Understanding Adobe Real-time Customer Data Platform Features

Introduction to CDPs

Customer data platforms (CDPs) are the next best thing for marketers to optimize their marketing campaigns. CDP is a future tool where data can be consolidated from multiple sources and can be seen in a single dataset. This tool can also help marketing generate meaningful insights needed to run campaigns. A CDP can capture and integrate information from both online and offline sources such as websites, mobile apps, and email platforms to offer a 360-degree view of the customer. This allows businesses to learn what needs to be done to target specific customers or retain the existing ones. A CDP can also be used by customer service teams to provide their support to everyone. Marketing automation software, data warehouse software, and other platforms that store data can also integrate with a CDP.

To qualify for inclusion in the Customer Data Platforms (CDP) category, a product must:

• Provide a 360-degree view of the customer
• Gather data from multiple sources into one platform, including first-party, second-party, and third-party data from online and offline sources
• Unify customer profiles across systems
• Use a common identifier to stitch different sets of data.
• Connect with other systems to allow marketers to execute campaigns.
• Send the consolidated profiles to other platforms (like DSPs).
• Improve targeting of marketing campaigns

AEP Overview

While discussing CDPs, Adobe’s name can never be left out.  Before talking about Adobe’s CDP let’s talk about the platform on top of which CDP is built. 

Adobe Experience Platform is one of the most powerful, flexible, and open systems on the market for developers to build and manage different data sources and have a complete solution that drives customer experience. Experience Platform uses their built-in schemas that enables organizations to centralize and standardize customer data pulled from various sources, use robust data governance framework to control the data and apply data science and machine learning to dramatically improve the design and delivery of rich, personalized experiences.

Built on RESTful APIs, Experience Platform provides the entire system to developers, easing the process of integrating with different platforms. Experience Platform also supports partners to build and integrate their own products and technologies as needed using the vast set of APIs available with the platform. This set of flexibilities gives Adobe Experience platform an edge over others. It provides partners, customers, and developers a foundation that builds innovation that drives customer expectations”. This helps deliver continuous improvement, personalized experience drawn from a 360-degree view of the customer and their individual preferences.

Adobe has built multiple application services on top of Experience Platform:

• Customer Journey Analytics
• Journey Orchestration
• Offer Decisioning
• Real-time Customer Data Platform (Real-time CDP)
• Real-time Customer Data Platform (Real-time CDP) B2B Edition

Adobe Real Time Customer Data Platform (RT CDP)

Adobe now offers a reliable CDP solution, Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (RT-CDP), built on top of the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), for enterprises needing robust data management and performance.

Real-time Customer Data Platform overview

Built on Adobe Experience Platform, Real-time Customer Data Platform (Real-time CDP) helps companies bring together logged in and anonymous data from multiple data sources stitched with identities to create customer profiles that can be leveraged to provide personalized customer experiences across all channels and devices in real time.

Real-time CDP includes tools for data governance, identity management, advanced segmentation, and data science so that you can build profiles and define audiences.

Real-time Customer Data Platform has a large number of sources from where data can be pulled, integrated with Adobe Experience Cloud, so you can seamlessly activate these audiences and deliver great customer experiences across all channels, from on-site or in-app personalization to email, paid media, call centers, connected devices, and more.

With Real-time Customer Data Platform, you can:

• Achieve a single view of your customer by combining data from across the platforms and ecosystems.
• Manage profiles with the data governance framework and privacy controls in place.
• Using Adobe’s built-in schemas to organize the data in a common readable format.
• Generate actionable insights and scale audiences with AI and machine learning tools provided within AEP.
• Deliver personalized experiences in Real Time across all channels and destinations.

Real-time Customer Data Platform B2B Edition

There is also a different edition of Real-time CDP available to suit B2B organizational needs. Real-time CDP B2B Edition is purpose-built to expand the functionality of Real-time CDP for marketers. It has different capabilities enabled within the Adobe Experience Platform ecosystem to better suit operating within a business-to-business service model.

Real-time CDP B2B Edition allows marketers to create holistic profiles for people and accounts. Specifically, you can enrich, segment, and export all your cross-source data from a centralized store of unified account profiles. This data can be managed using data governance tools that are available at every step of the centralizing process.

Adobe RT CDP building blocks

Account Profiles: Account profiles are created to give a holistic view of the customer. This profile combines the data from multiple sources and can be used by marketing to target the customers.

Datasets: Datasets are a set of data generated by running a query to get the current state of the users segmented by a given segment.  You are able to view and manage all of the datasets that your Organization has made in other platforms, as well as create new ones. The Browse tab contains a list of datasets, including columns showing name, created (date and time), source, schema, and last batch status, as well as the date and time the dataset was Last Updated.

Destinations: Destinations are pre-built integrations with destination platforms that allow for the seamless transfer of data from Adobe Experience Platform to that destination. You can use destinations to activate your known and unknown data for cross-channel marketing campaigns, email campaigns, targeted advertising, and many other use cases.

Identities: Adobe Experience Platform Identity Service has been offered by Adobe to get a better view of our customer. With this service we can now identify our customers from multiple data sources and can stitch that data to have a seamless view of the customer. Typically, your customers interact with your brand across multiple channels, this could include browsing your website online, making a purchase in-store, joining your loyalty program, or calling a help desk for support, to name a few. 

Profiles: Real-time Customer Profile is a unified view of an individual customer. The unified view has been created by combining the data from multiple channels, including online, offline, CRM, and third-party data. Each individual customer profile gives a detailed view of the customer – what actions have been performed by the customer.

Schemas: Adobe has provided with a standard set of schemas that ensures that all the data that has been brought into Adobe Experience Platform must conform to a standard, de-normalized structure for it be recognized and acted upon by downstream capabilities and features. Experience Data Model (XDM) is the standard framework that provides this structure in the form of schemas.

Segments: Segmentation is the process of defining specific attributes or behaviors shared by a subset of profiles from your profile store to distinguish a marketable group of people from your customer base. You can create your segments in Adobe Experience Platform, or you can import the segments from other tools.

Sources: Real-Time Customer Data Platform allows data to be ingested from external sources while giving you a service to have the data in AEP readable format and make sure the same structured data is coming into Adobe Experience Platform. You can ingest data from a variety of sources such as Adobe Solutions, cloud-based storage, third party software, and your CRM

Difference between CDPs

Final Thoughts 

In this ever-changing world, a seamless and personalized customer experience is very important. Real-time customer data platform solutions, no doubt, are a must-have for marketers to stay ahead of the competition. If you ever think of investing time in Adobe CDP, I hope this article will help you understand the tool building blocks and start with the tool implementation.