Live Engagement with Adobe Experience Platform Places Service

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Author: Gowtami Mohanty

In this blog, we will be discussing how to create a ‘Store Entry’ experience for customers by sending the best in-store offers as a mobile push using Adobe Experience Platform Places Service.

Adobe Experience Platform Places Service, previously known as Adobe Experience Platform Location Service, is a geolocation service that enables mobile apps with location awareness to understand the location context by using rich and easy-to-use SDK interfaces accompanied by a flexible database of points of interest (POIs). Places Service allows our customers to:

• Take actions such as push, email, SMS, etc from location signals in real-time, when and where it matters.
• Deliver the right context provides a more enriching mobile engagement experience.
• Gain deeper insights into their users by analyzing their physical behavior.

All this possible with only four simple steps.

Prerequisites

Before starting, you should have the below ready:

1. Ensure you are provisioned to use the Places service and Launch.
2. Your mobile app should use the Experience Platform Mobile SDK connected to a Mobile App Property in Adobe Launch.
3. Have access to Griffon service.
4. Have access to Journey Orchestration.

Note: If you don’t have access to one of the applications mentioned above, please contact your Adobe representative.

Lets Start…The Four Steps

1. Create one or many Point of Interest, within Adobe Experience Platform Places Services user interface. A point of interest (POI) is a location or a point on a map that is of importance to your organization or company. It can include locations like cafes, restaurants, retail locations, stadiums, and so on. Companies can define points of interest to help personalize a user’s mobile experience when they have entered a geo-fenced region for a particular point of interest. Beyond personalized experiences, companies may also create points of interest to help them analyze and better understand location traffic patterns. A large retail chain may choose to create POIs for all of their store locations to gain analytics on users that have their mobile application AND visit a store location.

   Figure 1: Create your POI for your organization in Adobe Experience Platform Places Service user interface

2. Install the Places extension and Places Monitor extension to your Launch Mobile property.

   Navigate to Experience Platform Launch > Extensions tab > Catalog > Places extension

   Figure 2: Places Monitor extension receives location information from the device’s operating system

   Places extension allows you to act based on the location of your users. This extension is the interface to the Places Query Service APIs. By listening for events that contain GPS coordinates and geofence region events, this extension dispatches new events that are processed by the Launch Rules Engine.

   Places extension also retrieves and delivers a list of the nearest POI for the app data that retrieves from the APIs. The regions returned by the APIs are stored in cache and persistence, which allows limited offline processing.

   Figure 3: Places extension is going to look into the database of all defined POIs for the library

   Figure 4: Launch Rules engine takes action based on the user’s POI entry or exit

   Figure 5: To take action upon the location data and send it out to any external systems for further engagement

   Do not forget to publish the changes to update the Experience Platform SDK configuration.

3. To make things more interesting and our life easier, instead of traveling all the way to the POI, let’s spoof the location using Griffon. The Griffon UI acts as a platform for customers to verify their application implementations.

   Figure 6: Load POIs in the Griffon UI

4. Create a Customer Journey to deliver the best offer on the ‘POI Entry’ event.

   Figure 7: Journey Orchestration event to capture POI entry based on the device location

   Figure 8: Customer Journey to Deliver Best offer via Email and Mobile Push

And that’s all, we are ready to deliver real-time engagement experiences based on customer’s physical behavior.

Real-Time Simulation

Once you have set up a POI with Adobe Experience Platform Places Service, you can run a real-time simulation to ensure you will deliver the experience for ‘Store Entry’. Here are the steps:

1. Connect your Mobile App to Griffon

   Figure 9: Scan the Griffon QR Code in your Mobile Device

2. Once connected you could see ‘1 client connected’ on Griffon UI top-right. This is to connect your Mobile App to the Griffon session. Click on ‘Simulate Load POIs’ at the bottom-center to load the POI we created earlier.

3. Now you can easily simulate the POI entry in Griffon UI by clicking on the ‘Simulate Entry Event’ Button.

   Figure 10: Simulate POI Entry Event

4. Expand the Griffon extension on your Mobile App to review the actions taking place based on the Griffon UI. Here you could notice, ‘POI entry’ event is dispatched i.e now the App’s Current location is exactly the ‘POI’ we are pointing to on the Griffon UI.

   Figure 11: Griffon Plugin processing the POI Entry in your Mobile App

5. This click action invokes Launch rule ‘POI Entry’ which triggers the customer journey in Journey Orchestration to deliver the Mobile Push offer and an Email offer based on the customer’s buying preferences and behavior.

   Figure 12: Mobile Push delivered with the Best offer in-store for that customer

Hence, we have successfully demonstrated a ‘Store Entry’ experience for customers by sending the best in-store offers as a mobile push with the help of Adobe Experience Platform Places Service, Griffon, Adobe Launch, and Journey Orchestration seamlessly.

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References

1. Adobe Experience Platform
2. Documentation-Adobe Experience Platform Places Service
3. Documentation-POI Creation
4. Documentation-Location spoofing using Griffon
5. Documentation-Using Project Griffon
6. Documentation-Build a Customer Journey

Originally published: Feb 18, 2021