Is AEP a CDP?

Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that provides a comprehensive development and deployment environment in cloud that allows businesses for managing client experiences that enables companies to gather, organize, and utilize centralized customer information to provide tailored experiences. The cloud-based platform provides a range of services for managing customer data and delivering personalized experience. Real-Time Customer Data Platform (RT-CDP) is an application service that is built on top of AEP. It combines known and unknown customer data to create dependable customer profiles. These profiles are created using smart segmentation, which groups customers based on shared characteristics, behaviors, or preferences. The platform offers instant activation, which enables real-time activation of customer profiles across the digital customer journey. This means that businesses can quickly and easily activate customer profiles across any channel, providing a seamless and personalized experience for their customers.??????

Let's take an example where you manage an online apparel company. You have a physical store, a mobile app, and a website. You advertise your products on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram as well. To give your consumers an uninterrupted and tailored experience, you need to be aware of how they behave across all of these channels.

The moment we start to lose focus on products’ capabilities to treat one of the product’s features as more of a customer data platform we tend to underutilize the platform's core potential. AEP’s capabilities go beyond a traditional CDP and the article attempts to explain platforms' services that provides a centralized and connected data foundation to empower intelligent decisions and engagement at scale.

To achieve personalization at scale and 1-1 experiences, it is essential to have a unified ecosystem where data profile and content are part of the same foundation. This requires having a single data foundation, profile store, segment definition, offer definition, and journey definition. Additionally, it is crucial to organize as one team that drives the holistic customer experience of your organization. This approach ensures that the customer experience mimics individual conversations and is real-time, omnichannel, contextual, and consistent. To make this possible, you need a future-proof, scalable architecture to drive your personalization ambitions.

AEP Foundation's two primary parts are the real-time customer profile, which makes it possible to perform all real-time personalization functions, including segmentation, activation, data collecting, and consumer profiling. To enable real-time data collection and real-time activation, the data lake is utilized to store all of the collected data as well as for use cases involving analytics and machine learning.

Adobe's edge infrastructure, a globally dispersed network of computers that receives data from outlets including websites and mobile applications, makes up a third important component. The edge servers are a crucial component that guarantees efficient data collection for all Adobe Experience Cloud solutions, including the Adobe Experience Platform. As a result, anytime a customer engages with the customer’s website or mobile application, data is gathered via the web SDK or mobile SDK.

The edge will next receive the SDK data and, in milliseconds, respond with segment qualifications and customized offers. This will lead to on-site or in-app personalization in a same-page or next-page scenario. The data collected is saved in a real-time customer profile. An identity graph, which is made up of all the identities connected to a customer, events, and profile attributes makes up a customer profile. This allows you to gather information about your customers from multiple sources and merge it into a single view of them that is prepared for consistent personalization in an omnichannel world.

There are three main mechanisms for using the data in the customer profile for activation; using the profile API, segment API, and building customer journeys for 1-1 interaction. API-based activation environments like call centers or point-of-sales terminals look up all profile attributes and all up to the last millisecond behavioral data of a customer so that the experience in the call center or at the point-of-sales terminal can be personalized. Real-Time CDP is a segment-based activation workflow that supports use cases whereby Adobe Target can read segment memberships from Adobe Experience Platform in real-time at the edge. This means that when a customer expresses an interest in a product on the website/app, Adobe Target can immediately personalize the experience on the website by reading the segment membership at the edge and changing the look and feel of the website/app immediately. With real-time CDP, segment qualifications can be sent to channels like social search and display.

Adobe Journey Optimizer(AJO) is an application service built on top of the Adobe Experience Platform that powers 1-1 experiences. Optimizer makes it possible to listen to events such as add to cart, order confirmation, segment qualifications, and much more to trigger the start of a journey. Every journey is defined as a sequence with potential wait times and the ability to query the real-time customer profile in the Adobe Experience Platform at any point of the journey. Besides querying Adobe Experience Platform’s real-time customer profile, it’s also possible to create any external data source in real time.

All external data sources (like external weather APIs, decisioning systems) will make contextual and timely information available to the journey that will help personalize the overall experience of your customer. Within AJO, messages can be sent to just about any application in your ecosystem. Of course, it’s possible to take action by sending an email, push notification, SMS, or in-app message. The only requirement for external applications like non-Adobe email marketing destinations, AWS, Microsoft, and other solutions is that they need to have an API that Journey Optimizer can communicate with.

You may extract a wealth of information from generic data by storing it on the same platform and comparing it to the same data model. Several innovative machine learning-powered intelligent services, like Attribution AI and Customer AI, are available on the experience platform. Furthermore, the query service adds a SQL layer to the platform so that you may communicate with it from any external program, including command line tools like PSQL and BI environments like Tableau and Power BI. To train and score machine learning models, you may even use the Query service to import experience data from the Adobe Experience Platform into Jupyter Notebooks.

Lastly, a lot of companies have sizable business teams that wish to analyze the entire customer journey. If you want your teams to be able to derive valuable insights primarily on their own, customer journey analytics is the way to go. It offers user-friendly dashboarding tools that let you combine omnichannel data into a single dashboard, giving you insight into your customers' entire journey across all channels.

To conclude the experience ecosystem which is powered by Adobe Experience Platform goes beyond a typical CDP. This experience ecosystem needs to be tightly coupled with the organization’s enterprise and data ecosystem to understand a customer’s profile and potentially apply machine learning and analytics to all that valuable data on a profile level to deliver on the promise of omnichannel 1-1 personalization.