Here’s what an OK digital experience looks like: a customer visits your website, submits a query to your search box, and quickly finds what they’re looking for. Frankly, though, this is the baseline for personalized customer experiences.
A truly personalized experience looks like this: when that customer visits your site, you already know who they are, what they want, and where they are in the customer journey – so all they see is the content that’s relevant to them. That’s the kind of customer experience made possible when the Adobe Experience Cloud platform and Coveo’s AI-powered Relevance Cloud work together.In a nutshell, the synergy looks something like this. Build content on Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). Gather demographic and behavioral signals about each visitor with Adobe Target. And then use Coveo to interpret those signals, sort through your content, and deliver exceptional customer experiences to everybody who lands on your pages – no matter their intent.
To your audience, it might be the difference between seeing value proposition messaging on your homepage when they’re a prospect interested in purchasing versus service messaging when they’re an existing customer. And to your business, it might be the difference between improving important metrics like customer satisfaction, call deflection, orders, and revenue.
Or as Jay Jackson, Director, Digital Marketing Architects at global digital consultancy Perficient puts it, “You have a question and we want to respond with the most relevant content … All of these data points that we can use across the two platforms can work together to ultimately put forward that next best action.”Here’s what we learned from Perficient’s experience at a recent webinar.
Benefits of Integrating Adobe Experience Cloud With Coveo’s Artificial Intelligence
Overcome Common Personalization Challenges
Personalization is a high-stakes game. It’s no wonder Perficient’s Eric Immerman, Practice Director, Search and Content, has developed a new take on an old adage: The customer is always right… and the customer is impatient.
“The internet and computers have opened up everybody to have as much choice in the world as they want,” he shared. “If you’re not giving results right away, or giving answers right away, they’re either getting frustrated (and that’s hurting your brand visibility, cost-to-serve, and those sorts of things for your business) or they’re going elsewhere.”
The ultimate nirvana in personalization?
“We know what your question is before you ask it,” Jackson said. And by using the Adobe Experience Cloud platform and Coveo together, it’s possible to get closer to that ideal solution. “All of these data points that we can use across the two platforms can work together to ultimately put forward that next best action to improve customer experience.”
This kind of personalization is possible at scale thanks to AI that learns from customer data collected – demographic and behavioral data – from every person who visits your site. With data gathered both historically and in real-time, algorithms can then interpret someone’s context and intent (who they are and what they want) and deliver hyper-targeted content on the fly.
Seamlessly Blend Online Commerce and Content
Is your customer on your site to research products and make a purchase? Or are they looking to solve a problem? Chances are, the information they’re looking for lives across multiple sources… but your customer just wants the answer, regardless of where it comes from.
The hard part of search isn’t delivering those results quickly. That’s been a solved problem for years. The real challenge is determining what input, from which source, is the most relevant for each visitor.
AI and machine learning give commerce businesses a way to rank and prioritize content across many sources and internal silos. It also gives flexibility for business units to influence the results – think anticipating more support requests for a new product launch, or responding to an uptick in questions about a new promotion. Finally, it weighs what customers actually want and act on.
And it’s necessary to perform personalization at scale. “At some point, at some level of scale, it becomes an impossibility to consider every end user’s possible scenario [manually],” said Brian McGlynn, General Manager, Commerce at Coveo.
“Users want to ask a simple question and get a simple answer that’s tailored to their needs. That’s where artificial intelligence and a unified index [come in].”
With this insight, marketers can adopt the Adobe Experience platform, combine it with Coveo’s AI – and finally, deliver the personalized experience that customers expect today.
Drive Business Results that Matter Most
Technology without purpose is technology wasted. That’s why Jackson advocates for best-in-breed tools as a means to achieve the business goals that matter most – not just implementation without direction.
While each business is different and each industry unique, there are some common outcomes that the Adobe-Coveo partnership can help brands achieve. Jackson shared:
- Unified results: When you rely on five different systems to deliver experiences and content, you may end up with five different sets of numbers in your reports – each with different levels of confidence. With Adobe Experience Cloud and Coveo combined, “We can leverage really fast insights in terms of what you searched for, and then correlate that search to some other action, even if that action took place offline, [and then report it centrally].”
- Relevancy: Personalization should seem invisible… that is, unless it’s missing or not done well. “Ultimately, [I want] what’s relevant to me in my journey. This is what’s actionable to me. Don’t show me things that I can’t do, that I can’t buy.”
- Seamless user experiences: From one page to the next, visitors should feel like their path on your website matches their buying journey and reflects what they’ve shared with you already.
- Respecting customer privacy: It’s hard not to leave a trail of breadcrumbs when visitors are navigating your site. Demographic and behavioral data get collected at every stage, and they need to know that data is being handled responsibly.
The Magic Happens in the Middle
There’s more than one way to approach personalization. By combining Adobe Experience Cloud and Coveo into one powerhouse personalization engine, companies can implement personalization, at scale, and across multiple fronts, shared Immerman.
On one hand, Adobe Target focuses on customer experience: which components, widgets or page elements does the visitor see? Coveo, on the other, is more focused on content: what results are presented to the visitor? What other links or products are recommended alongside those results?
“There’s a nice integration and overlap there, as your personalization might take multiple approaches,” he said.
And with the ability to find the proverbial needle in the content haystack, companies can drive personalized experiences that really matter, added McGlynn. “We provide the technology that unifies that and Proficient provides the capability to really understand it from a user perspective and integrate it.”
Dig Deeper
Want to see Coveo in action within Adobe? Check out our AI-Powered Search and Recs for Adobe demo.