AEP –What is in it for You?

How is AEP Helping Businesses?

The digital world is moving towards cloud, server side, cookie-less tracking with limitations & law restrictions in interest of ITP, GDPR, CCPA. With many products & service providers available, it is becoming important to understand what different players in the market are offering.

This article will help in understanding what AEP is and how its’ different offerings can benefit businesses in different practical scenarios.

Adobe Experience Platform has endless offerings for different business requirements. In this article, we want to help you understand -What’s in it for you?

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Whether you’re just beginning your digital transformation journey or are well on your way, we invite you to explore our partnership with Adobe and our diverse capabilities in manufacturing and automotive.

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Note: If you are existing user of Adobe experience cloud products like Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target or Adobe Audience Manager- this chapter will be very useful for you to build in understanding.

Overview

AEP is a platform evolved within Adobe where different services are integrated along with data-lake (based on Microsoft Azure) to build or optimize customer experiences in real time by capturing, processing, and centralizing data.

Before we jump on actual topic, few terms & tools to get familiar with(Adobe explained):-

• Customer Journey Analytics (CJA): Customer Journey Analytics is an Analytics capability that lets you use the power of Analysis Workspace with data from Adobe Experience Platform. Customer Journey Analytics expands the scope of Adobe Analytics by offering easy to use cross-channel capabilities and removing limitations in previous versions of Adobe Analytics(eg unlimited variables & events, historical data alternations, cross –report suite data analysis)
• Journey Orchestrator: Journey Orchestration is a service built on Adobe Experience Platform that allows you tailor individual journeys for every customer based on their previous behaviours and preferences
• Journey Optimizer (JO/AJO): Adobe Journey Optimizer, built on Adobe Experience Platform, allows Customer to orchestrate omnichannel Journeys, determine the next best action to take for their customers and deliver contextualized Offers that are personalized and optimized in-the-moment powered by real-time decisioning and intelligent insights.

Your Current Tools

1. If you are an existing user of Adobe Analytics (Or any web analytics tool)– Customer Journey Analytics is an analytics capability that lets you use the power of Analysis Workspace with data from AEP. The tool enables pulling data from AEP’s big data lake and conducting custom analysis with flexible specifications for historical data. Analysis of data coming from different report suites/properties is possible with CJA (Customer Journey Analytics). Additionally, online data can be coupled with data from any of the other marketing sources. To summarize, AEP+CJA can be your Analytics 2.0
2. If you are an existing user for Adobe Target (Or any Optimization/Personalization tool) – AEP can make your work even more interesting and more targeted with the functionality from Journey Optimizer. This is combination of Journey Orchestrator (taking your customer to ideal path/event) and offer decisioning engine (building dynamic offers with creative assets).
3. If you are an existing user for Adobe Audience Manager (Or any DMP (Data Management Platform) tool)– There is a lot more to do with the offering of “Real Time CDP” (Customer Data Platform). This platform can create segments from profiles and other data and tie it to another Ad tech. It also offers B2B, B2P and B2C versions which can be utilized as desired – professional data or checkout funnel/cart data.
4. If you are Data scientist or an Evangelist – This is an ultimate boon for you. It brings the functionality of the cloud-based “Query Service” tool where PL/SQL querying can be done with all the data available in data-lake. Additionally, you can use “Intelligent Services” which bring the power of AI and ML to churn, analyse, and predict conversion data for your customers at ANY granular level. Other BI tools e.g., Power BI and Tableau can be integrated with AEP data-lake.
5. Build Customer Profiles and Enable Identity Graphs- Tired of maintaining different Ids for different systems for the same customer? This brings the functionality of tying customer profile data from different sources so that you need not go to different places to see it. Know your true customer number and plan personalized projections using Identity Graphs. This provides both real time and replay customer stitching options.
6. Enable Event forwarding/Server-side forwarding- Send your data to any third party tool from a single collection point. Data can be collected once and sent to EDGE service where it can be forwarded to any tool. This reduces the dependence on 3^rd party cookies  and helps transition toward a cookie-less world.
7. Standardize and Integrate customer experience data by data labeling. By adhering to XDM standards, all customer experience data can be incorporated into a common representation that can deliver insights in a faster, more integrated way. Policies like GDPR, CCPA or any other regional data protection laws can be adhered to.

Building Relationships

In essence, AEP should be seen as a platform that provides integrated functionality of different tools that can also work in real-time to build rich customer profiles on which businesses can take relevant actions.

Looking for more insights in this direction? Get in touch with us! We here at Perficient can help you achieve your business goals.