[Music] [Akin Ajayi] Hello and welcome to S650. My name is Akin Ajayi. I'm a Group Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Experience Platform...
And we have an exciting session planned for you. I'm not going to be doing this alone, I have a star guest that's going to be joining me up on stage in a little bit. He's the reason why we set the session up. It's honestly about him, not about me. I'm just the guy that comes before the star joins me on the stage. So I'm excited to welcome you to the session. We have a lot of exciting content. We're going to have a great discussion with our star guest.
But I know we're all just coming back from lunch.
Did everyone see the Keynote this morning? Were you excited about the announcements, the innovation we're bringing to market very soon? I'm going to try to build on top of everything you heard in this session. But before we dive into all that exciting content, I thought it would be great for us to start with...
A quick icebreaker. And please indulge me just for two minutes, right? You can do this with your eyes closed or if you don't want to close your eyes, that's totally fine, but I want this to be therapeutic. So I want you to think...
About the last amazing experience you had with a brand.
Now it could be maybe the last time you bought something online or you had a great experience in a store. Maybe it was a Macy's store. And I'm not saying that because they're going to be joining me on stage, I promise.
But I want you to think about that experience, right? What was great about that experience? Was it because of a personal recommendation or maybe they just delighted you with some content that was presented to you or that experience was just so amazing.
Do you think you're going to keep patronizing that brand into the foreseeable future? And what would it really take for you to switch to another brand? Maybe the other brand is even cheaper. What would it actually take for you to actually switch? And maybe the experience they give you is maybe on an online store where they show you a shirt you like in the favorite color, and maybe they have a dog with the model because they know you're a dog lover. And maybe it was a Macy's store, I don't know. Anyways...
Keep that thought in mind as we go through the session because I think it really ties to what we want to talk about today. And as I started to prepare for this session, I was very curious, and I'm a data-driven guy, right? So I always like to know what statistics is telling me about what I'm thinking. And so it got me curious to go do some research. And I was trying to find out what percentage of consumers say they're more likely to engage with the brand that offers personalized experiences.
Can anyone in the audience guess what the right answer is? Any takers? [Man] 90% 90%.
I heard something. 71.
I'll take two more answers. 71. [Man] 90. 90. I like the way everyone's thinking.
Any more? I need one more.
50? Awesome. All right, so let's see what the answer is. The answer is 71. And I think I had two 71s. So I had one 71 here and one 71 there. But for the folks who said 90, you're probably not wrong because this data was maybe about a couple years ago. So it's possible that now, if we did the survey, we're going to be up to 90%. And I have a special gift for the folks with the right answers. So thank you so much for participating. But going back to the icebreaker experience, how many of you could actually think of an amazing experience you've had recently with a brand? With a show of hands.
Wow, I expected more. Looks like brands are not doing enough. Or maybe you're just very tough customers. You're one of those ones who we are all worrying about and trying to build campaigns for. But building on that icebreaker exercise, I want to start the session by talking about what I have coined, The Modern Marketer's Dilemma.
And what I want to talk about here is, just like we saw in the poll and in the icebreaker...
Customer's expectations are growing by the minute. And there's a need for you as brands to think about how you can exceed those customer expectations. And this is not a market's problem. If you're in IT, if you're in sales, if you're in products, if you're in customer support, this is a dilemma that touches everyone. It's having ripple effects across the organization.
And so brands today are just under a lot of pressure. But it's not just about the pressure. It's also about the fact that competitors are stepping up their game. So if you were maybe a marketing personalization leader years ago, guess what? All your competitors are catching up to you. So you need to do more. You need to think about how you can basically grow profitability, grow retention, and basically delight your customers.
But here's where there's a conundrum, right? Customers' expectations are increasing, but your budgets are getting smaller.
Recent studies, and once again, I'm a data-driven guy, so I'm going to throw a lot of stats at you.
Reports recently show that marketing budgets are actually dropping by 15% year on year. That's a crazy decline. So even your organizations are expecting you to do more with less, and that's a huge conundrum right there.
