, Identity Service recognizes the link between the anonymous device ID with one of the customer’s known identities, like a CRM ID, which in turn can be tied to other identities, like an email address, phone number, and so on. As the customer’s unique identity graph continues to be built over time, Platform leverages that graph to construct the customer’s profile from enabled data. When data lands in Platform and that data contains a customer identity, Platform will treat that data as a fragment of that customer’s profile. You can think of a profile fragment as a partial view of a customer, based on an interaction on a specific device or channel, such as a website, mobile app, in-store activity, and so on. These profile fragments are stitched to the customer’s profile based on the identity values present, updating their attributes and behavior history in real-time. Within Platform, profiles can be used to create actionable audiences through segmentation. Using the Segment Builder interface, marketers can leverage attributes and events from across your entire enterprise to define new audiences with no technical expertise required. Since these audiences are native to Platform, you can look up and activate any audiences you have to any system with a range of evaluation methods depending on your use case. For example, you can have audiences update at scheduled intervals for batch-based email campaigns, while other audiences can have profiles qualify on the edge in real-time for first-page and next-page personalization. Of course, we actually need to bring data into the system in order for Platform to act on it. The two main ways of doing this are through data collection services and source connectors. Experienced Platform Data Collection is a suite of technologies that integrate with your web, mobile, and other digital properties. Using tags, you can configure rules to send customer interaction data to Platform and Experienced Cloud applications. You can also leverage event forwarding capabilities to send event-level data directly to non-Adobe destinations and applications. Through data collection, you can start to build a first-party data foundation to reduce dependencies on third-party cookies. When it comes to data sources outside of your own digital properties, Platform also provides a catalog of source connectors that can bring in data from other systems on a batch or streaming basis. This includes other Adobe applications, databases, cloud storage services, CRM systems, and platforms for marketing automation, advertising, analytics, customer success, e-commerce, payments, and consent. Platform also provides a set of generic source connectors and API endpoints that allow you to upload files and stream data from your organization’s local data stores and on-prem technologies. To normalize this incoming data between different sources, Platform maps their structure to a set of standardized schemas referred to as Experienced Data Model, or XDM. XDM schemas describe data in a consistent way that maximizes reuse. Think about the language businesses use to talk about what they do. For example, a car dealership needs to keep track of makes, models, parts, and so on. But even something as simple as a part number can be named and structured differently between systems like the dealership’s inventory database and their sales website, even if they’re essentially tracking the same thing. XDM schemas allow you to unify these shared data concepts under a single definition when you ingest data into Platform, regardless of source. This enables marketers, analysts, and data scientists to work off the same standardized data model and do things you’ve never been able to do before. Once you have data flowing into the system, you can immediately generate insights through a variety of methods and technologies. Using Experienced Platform Query Service, you can analyze your datasets using ad hoc SQL queries, allowing you to verify the quality of adjusted data and explore for hidden trends. You can also schedule batch queries that transform your data and write the results back to another dataset. These results can then be used to enrich customer profiles, create visualizations using integrations with business intelligence tools, and prepare data for deeper intelligence with machine learning and AI-based services like Customer AI. Customer AI leverages profile data to predict customer behavior and enrich profiles with propensity scores, which describe the probability of a customer converting or churning. It also shares the key drivers behind each propensity, allowing you to target the customer more effectively and increase marketing ROI. Customer AI makes it easy to create propensity models based on any predictive attributes that are relevant to your business needs, such as the likelihood of a customer to purchase a product or upgrade to a premium service. Since platform data is already normalized and centralized, you can also export that data to run predictive scoring using external data science tools before ingesting it back into platform, giving you the flexibility to enhance customer profiles using any of your existing technologies. As powerful as Experienced Platform is, all these capabilities mean nothing without taking your customers’ privacy rights into account. Experienced Platform Privacy Service allows you to respond to customer requests to access or delete their collected data, helping you remain compliant with privacy regulations. You can also restrict how platform data is used in general. Platform’s data governance framework allows data stewards and marketers to collaborate with minimal coordination. Data stewards can label individual data fields according to granular usage restrictions and then build policies that prevent the labeled data from being used in specific ways. For example, they could build a policy that prevents data labeled as sensitive from being activated to a third party. Platform will then automatically enforce this policy if a marketer tried to send data to a social media destination. Experienced Platform provides a catalog of hundreds of unique destinations to which it can send data. Using destinations, you can easily integrate platform with your downstream systems and allow them to consume datasets, profiles, and audiences on a streaming or scheduled basis. This could include other Adobe applications like Campaign and Target, as well as third party applications for advertising, CRM, cloud storage, email, mobile engagement, personalization, voice of the customer, and social media. You can also create your own API connections to stream data to any HTTP endpoint, letting you easily connect to your on-prem systems or other third party applications as their own destinations. And that’s it! Keep in mind that Platform is built using an API-first philosophy, meaning that all the core capabilities we just talked about can be leveraged outside of the platform UI using API calls. Through Platform’s open APIs, developers can innovate faster by composing new applications that combine different platform capabilities with your existing systems, even non-Adobe systems, giving you the ability to extend your tech stack and deliver better customer experiences across your brand. So, those are the key capabilities of Experience Platform, which you’ll soon be using to create more engaging customer experiences. Thanks for watching!