When I recently worked with a brand during initial discovery as part of their Adobe Experience Platform implementation of Adobe Real-Time CDP, this question came up during a workshop where the client and their teams were tasked to conduct customer journey mapping exercises for specific customer personas. Understandably, most CDP development work focuses on data ingestion and modeling efforts.

The question was: How can you build and unlock robust customer profiles for activation if you can’t identify the specific customer behaviors and actions you want to collect?

Evolving the Typical Customer Journey Flow

In the traditional funnel model, customers move linearly from awareness to consideration, conversion, and loyalty. However, today’s digitally empowered buyers interact with brands across multiple channels, often jumping back and forth between stages. By evolving this one-way flow into a dynamic, event-driven loop, organizations can meet prospects where they are, respond instantly to signals like page views or cart abandonments, and re-engage existing customers with personalized offers. This shift demands that teams embrace journey orchestration on the front-end through not only documentation but collaboration with UX, product, and design teams that understand the customer journey at scale.

Data Journey Mapping Can Be a Game-Changer

When you clearly define how attributes like profile data and/or behavior data are collected and used throughout customer interaction touchpoints, you can eliminate blind spots and the lack of understanding. As a result, your data teams and engineers can map and build the appropriate schemas in your CDP needed to create your targeted segments. Taking the time to take a step back and having all the teams align and understand customer flows can help to prioritize data sources needed for ingestion. This approach also gives the teams better guidance on the relationship between datasets and their corresponding schemas.

Building Your CDP Use Cases

Believe it or not, updating or creating a detailed customer journey can prioritize use cases that drive measurable impact based on team or company goals. By visual mapping the customer experience upfront, you can identify “quick wins” for your customer data platform use cases tied to your marketing destinations. By documenting the following in your initial mapping— trigger criteria, data inputs, orchestration steps, and expected KPIs—you create a library of foundational to advanced use cases that accelerates future campaigns and solidifies your CDP’s role as the central source of customer truth.

When an organization ensures its CDP is set up correctly, the business can maximize the value of the platform and make smart business decisions based on accurate customer data. Interested in speaking to one of Blue Acorn iCi’s Adobe experts to learn more about Adobe Experience Platform? Contact our team today.