The other dilemma that I wanted to talk about is organizational cohesion. And this is one that I think is as old as time because even up until today, there's still a lot of siloed operations within the business. There's siloed sources of truth. There's no unified vision around customer experience. And so brands are also under pressure to see how they can bring together different stakeholders within the business around customer experience. And the final one, which I think is super important, is execution speed and agility. We live in the era of hyper-personalization and AI. And guess what? Once again, I'm going to throw another stat at you.
Studies have recently shown that you only have 400 milliseconds for a customer to decide if they want to engage with your brand and perform a call to action, 400 milliseconds. So you need to do all of the stuff you're doing, building the campaigns, putting up the contents, deciding what you want to serve the customer. You have just very limited time to do all of that. And I know this sounds like a lot. It seems like I'm throwing a lot of negative stuff at you. But it's just the reality, right? If you're going to succeed in this new era, you need to rethink your customer experience management approach. And this is what we want to dive into today. Like I said, my part is just to lay the groundwork for the conversation we're going to be having with our guest from Macy's later. But I will walk through some of what I consider the winning strategies to transform customer experience management. I'm going to walk you through some requirements to successfully execute on those strategies. I'm going to talk about the role of connected technology and AI 'cause that's the era that we're in. And then we'll get to the exciting fireside chat.
And so with that, let's talk about what I call the winning strategy. And this is a term that we at Adobe have coined, it's Unified Customer Experience.
And the keyword that I want you to note there is the word unified...
Because it connotes a lot of things. For example, it connotes the need for a unified vision around customer experience across the organization. It connotes the need to have a unified approach that's leveraging the central systems of truth. So everyone is talking from the same voice with the same understanding of the customer. It also desires a unified execution across all touchpoints, across all channels where you're interacting with the customer. So the customer is receiving cohesive experience. But let's unpack this a little bit more and talk about some sub-pillars of unified customer experience. And I'm sure a lot of you as we go through this will be able to relate with some of these. The first is what I call ROI-driven customer acquisition. This is a train of thought that suggests that brands need to efficiently plan and execute campaigns with a data-driven strategy. So now you have to be more data driven in your approach. It involves you being able to strategically...
Do your channel spend allocation and audience segmentation. We are leveraging first party data for prospecting, for retargeting, for suppression.
It also involves you using measurement tools. So now you're bringing analytics into the picture as you're actually doing your customer acquisition. So you're providing comprehensive insights. You're feeding those insights around your campaign performance so that you have an understanding of what is actually working and what isn't around your customer acquisition efforts. And then the last stage is where you're bringing in real time optimization. And what you're basically doing there is you're tweaking your strategy as you go. So you're iterating and you're making adjustments to your campaigns across all the channels, and you're also adjusting your tactics so you can meet your conversion goals. So it's all about going with the end in mind. You know how much you want to spend. You have to optimize. And if you do all of this right, your reward is you get the most valuable prospects that give you more bang for your marketing buck.
The second sub-pillar is around customer-centric engagement, and this is super important. This is where you are engaging customers through personalized on the channel experiences by leveraging dynamic audience segmentation.
Mobile app adoption is another one that's very critical at this stage 'cause most people are on their mobile phones now, right? And you're also building lifecycle journeys. So think about how you can basically use connected data across all the touchpoints that you're engaging the customer with. And you're optimizing your engagement strategies. When you're able to execute this well, where it all looks like you're building journeys that are well coordinated, you can evolve your customer's value from a one-time value to a lifetime value. And the third is around omnichannel content activation. I'm sure some of the folks in this room would agree with me that content is king, right? It's the first thing you see that passes the message to you. And so this strategy focuses on you.
I just realized that I had a comment on the screen. This focuses on you being relentless about content optimization. So you're optimizing content for conversion, right? It emphasizes you delivering the content at the right time, you orchestrating that content...
To drive loyalty and marketing effectiveness. And when you execute this well, of course the customers are delighted. They feel like every time they engage with your brand, you totally get them.
