Optimizing Customer Journeys: A Use Case for the Global Profile Filter

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The Global Profile Filter is a powerful new feature in Adobe Journey Optimizer designed to provide marketers with greater control and flexibility over live customer journeys.
What it is: Simply put, the Global Profile Filter allows you to define specific criteria based on profile attributes when the journey is paused and that will be applied to all profiles when that journey is resumed. This acts as an immediate, universal filter.
This feature is particularly beneficial for scenarios where:

• Dynamic Exclusion is Needed: Your business rules or customer segments change after a journey has gone live, requiring immediate exclusion of certain profiles from an ongoing journey.
• Preventing Irrelevant Communications: You need to ensure that specific customer groups do not receive messages from a journey that are no longer applicable or could lead to confusion.
• Operational Agility: It provides a mechanism to quickly adapt live journeys to new policies or customer classifications without requiring a complete rebuild or complex re-segmentation.

Unlike initial segmentation which applies only at journey entry, or a simple pause/resume which continues all profiles, the Global Profile Filter re-evaluates all profiles in the journey against your specified criteria upon resumption, ensuring only the relevant ones proceed.

Scenario: The Loyalty Program Onboarding Journey 

Imagine your organization has a highly successful read-audience "Customer Loyalty Onboarding" journey. This journey is designed to welcome new loyalty program members, introduce them to exclusive benefits, and guide them through their initial engagement with a series of personalized emails. It's a live, ongoing journey, with thousands of new members entering daily. 

The Challenge: Introducing a New VIP Tier 

Suddenly, a strategic decision is made to launch a new, exclusive "VIP Tier" within the loyalty program. Members who qualify for this new tier will receive even more personalized, high-value communications and access to unique benefits, delivered through a separate, dedicated "VIP Onboarding Journey." 

Critical issue arises

Profiles who were already in the standard "Customer Loyalty Onboarding" journey and now qualify for the VIP Tier should immediately stop receiving the standard onboarding communications. Continuing to send them the standard messages would create confusion, dilute the VIP experience, and lead to irrelevant communications. 

Why Standard Approaches Fall Short

• Initial Segmentation: While you could segment new entrants to the standard journey to exclude VIPs, this doesn't help with the thousands of profiles already in flight within the ongoing "Customer Loyalty Onboarding" journey who have now become VIPs. 

• Simple Pausing and Resuming: If you simply pause the standard journey and then resume it, all profiles—including the newly minted VIPs—would continue exactly where they left off, still receiving the standard messages. This doesn't provide the necessary exclusion. 

• Manual Complexity & Error Proneness: For large numbers of profiles, manually identifying and removing individuals or trying to create complex exit conditions mid-journey is incredibly time-consuming, prone to human error, and simply not scalable. It becomes an administrative burden rather than an agile marketing operation. 

• Loss of Journey Context: Trying to force profiles out of a journey through having them exit without a clear system-level filter, can lead to a loss of their journey state. This makes it harder to track their progression and ensure they receive the correct subsequent communications, or prevents unintended re-entry. 

• Operational Inefficiency: Constantly updating initial entry segments, cloning journeys, or creating new journey versions every time a dynamic exclusion is needed is highly inefficient. It consumes valuable marketing resources that could be better spent on strategic initiatives. 

The Solution: Leveraging the Global Profile Filter 

This is where the Global Profile Filter feature in Adobe Journey Optimizer becomes invaluable. It allows you to dynamically apply new exclusion criteria to all profiles within a paused journey upon its resumption, ensuring that only the relevant profiles continue down the path. 

Here’s how you can use the Global Profile Filter to address this challenge: 

Step-by-Step Guide: Applying a Global Profile Filter 

By applying a Global Profile Filter, you can ensure that all profiles who now qualify for the VIP Tier are immediately and automatically excluded from the standard "Customer Loyalty Onboarding" journey when it resumes, preventing any further standard communications. 

Step 1: Pause the Live Journey 

To apply a Global Profile Filter, your journey must first be in a Paused state. 

1. Open the journey you want to pause. 
2. Click the "More" (...) options button associated with the journey. 
3. Select Pause. 
   

Alternatively, for bulk operations: 

1. Select multiple journeys in the list. 
2. Click the Pause button that appears in the blue action bar at the bottom of the screen. 

When a journey is paused, all profiles currently in the journey are held in their current state, and no new profiles can enter. The system awaits your instructions for resumption. 

Step 2: Access Global Filter Settings

Once the journey is paused, you can modify its settings to apply the Global Profile Filter. 

1. Open the Paused "Customer Loyalty Onboarding" journey. 
2. On the journey canvas, locate and click the Exit Criteria & Global Filter icon. This typically appears near the top of the canvas settings. 
   

Step 3: Define the Global Profile Filter 

Within the "Exit Criteria & Global Filter" panel, you will define the condition to exclude the VIP profiles. 

1. Click Add Global Filter. 
2. This will open the expression builder. Here, you will define the criteria for excluding profiles. For our use case, you would configure a condition that identifies profiles belonging to the new VIP Tier.
   Example Condition: Profile attribute 'tier' equals 'VIP' 
   
3. Confirm your filter criteria. 
   

Important Considerations: 

• Only one Global Profile Filter can be applied per journey. 
• This filter will apply to all profiles in the journey at the time of resumption, regardless of their current position in the journey. 
• It also applies to any new profiles attempting to enter the journey upon resumption. 

Step 4: Resume the Journey 

After applying the Global Profile Filter, you can resume the journey. 

1. Save the changes to your journey configuration by clicking Update Journey. 
   
2. Click on the …More button on the upper-right section of the journey canvas, and select Resume. 
   

The Outcome: Seamless Transition and Enhanced Experience 

Upon resumption, the Global Profile Filter will evaluate every profile in the "Customer Loyalty Onboarding" journey. Any profile that now qualifies for the 'VIP' Loyalty Tier will be automatically exited from this journey, preventing them from receiving standard onboarding communications. Meanwhile, non-VIP profiles will continue their journey seamlessly. 
This approach ensures: 

• Relevant Communication: VIP customers receive only the communications appropriate for their new tier, enhancing their experience. 
• Reduced Message Fatigue: Customers are not inundated with conflicting or irrelevant messages. 
• Operational Agility: Your marketing team can react quickly to new business requirements without having to rebuild entire journeys or perform complex manual segmentation. 
• Data Integrity: Maintains clean customer data by preventing profiles from being in the wrong journey path. 

The Global Profile Filter empowers you to maintain dynamic and highly personalized customer experiences, even when business rules or customer segments evolve in real-time.