Capitalizing on AEP's Potential

In the age of data-driven decision-making, businesses are constantly seeking ways to harness the full potential of their data. This quest for actionable insights often involves dealing with various data systems and access patterns, which can be both complex and costly. Enter Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), a game-changing solution that addresses these challenges head-on, offering a streamlined approach to managing and utilizing data for operational and analytical purposes. In this article, we'll delve into the benefits of AEP and explore how it can revolutionize your data workflow.

The Current Landscape: A Two-System Conundrum

Before diving into the benefits of AEP, it's essential to understand the current data landscape that many companies grapple with. Typically, businesses use two primary systems:

Operational Systems: Operational data is typically about individuals at specific points in time.  These systems are designed for real-time or near-real-time interactions with customer data. Mobile apps and kiosks, for example, require quick access to profile data to personalize experiences instantly.

Analytical Systems: On the other hand, analytical systems are geared towards processing vast amounts of data to derive insights or train machine learning models. Compared to operational data, analytical data works with populations of entities throughout time.  They often involve querying data lakes and running compute-intensive tasks.

Why Combine the Two?

Historically, brands have relied on both operational and analytical systems. Combining these datasets offers several advantages:

• Enriched Customer Profiles  - Insights from big data analysis can enhance customer profiles, leading to more personalized experiences.

• Deeper Insights  - Customer profiles can be analyzed to gain further insights into consumer behavior.

However, this dual-system approach comes with its challenges:

• Complex Integration  - Stitching together operational and analytical data systems and maintaining consistent data taxonomies can be intricate.

• Latency Issues - Keeping workflows separate introduces latency, impacting real-time decision-making.

• Higher Costs - Maintaining data in two places incurs additional licensing, storage, and manual integration costs.

AEP Solution: A Unified Data Workflow

Adobe Experience Platform offers a compelling solution to the challenges posed by dual data systems:

• Multiple Access Patterns  - AEP is designed from the ground up to support both operational and analytical use cases seamlessly. You can configure it to fit your specific needs, eliminating the need for extensive manual integration.

• API-First Approach - AEP's API-first design enables quick connections, allowing you to ingest customer experience data and build real-time customer profiles. It bridges the gap between operational and analytical use cases effortlessly.

• Increased ROI: AEP reduces operational costs by eliminating the need for multiple systems, resulting in lower licensing, storage, and manual labor expenses. This translates into a more substantial return on investment.

• Reduced Complexity: Forget about creating and maintaining complex integrations between operational and analytical systems. AEP simplifies your data workflow, streamlining operations and minimizing complications.

• Eliminate Latency: AEP's unified approach eliminates latency issues associated with dual-system workflows. Real-time decision-making becomes smoother and more responsive.

• Seamless Data Integration: AEP's consolidated platform allows you to harness the full potential of your data without the need for data movement or specialized tools.

• Scalability and Flexibility: AEP adapts to your evolving needs. It doesn't seek to replace data warehouses but can seamlessly integrate with them, offering you unparalleled scalability and flexibility.

Illustrating the Benefits

Let's take an example to understand AEP's benefits better. Suppose you need to perform identity resolution, a common task in operational profiles. With AEP, you can achieve this using the Identity Service, creating identity graphs that determine user identities based on various touchpoints. As all data is integrated into the same platform, this identity graph can inform all analytical workloads. This means when you want to perform business intelligence (BI) or machine learning (ML) on cross-channel data, you can leverage this identity graph. AEP consolidates data, enabling an omnichannel view of customers.

Where Can Celerity Help?

Adobe Experience Platform is a powerful tool that can help you deliver personalized experiences to your customers.  Celerity has worked with AEP helping to implement the AEP infrastructure along with integrating it into Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Campaign, Customer Journey Analytics, and Adobe Target.  During that time, we have also developed implementation practices, and tips and techniques to ensure a successful setup of AEP.  They include:

• Assistance in determining what data you will want to collect, how it will be used, and how it will be structured and organized.

• Helping you define data quality controls and data ownership to implement a solid data governance plan.

• Guidance in using the real-time data activation features of AEP.   This is a key feature of AEP to helping to improve customer engagement.

• Support in activating the AI and ML capabilities of AEP to help you gain even deeper insights into your customer behaviors.

• Training and coaching for your team on key aspects of the platform so that they are positioned to maintain and optimize AEP going forward.

In conclusion, the Adobe Experience Platform revolutionizes how businesses manage and utilize data for operational and analytical purposes. By consolidating data workflows, AEP not only enhances ROI and reduces complexity but also ensures faster, more responsive decision-making. It's time to unlock the true power of your data with AEP and take your customer experiences to the next level.   

If you would like more information about Celerity’s AEP services, please do not hesitate to reach out to Sean Burrell, our SVP of Business Development at sean.burrell@celerity-is.com, or 617-816-9492.