But if you think about the connecting fabric across all of these strategies, it's three things. It's content, it's data, and it's journeys. And these are the three fabrics that you need to weave together in addition to these strategies to create a lifelong relationship with your customer while maximizing marketing ROI.
But let's take a step back and think about this from a customer's perspective. A customer who, when you execute unified customer experience, would definitely feel like you know them, because you have all the details of the customer in real time. So it involves you being able to gather the data around the customer, both in batch and in real time and put that data together to form a real comprehensive understanding of the customer.
The second element around that is you're also reaching the customer at the opportune time. So you're catching them at the right moment. And this is where leading brands are actually using AI to figure out the triggers around when exactly they should engage with the customer that's most likely going to lead to conversion. Some would call that propensity, right? And it's also about orchestrating across the journeys those touchpoints, using techniques like smart frequency management to ensure that their touches are coordinated, not overwhelming. I'm sure most of you would be irritated if you're getting 30 different messages a day from just one brand. That's too much noise. So it's not about just speed. It's also about the velocity and the efficiency of what you're doing. Ultimately, you want to do all of this by also respecting the customer. And this is where customers' consents and preferences need to be honored. And so any system that's helping you to orchestrate these experiences must be trust or privacy first. That's a key requirement. And ultimately, when you get all of this right, you're starting to delight the customer. But delighting the customer is not that easy. Despite everything that I talked about, even if you knew the customer, you have to iterate on the fly. And that's where experimentation and optimizing those experiences or those engagements based on experiments is very critical. And that's why it's super hard to do because you have to experiment at scale across multiple channels. But ultimately, if you're able to do this right, then you get to the point where the customer feels empowered. They feel like you understand them, you respect them, and they feel like they're going to be loyal to you. And that's where you want to be. So just a quick recap of some of the requirements we teased out from what we saw in the last slide. You have to be able to move from measurements to insights to optimize action pretty quick. You need to be able to deliver in the moment experiences with experimentation, like I said. You need content. You need content libraries to be able to fill these experiences. And data is also the fuel for all of this. So you need to have batch and real-time data being stitched together based on identities or identity graphs so that you're able to basically build those unified customer profiles. And AI, of course, is a gamechanger. And I'm going to talk a little bit about that in a second.
But ultimately, you have to honor privacy and compliance as well, keeping in mind that you only have 100 milliseconds. So there's also the speed that you need to be able to execute all of this. And this is where...
Unified customer experience relies or depends on connected technology. No longer can you rely on technology that's siloed or that has multiple integration touchpoints. You need technology that's connected, that serves as-- think of it as the control tower, that's orchestrating these experiences to the different systems you have in your marketing stack and serves as that single source of truth with unified actionable profiles. The technology is also open, so it's API-driven, it's extensible, and it allows you to incorporate insights, and you're able to use those insights seamlessly across all your different touchpoints.
So this is not only about technology. It's also about the organizational shifts that are required. And I'm going to push-- When we get to the fireside chat in a minute, I'm going to push Gaurav around this. Because I would want us to get some real life experience on how you can create that organizational alignment around unified customer experience. So everyone within the organization needs to be defining strategies around unified customer experience, and also leveraging the technology that you put in place to be able to execute on it.
I talked about AI earlier, and I made the bold statement that we're in the era of AI supported customer experience. And that's very true. I'm sure most of you are already leveraging Chatbots, GenAI, agents in one form or the other in your businesses. So this is also starting to become almost table stakes. And the key thing here is this is a force multiplier, right? It's able to save practitioners hours of work, and it's also able to boost the end results. So this is becoming a gamechanger for every organization that's able to leverage it. And so any technology you're thinking about to use for unified customer experience needs to have AI at the center as well.
And so with that, I'll just quickly talk about our point of view around this. As you know, we've been at the forefront of pushing our customer experiences. And it's no different in this era. We are laser focused on power unified customer experiences on your behalf. And that's exactly the reason why we built Adobe Experience Platform about six years ago because we realized the need to disrupt even our business...
