Pilot the Overall Customer Experience with Journey Orchestration

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Authors: Jaemi Bremner (@Jaemi_Bremner), Mickael Bentz (@mickael_b1), Saurabh Garg (@saurabh_garg2), and Aditi Jain.

This blog provides a step-by-step guide on how to create exceptional customer experiences with Adobe Experience Platform Journey Orchestration, Real-time Customer Profile, and Experience Platform APIs.

Adobe Experience Platform Journey Orchestration is a service allowing marketers to set up real-time and 1:1 event-based scenarios, called journeys. It helps marketers reach their customers in an extremely personalized and timely way.

It leverages the Adobe Experience Platform, and in particular Real-time Customer Profile.

A new feature to update profiles

So far, Journey Orchestration was able to use the Real-time Customer Profile data for condition building (for example, to check if a person is VIP or not) or personalization (for example, getting the first name of the person to say Hello <Firstname> in an email).

In February 2021, a new feature came in Journey Orchestration and changed the game in terms of functional coverage. It is called Update profile action. It allows users to update profile attributes in the Real-time Customer Profile in a very simple way, leveraging the Experience Platform APIs.

Changing profiles’ states to flip customer experience

Updating profile attributes is a good way to keep track of customer behaviors.

But the real value comes from the fact that updating profile information will make persons go in/out of Platform segments. If segments are streamed, the update will take place in near real-time.

It means that immediately, all systems leveraging Platform segments will take into account this change: all destinations connected to the Experience Platform through Destinations service, Offer Decisioning, and Adobe Target.

It means we here bring in Journey Orchestration a way to pilot the states of profiles in Experience Platform, the segments they belong to, and thus pilot their overall experience.

Figure 1: Simple illustration of an overall experience changing based on an attribute change, from not VIP to VIP

Example of usage

In this simple example, we’ll add a specific flag if a person did a big purchase (above 1000 euros) on a brand’s website.

Step 1

In a journey listening to web purchases and then checking with a condition activity if the purchase is above 1000 dollars, you must drop the “Update profile” activity.

Step 2

You must then configure this update profile action. As the first step of this configuration, you must select in a dropdown list the XDM Profile schema you want to associate to this change (SCHEMA line in the UI). Indeed, the Experience Platform allows N Profile schemas. The UI automatically picks the 1st schema available.

Step 3

You must then select the field you want to upload among the fields of the selected schema (FIELDS line in the UI). Here the field selected is called +1000purchaser.

Step 4

Experience Platform allows N dataset associations to schemas (DATASET line in the UI). The UI here auto-selects the first one linked but you can change it by selecting another dataset in a dropdown.

Step 5

You must specify what is the value you’ll put on the field selected at step 3 (VALUE line in the UI).

Here the new value will be true. Here we make the choice to pass a value typed manually that will be the same for all people entering this journey and validating the condition. This is the simplest use case but in the UI below you can leverage data from journey’s events, from external data sources, from journey properties information, use some functions, etc. It would make the update potentially specific to each person entering the journey.

This is over for the setup of the update action. Let’s now see the updated profile in action. We’ll do a test of the journey activating it in “test mode”. Test mode means only people flagged as test profiles in Platform can enter the journey.

Test Step 0

See below the initial state of the test profile Mickael Bentz. 1000purchaser attribute is “false”. This profile never made a big purchase on the brand’s website.

Test Step 1

Using the “Test” toggle top right of the screen you activate test mode.

Test Step 2

Using Trigger an event button you trigger the entrance in the journey of a test profile. Here is pushed to the journey the profile we saw step 0, identified by its email address “bentz@adobe.com”.

Test Step 3

The journey is executed, you can see the progress seeing the arrow going green in real-time.

Final test step

Refreshing the profile view page in Platform, you can see the immediate update from false to true of the 1000purchaser attribute. Update profile worked!

Limitations and future improvements

This new feature is a first step to offer advanced state management capabilities in Journey Orchestration.

Among the potential improvements that could be brought in the future (with no commitments for now): update N fields with a single Update profile action, update complex attributes formats (maps, arrays, etc.), generate Experience Events from journeys, etc.

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References

1. Adobe Experience Platform
2. Journey Orchestration
3. Real-time Customer Profile
4. Update profile
5. Streamed segments
6. Test mode

Originally published: Apr 29, 2021