This year I had the pleasure of attending Adobe Summit once again. Adobe Summit is one of the largest conferences held by Adobe each year which typically focuses on their Digital Marketing products. Adobe Summit is also where they announce changes in their digital strategy, product focus, acquisitions, and other aspects of their overall business. This year the main focus was around the “Customer’s Experience” and all messaging, keynotes, and workshops were centered around this concept.
You might remember my last blog where I talked about Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) and how the concept of DXP’s is one emerging in the digital arena. Adobe’s focus on the customer experience further supports this shift and underlines the fact that companies need to be vigilantly aware of their customer experience.
At UDig we like to remain as agnostic as possible when it comes to our technology selections for clients and our investments into what we would like our consulting team to learn but in the interest of this blog I would like to specifically call out a few new things that Adobe announced at Summit with regard to their products and then walk through what this might mean for the overall digital space.
Adobe Experience Cloud
Adobe’s experience cloud is a suite of Adobe’s applications in the cloud (much like the marketing cloud) that leverages data across the contained applications to deliver a custom, targeted experience to their customer. Experience cloud sources data from adobe’s analytics tools, marketing tools, and advertising tools to make this happen.
What could this mean for Digital Experience Platforms?
What experience cloud does well for Adobe products is it creates a single source of data that a developer or business can collect data from. This data can then be used to create targeted, personalized experiences for their specific customers. Adobe’s value-add is that it is all contained within their ecosystem but there are many tools out today that can be leveraged to create similar, insightful experiences for your customer albeit, maybe not as seamless as Adobe’s current solutions. Read more about experience cloud here.
Adobe Sensei
Adobe Sensei was one of the most impressive things that I have seen in the Digital space so far especially when it comes to building personalized customer experiences. Sensei is Adobe’s foray into machine learning “smart” automated personalization and overall experience building for their customers. Sensei takes everything the Experience Cloud, Analytics Cloud, Marketing Cloud has to offer and pulls every bit of information out of it to make a searchable, indexable archive of everything you have to leverage as a piece of an experience. It does this by leveraging metadata, tags, and things you tell it about your assets and then comparing that against your customer data. Read more about Sensei here.
What could this mean for building personalized customer experiences?
Again, I must start with saying this was done impressively well by Adobe and I have not seen this type of machine learning leveraged in this way in the Digital space as well as Adobe has done it. I will say though with the emergence of many different machine learning open sourced technologies and things like natural language processing (NLP) becoming more and more common, that it’s only a matter of time before more “smart” engines like Adobe’s Sensei start to emerge.
Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is one of the premier Digital Experience Platforms out there and Adobe did not disappoint with some of the new introductions this year into its latest version (6.3). Adobe Experience Manager leverages some of the new introductions like Sensei to make it even easier to build customer experiences from the ground up. One of the most interesting developments in 6.3 was the introduction of NLP in its content creation mode. AEM was able to process content in real-time and quickly generate snippets of content from a much larger piece of content after being given simple parameters like word count. The impressive part was that text generated was not only reduced but it was rewritten … by AEM, to fit within the parameters. I know this might be a “you had to be there” moment but believe me, it was quite astounding. Read more about 6.3 here.
What does this mean for non AEM customers?
This one is pretty simple, this means that as more people start to leverage Natural Language Processing that this type of improvement can be made across all DXP’s and it seems to be happening very quickly.
And there you have it, those were some of the Customer Experience takeaways from Adobe Summit and how they might make their way into the Digital ecosystem. A lot of these things that Adobe announced are available NOW on their platforms but I think for some of the “smart” and NLP introductions we might have to wait a bit for them to hit other platforms.
One final takeaway: your Customer’s Experience is the key to the success of your business. Even without an investment in Adobe or an investment into a DXP you should always be thinking of ways you could improve the experience for your customer. There are many things one can do to aid their customer and make their experience a happier one. We have noticed that things as simple as a tweak to the UX of your checkout, or a redesign of your landing page could have a massive positive impact to your customer’s experience and satisfaction.