And build something that puts customer experience at the center and brings all the core components into a centralized ecosystem, right? And that's why we've built Platform to be that single system of truth, amplified with AI innovation to centralize the delivery of unified customer experiences. And what we then did was we built these applications on top of Platform that are purpose built for different use cases. And I'll show you some examples of use cases that you can power with Adobe Experience Platform and apps.
Now I'm not going to waste more time here because I'm not trying to sell you on anything. But I just want to showcase some of the components and how exactly they're working together to power these use cases. So for example, when you think about customer acquisition, ROI driven customer acquisition, we created an application called Adobe Mix Modeler that enables you to leverage AI to quickly generate, compare, and adjust multiple campaign budget plans using previous incremental ROI data to maximize cost savings within and across channels.
We also recently announced Adobe Real-Time CDP collaboration, which basically allows you to partner with strategic partners that might have interesting audiences. And basically, you're able to enrich and expand your first party data to enable better prospecting, retargeting, and suppression. And finally, Customer Journey Analytics, which we've had for a while, it's basically providing you the modern measurement framework that can allow you to get insights across all your full share of wallet investments against every level of granularity. So it's giving you all the insights you need around how you're basically investing within a campaign or a journey.
Going to the second one around customer-centric engagement, once again, Customer Journey Analytics is bringing the insights. But you also have Journey Optimizer now that enables you to deliver that omnichannel personalized lifecycle journey. So it's helping you to build, manage, and execute those journeys that are dynamic in nature, right? And it's basically adapting to your customer's needs and behaviors.
And finally, you have Adobe Real-Time CDP. This is where you get the actionable profiles and also the AI technology that helps you to build the right segments and ensure that those segments are targeted with the right messages, offers, or journeys for audience-based engagement. And finally, for content, omnichannel content activation, we have Journey Optimizer that's dynamically activating the relevant content in a modular fashion across channels. And it's all based on the knowledge from the profile. So you have the attributes, the preferences, and the behaviors of the customer that helps you to determine what content to serve at the right time. Adobe Experience Manager sites helps you to establish that content foundation, right? It becomes that repository that supports scale and enables your marketers to centrally create, repurpose, and manage content while ensuring brand consistency. And finally, Content Analytics, which we actually just announced on stage today, is providing you the measurement mechanism around the content so you can understand the attributes and elements of content that engage and convert customers. Once again, just helping you to be more focused on using insights to drive your business and to be more efficient.
And so as you can see, all this Platform, what makes Platform so powerful is that all these applications are working together. I'm just going to go back for a second. All of them are working together. They're connected to the same center, right? So there's little or no latency that's happening when you're using all these products. And you can basically flow from one to the other. And that's a huge benefit. And when you think about the stakeholders like we talked about earlier, and the importance of making everyone collaborate, Experience Platform actually brings them together. It has shared composable services that each of these folks can work in, but also having the audit and rule-based access controls in place so that you're not viewing parts of the system that you shouldn't. And so it's really built for organization alignment and collaboration.
And this was the big announcement this morning. I don't know if you caught it, but agents are coming into our customer experience ecosystem. And as I mentioned, these agents are purpose-built for different use cases. So think of how you can layer agents on top of the rich data and knowledge that we already have in Platform. And you can see how magic starts to happen.
So in summary, the benefits of our Platform approach is you're bringing data, you're bringing journeys, you're bringing content together. And you're basically creating that single system of truth from which you can execute these real-time experiences from. But all that is also powered by one single brain, which is that unified customer profile that you're able to build based on all the data that you're gathering about your customer, both in batch and in real time.
It's modern, which means we're continuously innovating. And that's why you would notice that all the AI innovation announced today is built into Adobe Experience Platform because that's the simplest way for it to reach every single part or every single node in your customer experience ecosystem. It's also scalable. So whether you're a small business, you're a global brand, no matter who you are, you can get started quickly. It has use case playbooks for you to be able to get executed on maybe one or two of your use cases pretty quickly. So no matter who you are, no matter what type of brand you are, B2B, B2C, we've got you covered. And it's AI enhanced even, so you can get more productive with it, you can get faster results from it. And it's built with privacy in mind. It's privacy first. So we have all the advanced controls around privacy, governance, and security that makes sure that you can market responsibly.
