Moving from Customer Interactions to Customer Journeys – The Critical Strategic Imperative for 2021

As customers “go digital,” marketing teams must rethink and better organize how they interact with customers and prospects. Perhaps the most meaningful change is that brands need to truly personalize the experience for each customer, throughout the customer journey.  In addition, brands must react and bring cohesiveness to diverse interactions to deliver the next generation of customer experience (CX).

To do that, multiple aspects of the customer must be combined into a single “vision” or reality. The brand must track and organize their interactions, responses, and reactions each and every time. That means data from many different systems and/or platforms must be integrated into one “master” customer profile that can inform how a brand interacts with the customer at a specific point in time.

To help brands accomplish this goal, Adobe created Adobe Journey Optimizer, an enterprise application built on Adobe Experience Platform. This application enables marketers to complete critical tasks necessary to developing a “journey focus.” Adobe Journey Optimizer is the first product on the market to combine full end-to-end journey and message design, orchestration and high-scale execution through any delivery channel.

The starting point is to combine multiple, disparate data sets that can include behavioral, transactional, and operational data. The result is a comprehensive customer profile that is kept current as each new interaction is added to it. This profile provides the holistic perspective necessary to derive insights in real time and determine the “next best step” for interacting with the customer or prospect. Adobe Journey Optimizer has the flexibility to either react to customer actions or act as an organizing tool for outbound audience engagement.

In addition to creating customer profiles and scripting a journey based on the insights from this data, Adobe Journey Optimizer works seamlessly with built-in digital asset management capabilities, powered by Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials, to deliver the right digital asset at the right time. Brands can benefit from an agile approach to content delivery, leveraging a cloud-based store of marketing-approved assets to support each point of the buyer’s journey. Assets Essentials is a “lightweight” version of Adobe’s powerful digital asset management platform. By integrating content delivery and customer journey analytics, the application allows marketing and creative teams to better collaborate, with reporting that supports continuous learning for both groups and optimizes future decisions.

To help identify the best approaches and deliver insights quickly, Adobe Journey Optimizer utilizes both AI and machine learning (ML). Adobe applies those technologies in a central decision engine that assists marketers, providing customer data analysis. An extensive set of rules and ML-based ranking capabilities enable it to select the right offer for each customer, at the exact right point in the buying journey.

Adobe Journey Optimizer solves numerous problems for customer journey practitioners that want to improve the entire customer journey in an agile and efficient manner. This is critically important, as the differences between “best-in-class” and “worst-in-class” customer experience is now wider than ever before and readily apparent to more knowledgeable and sophisticated customers. This application delivers a comprehensive perspective, provides the right content, and creates a 360-degree perspective of each unique customer that enables actions that not only delight the audience but give brands a competitive advantage.