• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 11, 2019

Adobe Analytics now offers a feature that company developers say brings together customer data from across an organization.

Customer Journey Analytics, a suite of Photoshop-inspired analytics tools for enterprises, provides new ways for marketers to analyze insights into customer behavior from the numbers aggregated across online and offline channels.

A few enterprise brands are testing the platform in retail, financial services and media, but the plan is to roll out Customer Journey Analytics in October.

Adobe developers used creative concepts in Photoshop to layer the interface in Customer Journey Analytics.

Images, color-coded charts, and graphics create visual representations of the data, allowing brands to curate drag-and-drop metrics for orders, conversions and visits.

The focus is on gaining high-resolution views of the data, similar to the way designers see images in Photoshop, explains Nate Smith, group product manager at Adobe Analytics. But it’s also about predicting the next purchase and targeting messages.

"You can add filters and lenses to an image in Photoshop,” Smith said, adding that this is similar to the Adobe tool, where different lenses can be added to the data to gain customer insights.

The system also brings device data together to determine when one customer is connecting via multiple devices. It maps and color codes a buyer’s journey through the purchase and fan process.

For example, a customer sees an online ad for a holiday sale and visits the brand’s website to do research. When the holidays arrive, she makes the purchase online, and a week later makes another purchase in the physical store. The platform will also identify when the consumer follows the brand on Twitter or downloads its app.

The advertising industry has made progress in linking some disparate systems like CRM and ERP to connect real-time data across the enterprise, but siloes still remain challenging. The disparities force the use of stale data to inform customer experiences for millions of transactions happening across websites, mobile, video and more.

Smith said it’s been a multiyear investment in terms of building the platform, but declined to put a price tag on the cost.