So let's get done with the boring part of the session and I would love to invite our special guest, Gaurav Rajan from Macy's to join me up on stage for a Fireside Chat.
Awesome. Thanks, Gaurav, for agreeing to join this session. I'm super excited to learn a lot more about yourself, your role in Macy's and your journey so far when it comes to unified customer experiences, what's going on with Macy's and how's that going. [Gaurav Rajan] Yeah, absolutely. My name is Gaurav. I lead the Lifecycle Strategy team at Macy's. And in terms of just Macy's in general...
As cliché as it sounds, it does really start as the customer. And they have this expectation from us that they really want a connected experience. And they just want to be heard. And when you as a retailer know that's what the customer wants, it makes it really easy to get everyone bought into that idea, right? Once everyone's bought in, that's pretty easy, the hard part is actually scaling it. And then fortunately, our leadership has made it a priority for us, and we made the right investments in technology and people and process. And we're really just trying to keep up with what customers want. In fact, trying to exceed it, right? And it's an ongoing journey for us. It's going to continue to evolve with new innovations, new technology, new insights. It's definitely very much top of mind. Wow. That's awesome. I'm glad that your leadership is binding to it. But as you were speaking, I started to think about, first of all, how long it must have taken you to get to this point. And then secondly, I know you talked about leadership, so I'm guessing maybe this came top down.
But I'm just curious to know how you've been able to navigate bringing all stakeholders in the business, because marketing is not only going to be able to do this, you need your IT folks to buy into this, you need your data folks to buy into this, maybe even your privacy and legal folks to buy into it. So what has that been like navigating, bringing everyone to alignment around the connected vision that your leaders have around customer experience? Tough, I will say. It's funny, personalization, I think we can all agree, it's great for the customers. Unfortunately, it's a disruption for internal organizations. And working through that has definitely been an opportunity for us. But this is just that important to work with your cross-functional partners, working with your tech and product team to understand, are we building this the right way? With your creative team to understand, are we scaling efficiently? And also your finance teams, are you building a credible program that is truly driving that incremental value? It's just more of a reason where you have to hold hands with each other. And I go back to, hey, if we all believe this is what the customer wants, then we should all feel really good about this. Yes, it's going to be hard, but let's hold hands. Let's move in the same direction because if you don't do that, it's just not going to be successful. Yeah. Yeah, and that's why for me, I think the organizational alignment is sometimes underrated. And you see a lot of businesses invest in technology. And then the next thing you hear is the technology doesn't work. And it's not the technology that's not working, it's the people that are not centering around it. That might have happened a couple of times, yeah.
I appreciate your honesty. So with that said, I'm just curious to know how ingrained unified customer experience is in the overall strategy of the business. Is this the big bet that Macy's is making with regards to how you want to maybe achieve a financial target in the future? It's definitely a key driver of our strategy, and it's embedded in everything we do, right? As soon as a customer raises their hand, we are trying to cater to them as best possible, right? It depends on what channel they want to receive communication on. What should the messaging be in that specific channel? We have data science model, propensity models that are catering the right offer, the right message, the right piece of content. At what time should they receive the specific content? It's very, very important. And then on the landing page side, we are striving to ensure that every customer that comes to our site sees a different experience. If we're able to just make it a little bit easier for them to do the thing that they want to do when they come to the site, how much better would you feel as a customer, right, so how do we enable that and ultimately drive this unified customer experience that they're expecting from us.
That's awesome. I think it's very key for this to be ingrained in the strategy. It has to be the force and function for the growth of the business because to your point, it all starts with the customer, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'll just add, right? We feel like historically brands and retailers have thought about how much business value are we going to drive? And I would honestly challenge brands and retailers to think about how much customer value you're going to drive. If you're able to do that, I think the brand value just like comes with it.
