Adobe Experience Cloud: The Data Piece

"Role that analytics plays is now completely foundational. You can't do great marketing or great advertising unless you have great data behind it. The more data you have, and the more channels — as long as you can integrate them right — the higher resolution the view of the customer."

That was Nate Smith, group manager for product marketing at the Adobe Analytics cloud, summarizing the way in which analytics has become a central driver for customer experience initiatives, rather than a valuable add-on for metrics and reporting purposes.

Adobe's CX system of record

The context for the conversation was Brad Rencher's keynote at Adobe Summit 2018 in which he re-cast Adobe's Experience Cloud offering as a customer experience "system of record," starting with the all-important data piece. I asked Smith whether this should be viewed as a big change or just a change of emphasis?

"Probably both," he said, "as far as how the data is being used. One of the big trends we're seeing is organizations adopting data at a scale we've never seen before." He's also seeing lines of business outside marketing, for example, "having a need to utilize data to make decisions that affect the CX." Take the mobile app developer, using analytics to optimize the app experience; that may seem remote from customer-facing work, but of course the customer will directly touch the app

Not only are brands consuming customer data across a range of functions, but they increasingly need analytics generated at high velocity. "The need for insight is becoming more real-time than ever," said Smith.  Getting reports a week later, or a month later, is no longer acceptable; especially when it comes to optimizing CX. Customers have high demands:  "We want an experience now."

The make-up of teams needing data, and the speed at which they need it, has been "changing the vendor landscape," said Smith. "How do we make data available to all these groups which have not been trained in analytics, are not data scientists – but they are customer touching?"

Access to insights

Analytics has, in the past, been what Smith calls a "destination type of tool. You did your analytics, and there was usually an output: a predictive score, a segment, an audience. But having these insights is not enough. Action is the key word. Those insights need to be ingested by other technologies, which embed the analytics, and which can automatically take action taken in real time, whether it's for content or ad optimization."

Adobe has two main solutions to the demand for instantly actionable analytics from business teams not deeply engaged with data science. First up, there are the recent enhancements to the Analysis Workspace, giving business unit stakeholders the opportunity to drill deep into data without hand-holding from experts. Secondly, there's Sensei, Adobe's CX-specific AI engine, working behind the scenes to surface insights and make recommendations for actions.

The data quality question

As Rencher, GM for the Experience Cloud, had explained, the new "system of record" is designed to ingest customer data from a wide variety of sources, apply a common taxonomy (Adobe is promoting an open standard data model for the experience business, XDM), and make it available for execution, whether in Adobe Experience Manager, Campaign, Target, the Advertising cloud, or other Adobe cloud environments. The two main use cases, for now, are driving the customer journey through timely deployment of relevant content; and optimizing the ads customers see; both parts, ideally, of a seamless CX.

Processing many trillions of transactions every year, the Experience Cloud itself is a rich source of data. But the system of record also taps into external sources. For example, CRM. Famously, Adobe offers no CRM – and currently has no plans to do so. But ingesting data from third party CRMs – Salesforce, for example – inherits incompleteness and inaccuracy from the source.

"So…if data doesn't exist, you can't do anything," Smith acknowledges. "What we do provide, however, are capabilities to help organizations identify blind spots, whatever they are." The long-standing partnership with ObservePoint contributes to the monitoring and validation of tags. Sensei can alert users to gaps in the data too. As for CRMs – said Smith – Adobe offers "best-in-class technology to hook into CRM systems, or any type of enterprise data warehouse."