I recently completed an in-depth training session on Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) for a bunch of Developers and Architects from a Consulting organisation. I prefer to term the session as AEP Bootcamp as it was indeed a start to finish session covering a myriad of topics related to Adobe Experience Platform and its applications. I wish to record all my knowledge regarding AEP and create a repository of blog posts that I can refer anytime.

I collated materials from different sources and also referred my own knowledge that I gained while attending AEP 101 Digital Marketing Academy Bootcamp and completing a capstone project while in Adobe Consulting services. Below is a snapshot of the topics that I covered during and the training and for which I’ll be creating individual blog posts.

This blog post will cover the business need of Adobe Experience Platform.

Introduction to AEP

Any platform or application, I believe, has to be designed around solving a business need. Technology always come later. Primarily, I believe, enterprises should be convinced about the need that a particular application will resolve. So, while researching the about the business need for Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), I stumbled upon a new way of looking at it.

“AEP is a platform that helps organization manage the experience of its customer.”

Somehow this definition felt simple yet highly relevant. At the heart of its technology stack and intelligent applications, and all its myriad streaming and destination services, AEP is a platform to enterprises to manage the expectations of its customers, and being at the right moment in the right time. This led me to finding more about customer experience management (CXM).

A quick search and I found the below definition which further cleared my head regarding the connection between AEP and CXM:

Customer experience management, often called CXM or CEM, is a system of marketing strategies and technologies that focus on customer engagement, satisfaction, and experience - Dynamics Microsoft

So what is a CXM supposed to do to ensure customer satisfaction and personalized experience? A CXM is supposed to help enterprises:

  • Approach relationships beyond tools and software
  • Achieve digital transformation that puts customer at the center of business
  • Prioritize orchestration and personalization of entire end to end customer experience
  • Do it at scale, any channel in real time

In short, a full fledged and effective CXM tool is supposed to:

But the question that remains is why should it matter to enterprise to have a CXM application manage its customer expectations and help to personalize? Today every enterprise and every CTO, CMO, CEO anyone connected to the entire c-suite wants to:

  • Understand the customer - Enterprise wants an enhanced view of the customers behaviors and preferences so that it can provide a personalized experience one that the customer demands
  • Cultivate loyalty - Enterprise wants to cultivate deeper and long lasting relationships with its customers and thus create seamless customer journeys
  • Stay competitive - Enterprise to succeed in today’s hyper competitive world need to increase customer satisfaction and reduce churn rate and thus stay competitive
  • Measure - Enterprises are drowning in data and they want a tool that can help them interpret large volumes of data so that they can make informed customer centric, business decisions

And how does AEP fit into the definition of being an effective CXM application? To understand that there are six blocks that any CXM application needs to check. Those are:

  • Customer profiling: How well can a Platform profile the customer and his disparate identities into one single unified customer profile?
  • Integration with current ecosystem: How can a Platform integrate itself within the current ecosystem without having to make a radical change at an org level?
  • Adapting and extending the personalization program: How can a Platform boost the personalization experience of a customer from an organisational perspective?
  • Orchestrating cross channel customer journeys: How best can a Platform help an organisation to orchestrate cross channel customer journeys ensuring a unified experience?
  • Capability to help organization grow: How can a Platform bring in Digital Transformation through initiating a culture wide change that is more data driven?
  • Respect customer privacy and government guidelines: How well can a Platform help an organisation respect the privacy choices of customer while being more compliant with legal guidelines?

Adobe Experience Platform as a tool or an application ticks all the checkboxes.

AEP helps by bringing in data from multiple channels and helping enterprise create a personalized, one view of its customer. It does by respecting the privacy choices of a custome. It not only integrates well within the current ecosystem in an organisation, it enhances and enriches and brings a mindset shift to be more data driven. These are some great features that AEP can provide to an enterprise.

Let’s focus on one single aspect for now: How can AEP sort millions of data points for a customer that is generated on a wide array of devices and create a single, unified profile of a customer? Let’s watch a quick overview video as released by Adobe on the Adobe Experience League website:

The architecture shared in the video above is available as an image format too. Both the video and images are copyright of Adobe and available for consumption in the public domain. I don’t own or have created any of the above.

Let’s end this blog post by spending a minute or two to understand the AEP Architecture Diagram:

I think the above view best summarizes the architectural vision of AEP. To simplify, think of AEP in three terms

Data Ingestion » Data/Profile Enhancement » Data Activation.

That about covers all there is that I wanted to explain and write about the AEP Architecture. We will now start going deeper into the foundational aspects of AEP and its inner working in subsequent blog posts. See you in the next blog post.

Do let me know what you think of this blog? Please feel free to drop in a line or two or comment your thoughts on ritesh(at)thelearningproject(dot)in. And if you’d like to see the entire deck that I created for the training, it is available at SlideShare.