That's awesome, and I'm glad you actually touched on the technology, the fact that you've invested in the technology. I'm very curious to know how you've gone about investing in technology, what technologies you've invested in, and how is that changing the process within the business? Yeah, we have this idea of the unified customer experience. And I think if we go on to the example, this is something that at Macy's we tried to roll out that I think is a really good example of connecting every single thing, all those different channels that we have access to, especially leveraging Adobe technology. So we have a customer, Stella. I'll try to look around. Stella, who's a lapsed customer of ours, we know a little bit about her. We know she's lapsed. We know that she has a propensity for home. And we know that she's a discoverer, which really just means that she's into new and trending products. And we wanna message to her, right? But because Stella is lapsed, we're going to serve her up an Instagram ad because that's actually where she is and we're going to try to go after her, right? And as soon as we can-- And we can go to the next one.
And then as soon as she does receive that Instagram ad that's very specific to the content that is very much curated for her, she does decide this is engaging, right? We have been able to do that promise right to her. And she does end up clicking through to the Macy's site. And we don't want to just make it a disconnected experience. We want to curate products very specific to Stella, right? Home products with the discoverer's lens, new and trending, right? How do we make this as curated and as relevant as possible for her so that she continues to stay engaged with us. And she does, right? She continues to browse the site. And we want to make sure that we're following up with appropriate acquisition messaging...
Because at this point, the only way we're able to reach out to Stella is on Instagram, right? And we want to make sure that we keep the sticky communication with her. Fortunately, at this point, that she does sign up for the Star Rewards program and we have the ability to now communicate to her, not just on media, right? So she does end up leaving the site, but because she signed up for email, we were able to send her a retargeting message, right? And we don't want to forget about the thing that initially got her excited, right? What was the thing on Instagram that got her excited? Then take the thing on the site that she clicked through and applied those principles together and applied it in the email. Unfortunately, she did not think this was enough for her to convert, so we follow her up with another email, right? And this email is where we sweeten the deal, right? We send her a personalized offer that's very much specific to the products that she wants to buy, and she does end up purchasing. And we don't want to forget about her, right? She ends up purchasing, and then we want to make sure we follow up with relevant messaging that is very specific to not only that initial experience, not only the Star Rewards program she just signed up, but also that purchase, right? We have to combine all three messages and make sure we're not inundating her with irrelevant messaging, especially since she just signed on with the brand and make sure that we onboard her, not just for the next 7, 30 days but the next 90 days, right? What does that look like? And we want to make sure that we're doing right by the customer. Wow. Isn't this exciting? This is an amazing experience. I wish I had thought about this one when we had the icebreaker. If this was my experience, I would have raised my hand. But it's sometimes annoying. And this has happened to me where, for example, I go to a site, I buy a product. And then I go on Instagram, and I get an ad for the exact product I just bought. That is super annoying. But in your case, you're following up with a customer with something that's also going to be useful to them around what they just bought. I think that's super powerful. But in all of this, you describe the journey of this Stella customer, which I think is absolutely stellar.
Pun intended.
But I didn't hear you talk about the technology that's empowering this, because I want to believe that you're able to orchestrate this very unified customer experience using some technology. I hope it's Adobe technology you're using. Can you maybe talk about that a little bit? - You hope, yeah. - I know about selling anything. I will say this. It feels like it's very simple when you put it on one slide. But this was a very, very complicated use case. And I have so much thanks to my tech and product partners that some of them right here. And when we're thinking about this use case, specifically, what type of segment do we go after? Is it the lapsed customer? Is it the new customer? Is it the retained customer? What types of behaviors do we want to cater that content to? We fortunately were able to do all of that within the tool, Adobe Experience Platform, which is really nice and kudos to you guys, right? It was amazing to be able to not only do it all in one place but then integrate so nicely and so quickly with our media partners. And then all the way on the flip side, now that we have these very robust segments that we're going after with a specific objective in mind, we want to understand how are these segments performing. And not only at the segment level but also at the campaign level. And fortunately, Customer Journey Analytics allows us to do that, right? We made a custom dashboard that not only looks at this entire use case end to end but also at the segment level. And then where is the drop-off, right? You saw so many steps in that specific journey, help us understand where is the drop-off for each one of those different segments, those behavioral segments, and then let's apply a loyalty layer on top of that. What does the bronze customer do? What does the silver customer do? These are all things that we wanted to deep dive into to then better iterate on future use cases. Because this was such a hard use case to get out the door and such a complex use case, but at the end, we did right by the customer. - Yeah. - We're now able to build on it. We built all these amazing integrations and we're really excited about the future for this type of use case. That's awesome. So if I heard you correctly, you used Adobe. Yes, yes, yes, you did. Yes. That's awesome. I'm just curious. I know you talked about bringing the analytics into the picture and using that to inform how you can improve that customer journey. But I'm also curious around data because I talked about the need to have data...
