How Marketers Fulfill Customers’ Desire for Real-Time Brand Experiences

The following is republished with the permission of the Association of National Advertisers. Find this and similar articles on ANA Newsstand.

By Anjul Bhambhri

Marketers are poised to take a quantum leap forward in crafting brand experiences. The age of digitalization means business models, industries, and value chains are exposed to perpetual disruption and creative destruction. Whenever a company like Amazon, Tesla, or Netflix redefines a category by raising the bar for customer experience, pressure mounts for every other business to step up and meet the new expectations head-on.

How to bolster the customer experience is now considered mission-critical among most senior marketing executives. According to an Adobe survey of more than 2,000 marketers conducted earlier this year, 83 percent believe their department is organized to improve the customer experience.

Brands have to turn run-of-the-mill interactions with customers and prospects into something remarkable and unexpected. Such experiences not only boost the top and bottom lines but also strengthen brands and turn their customers into advocates for their products and services.

Experiences are based on interactions, and interactions generate data. The amount of data available today is bigger than when web searches for “Big Data” peaked in 2014. Data is also increasing faster than ever in both volume and velocity from multiple sources.

For marketers, analyzing data in a timely manner is not easy. Delivering personalized experiences requires technology that can help brands know and understand each customer’s needs, behaviors, and preferences holistically. What’s more, to ignite customer experiences, marketers need to partner with their CIO and IT counterparts to make sure the company is leveraging the right technology.

Solving the Experience Challenge

In the current climate, companies spend a disproportionate amount of time babysitting data infrastructure and rarely achieve the holy grail of delivering personalized experience at scale. This is partially because existing enterprise systems were not originally designed to handle today’s high-volume, high-velocity, fast-moving interactional data. Interactional data is generated across diverse touchpoints.

Brands also struggle to normalize data that is fragmented across these dozens of data streams and applications. Even if all the data was loaded in one data lake, it’s not sufficient. Brands have to be able to make sense of what data they have collected across the disparate systems. Ultimately, behind all this data is a person on a unique journey; understanding the customer at a holistic level is a crucial prerequisite for delivering compelling experiences.

Once there is a holistic view of the customer, another challenge is that all the signals have to be converted into actions in a timely manner. Taking too long to do this can mean the difference between winning and losing the customer.

Many companies also lack the skills and capabilities to apply advanced analysis techniques, such as machine learning, to enrich customer profiles with additional insights and recommendations and to predict the next, best action or offer. Overcoming these challenges is the only way for brands to deliver rich and relevant experiences, in real time.

With the advent of digital experience platforms (DXP), which are purpose-built to process and analyze interactional data that streams from many channels (including websites, mobile devices, IoT [Internet of things] devices, call centers, social media, review sites, etc.), the market is at the point where the pieces of the puzzle are starting to fall into place.

The quest for customer experience management that has consumed CMOs and CIOs for years is now closer to fruition than ever before, with the availability of these purpose-built, cloud-native platforms delivering on the experience architecture.

According to a Gartner market share analysis of digital experience platforms worldwide, DXP buyers “want to invest in cloud-native solutions to deliver digital experiences faster; enable developer agility, application scalability, and resilience; reduce technical debt; benefit from highly scalable predictive analytics, advanced personalization, [and] machine learning, along with other forms of artificial intelligence (AI).”

Five Ingredients an Experience Platform Must Have

For marketers to capitalize on a purpose-built experience platform, the effort requires five core components:

1. data pipeline to onboard customer interaction data from a globally distributed edge network.
2. unified and real-time customer profile that uses identity resolution to build aggregated representation of a customer. This enables marketers to engage with customers individually or in larger segments.
3. AI and machine learning (ML) at their core are designed to create segments dynamically, changing in real time as the customers’ interactions change; enriching profiles with additional insights; predicting the next, best action; and automating, scheduling, and simplifying marketing workflows.
4. Experience delivery powered by unified profile, AI, and ML to deliver compelling, personalized experiences across all channels including digital and in-store.
5. Edge computing to collect, process, and make actionable “hot data” using customer profiles and decisioning services to deliver personalized experiences in milliseconds or less.

Mindful of the ingredients needed to deliver a cloud-based digital experience platform, next up is an examination of the power it can unleash to improve the lives of customers and drive positive business outcomes across use cases and industries.

Delivering Meaningful Experiences

The good news for brand managers is that the top technical hurdles have been overcome. Experience platforms can now ingest data from any source, standardize to a common data model, apply data governance and honor consumer privacy rules, manage consumer profiles, and provide APIs through which developers can build applications for brands to deliver engaging experiences.

For example, retailers using such platforms can deliver in-store notifications that leverage a customer’s prior web and mobile interaction. Coupled with location-based targeting and geofencing, the possibilities are endless for serving up custom promotions, offers, and information that blend the online and offline worlds.

Another encouraging example: telecommunication companies can proactively recommend an optimal call plan and accessory options by leveraging the customer profile, which can contain current call and data plan usage information. In addition, media and entertainment companies can leverage customer segments to engage in a meaningful way with them before, during, and after events, while tourism brands can reimagine the travel service experience.

Companies have been chasing a 360-degree customer strategy for years. But the chase is finally over. By investing in a platform, companies can move up the technology stack and become leaders in customer experience management, redefine and lead their market category, and convert their customers into advocates for their products and services.

About Author: Anjul Bhambhri is the VP of platform and solutions engineering in the digital experience business unit at Adobe, a partner in the ANA Thought Leadership Program.