Adobe unveils new application to help brands personalize customer journey

Adobe is announcing Adobe Journey Optimizer to help brands optimize and personalize experiences across the entire customer journey.

Consumers are in control when it comes to how they engage with brands. In the era of instant gratification, consumers expect brands to understand them and anticipate their needs. Think: curbside pick-up options for products when inventory becomes available at a store close to the consumer, text notifications when the latest video game console is back in stock and instructions for contactless check-in at hotels via a push notification that are initiated when a guest pulls into a hotel parking lot. These interactions are not occurring in real-time but on the consumer’s time — and in most cases, that means now. To add to the complexity, consumers are also switching between multiple apps, devices, and channels with every interaction, forcing brands to become more agile as well as to rethink and rearchitect their customer journeys.

To truly meet consumer expectations, brands will need to break technology and organizational silos to stitch together data from multiple interactions across different systems to get a clear understanding of the customer and turn actionable insights into personal and contextually relevant experiences. Every interaction should inform and enhance the next one with the intention to serve the consumer as the primary goal instead of forcing the next commercial transaction.

Adobe is announcing a new application, Adobe Journey Optimizer, to help brands optimize and personalize experiences across the entire customer journey, whether it is a brand-initiated engagement like weekly promotional emails or personalized, real-time interactions like delighting customers with contextual information as they engage with the products and services they already bought. Brands can use a single application to put consumers at the heart of the customer journey and go beyond orchestrating individual campaigns to full, intelligent customer journey management.

From insights into action

Adobe Journey Optimizer, built natively on Adobe Experience Platform, combines a variety of data types, including behavioral, transactional and operational data across multiple touchpoints into a single, centralized customer profile that is constantly updated. With unified profiles that are constantly updated, brands have a full 360-degree real-time view of their consumers and can derive real-time insights to anticipate the next best action to take. Customer journeys designed in Adobe Journey Optimizer can be dynamic and event-based to help brands react to real-time signals as well as connect those interactions with broad, audience-based engagement so the right experience is delivered, at the right time to drive the best outcomes for the consumer.

What does this look like? Imagine a clothing store that typically sends customer satisfaction surveys to people who have purchased products in the last week. Due to inclement weather, a few shipments experienced delays. Seeing which customers have not received their shipments, the clothing store can exclude them from the scheduled customer satisfaction communication and instead engage them with a personalized email apologizing for the delay, offering a discount code with product recommendations based on the customer’s past purchases. Additionally, if the consumer has the brand’s loyalty app on their device and they happen to be in proximity to a store-location, a real-time offer can be sent to their device based on inventory available at that store location.

Adobe Journey Optimizer provides marketers and customer experience teams with a single canvas to create and optimize both real-time tailored interactions as well as scheduled audience-focused messages within the same application. An intuitive user experience with a drag and drop interface and contextual insights enables marketers to easily segment audiences, design and personalize messages, and orchestrate the customer journey from end-to-end.

Built-in digital asset management capabilities, powered by Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials, allow brands to take an agile approach to content by tapping into a cloud-based destination for marketing-approved assets. As a new, lightweight edition of Adobe’s industry leading digital asset management (DAM) platform, Assets Essentials allows for deeper collaboration between marketing and creative teams to store, discover and distribute digital assets from initial concept to full experience delivery. For more information about Assets Essentials, visit here.

Cloud-native services within Adobe Journey Optimizer ensure brands can deliver communications at cloud-scale and speed during demanding peaks like “Flash Sales” or breaking events (think: sporting events or world news). Additionally, intuitive goal setting, reporting, and dashboards enable marketers to see and report on key metrics to optimize their business.

A tailored experience

With Adobe Journey Optimizer, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) based intelligence is an integral part of the application. Brands can apply intelligence, learning, and predictive insights to automate the process of deciding what communications to send on which channels and when in order to produce the best outcomes for individual customers. A central decision engine analyzes customer data and applies extensive rules and ML based ranking capabilities — including eligibility, frequency, and capping — to select the right offer for each unique customer at the appropriate point in their journey. Practitioners can also use the drag-and-drop interface within the message design experience to easily add intelligent, personalized offers into the messages that are being sent to consumers.

“Journeys are ultimately about choices,” said R “Ray” Wang, principal analyst and CEO, Constellation Research. “Companies are looking for AI-driven, mass personalization at scale wherever they can to make contextually relevant choices. Every customer choice in the digital world is an opportunity to build intelligence and feed the neural networks that feed the machine learning on the back end. Companies seek products that build more precise decisions and better signal intelligence.”

Early excitement

Customers are excited for the possibilities of how Adobe Journey Optimizer will help them enhance the customer experience.

“Our mission at Walgreens Boots Alliance is to help our customers lead happier, healthier lives — and one of the ways we’re making that happen is through hyper-personalized customer experiences,” said Alyssa Raine, Group VP of Customer Marketing Platforms, Walgreens. “We’re excited about what Adobe Journey Optimizer offers — a powerful combination of real-time data, AI based decisioning and the added value of built-in best-in-class asset management capabilities with Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials, which will enable us to show up for customers when and where they need it.

Customer expectations will only get higher when it comes to brand interactions. And with Adobe Journey Optimizer, brands are equipped to meet and exceed these expectations at every point in the customer journey for years to come.

To learn more about Adobe Journey Optimizer, click here.