You need to have in the moment data, right? You need to know what the customer just did. So how were you able to implement a data strategy that could serve this use case? Yeah, it was, one, using the Adobe Experience Platform, we had access to real-time data that allowed us to connect the dots during this experience, right? As soon as Stella landed on the page, there were data points that we were capturing to ensure that we're able to continue that journey of hers in a really relevant way. As soon as she clicks on an email, we had data on her and then we're activating on that data. As soon as she converts in that personalized offer, how are we taking all of that together and then building this unified profile for her to then better be able to communicate to her in the future? If you remember, Stella was lapsed. We didn't do right by her at some point in time. Yeah. This time, we were able to get her to come back to us. Let's just try to get it right this time, right? And the ability to try to get it right sometimes does involve making sure we're making the connections specifically to the things that she's doing on our site and the things that she's telling us and not telling us. Got it. And last question, I promise, on this one. I'm curious around the content and how you try to get the content right so that it's delightful to the customer. I mean you talked about the last step in that journey where you're sending her some recommendations around how she can actually use the product. Just curious how you go about that and is there a lot of personalization thinking that goes into making sure that the experience that I receive when I'm looking at, let's say a product in terms of maybe the color or what image I'm seeing is different from what someone else is seeing. Yeah, I mentioned the addition of behavioral, right? How are we catering the content to the specific behaviors that Stella is showing us? Specific to her was discoveries. We know that she's into new and trending products. It makes sense that she's on Instagram. So how are we making sure that every single piece of content that she's seeing has that lens applied to it? So not only on the Instagram ad but also on the landing page. Also following her through the site, it shouldn't be-- if she's not really interested in promotions, let's not show her promotion. Let's show her trending items, right? And then finally, when she goes to making that purchase, all the rest of that communication is going to be very much in line with that until she tells us she doesn't want that. - Got it. - Right? And then we flip. Got it. That's powerful. And I'm just going to pick on one last thing you said, which was doing this was pretty hard, right? I want you to unpack that a little bit and tell us, maybe just share some examples of challenges you faced in implementing the technology or bringing people together, whatever the challenges were in implementing this use case. I think it'd be insightful for folks to hear that part. Yeah, I will say the implementation of technology was honestly one of the easier parts. Okay. The use case was you can have the best use case, you can have the best strategies, the technology implementation can be really easy. At the end of the day, you do need marketing assets. And the more complex you go, which this is a pretty complex use case, the more marketing assets you need. And that is unfortunately something of an opportunity for us at Macy's. And we're still trying to figure it out. We have amazing partners. However, we're asking a lot, right? And more and more use cases that we roll out, we're going to ask for more. And this is where I think AI could potentially help us, but it is definitely something that we're actively working through, especially when you think of eight different types of segments, customer states, loyalty status. These start to exponentially increase in number of assets. Yeah. And I think that's the difficulty because, like I said at the beginning, customers are asking for more. And to do more, you need to scale across different dimensions. And I mean, how many resources is it going to take for you to create thousands of content? Everything just multiplies when you start to think about how you need to operate in this time and in this era. So I'm actually very curious to know how you at Macy's think about AI and how you are either leveraging AI right now or how you plan to leverage AI. And I'm speaking more-- I know you probably do some propensity modeling, you mentioned earlier, but I'm thinking more about AI that's transforming how you work, right, and bringing more efficiency and productivity to your practitioners. I'm just curious to know how you think about that and if you think about adopting it, what might be the challenges to doing that? Yeah, in Macy's, we've fortunately been working with AI. I feel like as a brand or retailer, if you're just now thinking about AI, you're late to the game and you've lost it. Fortunately, as I mentioned, we're using data science models, we're using propensity models, we're using sent-time optimization. We're trying to understand where the customer might be, what type of category they want to purchase during a specific event. I will say candidly, we aren't using the Adobe AI tools as much as we would like, right? But that doesn't mean we're not going to. I'm really excited about what was presented today, about the ability to leverage that, go forward. A use case that my team is actively working on is marketing arbitration, not just in communications, right? We have access to all these different marketing channels and often customers are signing up for all these marketing channels. How do you curate the appropriate marketing message to them across all these different channels and you're not hitting them over the head with different pieces of content? And then you can take that and extrapolate, on the site what type of arbitration should happen. Should they see an email capture model? Should they see an offer? Should they see a brand campaign? Should they see something they recently purchased? Should they see a message about the thing that just shipped, right? These are all different types of messages that we need to arbitrate. And I would love to say that I could write 99 billion business rules for this, but it's not possible. So we really need to leverage AI to figure out a way to prioritize these messages, right? Yeah. And ultimately, prioritize these messages that are right by the customer and also for business, right? Ultimately, how are we going to drive CLV with this customer by that specific message. Yeah. And I'm excited. I think I've been chasing you for about a year, maybe more than a year, to get you on AI Assistant, which we announced last year. So I hope you're excited to finally be able to get your hands on that. - Yes, very much so. - I'm looking forward to all the feedback. Maybe next year we'll be doing a session about how you're leveraging agents. I would love that. I would love that. If it made the job easier, absolutely. Yeah, thank you so much, Gaurav, for joining me on stage and thank you for sharing candidly your insights around your customer experience transformation journey. Absolutely. Can we give him a round of applause, please? Thank you.
Awesome. So just a quick recap of the key takeaways.
I want you to go back to your businesses and start evangelizing unified customer experience. You may not use that word, but you know what it entails. And so I think you need to start thinking about how you can transform your businesses and convert your business around that strategy. And of course, you have to remember that technology is an important ingredient. You need the right connected technology to make that happen. AI, of course, is a gamechanger. So you also need to ensure that you're thinking about how you can bring AI into the mix. And don't forget, I mean, we're your trusted partners. We've been your trusted partners in your customer experience and your digital transformation journey over the years. And we are continuing to innovate around unified customer experience. So we do have the tools that you need to be able to power those powerful connected experiences for your end customers.
So please don't stick to the status quo. Don't get left behind.
Start to think about how you can leverage unified customer experience today. We have a lot of sessions that are going to touch on the AI announcements that were made this morning. So I do encourage you to try to attend some of them. For example, S653 is going to be going under the hood and giving you more details around the technology, the models, and all that comes together to power agents.
We have some other sessions that are focused on value realization with Adobe Experience Platform. If you want to go deeper and learn more about Adobe Experience Platform and the applications, please check out these sessions where you can get a lot more insights, more use cases, more details around them. And then finally, if you want to learn more when you're back in your respective stations, please visit Experience League where you can get more details around all the Adobe products. And you can get all the support you need. You can get documentation. You can join the forums to learn from your peers.
And it's just a great resource for you. So with that, thank you so much for spending the last hour with me. Hope this session was insightful. Hope you gained some real-life tips based on the experience at Macy's. And hope next year perhaps one of you here will be coming to share your story around you were in this session and now you're using connected technology, Adobe connected technology hopefully to power your unified customer experience. Thank you so much and have an amazing Summit.
[Music]
