WHITE PAPER

The 4 Pillars of the Next-Gen Digital

Engagement Architecture
Table of Contents

00 INTRODUCTION

00 COLLECTION
GATHER YOUR DATA

00 DATA & ANALYTICS

TURN THAT DATA INTO INSIGHT

00 CONTENT ASSEMBLY
CREATE YOUR BEST MOVE

00 ACTIVATION
DELIVER THE EXPERIENCE IN CHANNEL AND IN MOMENT

00 TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS FOR AN EVOLVING ENGAGEMENT ARCHITECTURE

00 CONCLUSION

The 4 Pillars of the Next-Gen Digital Engagement Architecture 2

Introduction

Entering 2020, improving digital products and services was a priority for enterprises across
industries, but for most, digital was still viewed as a compliment to the business instead of
the primary way of engaging customers. With COVID-19, enterprises and customers overnight
became dependent on digital in order to achieve their goals.

The emergence of digital shouldn’t come as a surprise. We have been in the process of
migrating from an in-person world to an increasingly digital one for the past 30 years. The
difference here is that COVID-19 has acted as an accelerant, turning 5 year road maps into ‘I
needed it 5 minutes ago’ sprints as enterprises attempt to bend and shape their business to
perform in ways it wasn’t designed to.

Banking customers who used to meet in-branch with their advisor to set up their account,
make a deposit, or transfer funds are faced with a reality where the only safe way to do
that is online. Retail consumers are hesitant to shop in brick and mortar locations and lean
towards curbside pickup or delivery. This puts tremendous pressure on enterprises to find
ways to make themselves easier to do business with digitally, so that customers can be more
successful and to generate loyalty in a time when defecting to competition is a click away.

THE OPPORTUNITY

This shift towards digital presents an opportunity for businesses to harness this
transformation and take advantage of our new digital reality where every touchpoint provides
data that can be collected, understood, and acted upon in ways that have never before been
made possible.

By leveraging this data, businesses are able to give customers highly personalized and
contextual experiences. And now is more important than ever as customer expectations on
digital are radically different than they were in the past. Your competition is no longer the
bank across the street, but it is every modern, cloud-native digital bank that is vying for your
customers’ attention. And the second they become frustrated with your ability to deliver that
experience digitally -- you lose.

The 4 Pillars of the Next-Gen Digital Engagement Architecture 3

THE GOAL

In this whitepaper, we provide a blueprint for enterprises who want to take back their
advantage of scale and utilize customer data, machine learning, and dynamic content
to power next-generation digital experiences. The goal is to identify the component
architecture that makes best-in-class customer experience possible. Our perspective
is informed by working with leading enterprise digital teams in healthcare, insurance,
banking, telco, and retail to transform the way they engage with customers and drive
radically improved business outcomes.

DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT ARCHITECTURE OVERVIEW

Enterprises need to find a way to compete in a digital world. The truth is, they face the same
challenges as every other business; their approach and the underlying complexity is just a
bit different. The future-state looks the same: highly personalized, contextual interactions in
every channel.

So how do businesses gather data from all interactions? How do they use that data to gain
new insights? And how do they dynamically create and deliver the perfect, personalized
message? These are the core questions that define the Next-gen Digital Engagement
Architecture.

Adapting to this shift requires new strategies, capabilities and tools. To help answer these
questions, we have identified four core pillars: Collection, Data Science & Insights, Dynamic
Content, and Activation.

COLLECTION DATA SCIENCE & INSIGHTS

Getting all your customer data in Learning from that data to gain
one place so you can use it insights that drive growth

DYNAMIC CONTENT ACTIVATION

Spinning up the right creative Delivering that experience to the
experience in the moment customer in real-time and in channel

The 4 Pillars of the Next-Gen Digital Engagement Architecture 4

 Dynamic Content

1:1 EXPERIENCES

CRM ADOBE

ERP WEB

3RD PARTY
Collection Activation
MOBILE

GEO REAL TIME CALL CENTER

IoT IoT/ATM

DATA SOURCES CHANNELS

Data Science & Insights

These pillars are intended to work together, each building on the other to close the loop and
power next-gen digital experiences. The architecture is broken into components with the
intention of making changes over time. This provides you with a futureproof architecture
that can adapt to the technology of the future as customer and business needs evolve
over time.

While at times it may seem like some pillars are predicated by others, we recommend an
agile and iterative approach to solving for each pillar and its capabilities. With time being of
the essence, it is critical that businesses avoid the trap of waiting for perfect data, cutting
edge AI, or wholesale digital transformation before making progress.

The 4 Pillars of the Next-Gen Digital Engagement Architecture 5

COLLECTION

Gather your data

OVERVIEW

Positioning an enterprise to take advantage of this Positioning an enterprise

opportunity is easier said than done, and every business
to take advantage of this
is in an arms race to make this new data an asset for
their company. Data initiatives have become mainstream, opportunity is easier
with virtually every F500 enterprise investing time said than done, and
and resources into CDPs, custom datalakes, and data
tagging. That’s why the first pillar in the Next-Gen every business is in an
Engagement Architecture is Collection. Collection has arms race to make this
a few key components, each required to make sure
new data an asset for
that you are able to ingest the data that is critical to
your business. their company.

KEY COMPONENTS

Tagging Data Store Insights

Seamlessly feeding A place to store The combination of

different events into your customer history data collection, identity
datastore from a variety resolution and out-of-
of data sources the-box machine learning

The 4 Pillars of the Next-Gen Digital Engagement Architecture 6

We have seen two predominant Collection strategies, each with its own advantages
and disadvantages:

Built it yourself with the combination of a tagging system like Segment

1 and a custom data store like Azure, Big Query, and snowflake

Buy a Martech CDP like Adobe CDP, ActionIQ, or Redpoint that

2 combines data collection with native AI/ML

We recommend the first option for most companies, particularly for those who consider
data to be a critical part of their growth strategy. Customer data has proven to be the most
strategic asset a company has -- and it should be managed as such. By building your own
data collection architecture, you are equipped to maximize the business impact of proprietary
data, AI, and ML. While insights CDPs do offer some out of the box functionality, these
generic AI and ML models aren’t tailored to your business and can have significant long-term
limitations on your ability to turn that data into long-term growth.

The 4 Pillars of the Next-Gen Digital Engagement Architecture 7

DATA & ANALYTICS

Turn that Data into Insight

OVERVIEW

Customer data is the new oil – and your ability to turn that data
into meaningful insights is the life blood of growth. No one
understands your customers or business better than you, which
is why Data Science & Analytics are both a technology pillar and
stand-alone teams you should build in-house.

KEY COMPONENTS

Data Science Business Intelligence

Building IP that drives Democratizing data

new insights with analytics and visualization
technologies like with tools like Looker,
Databricks, Python, and R Power BI, and Tableau

Depending on your organization, these can be two different

teams or one. And the people and skillsets are as important as
the technology you select. Significant investments should be
made in building data science as a core competence. It is as
vital to the next decade as coders have been to the last decade.

The 4 Pillars of the Next-Gen Digital Engagement Architecture 8

CONTENT ASSEMBLY

Create your Next Best Move

OVERVIEW

As customer engagement shifts from automated campaigns to dynamic journeys, businesses

need to be able to assemble personalized content in real-time. Content is at times the
forgotten piece of the engagement puzzle. The truth is, data and models are only meaningful
if you have a substantive amount of content that you can put together for customers. Many
personalization efforts are blocked at go-live by inadequate content assembly.

KEY COMPONENTS

Next Best Action CMS

Offering the most relevant A home for creatives to

and rich content spin up web experiences

DAM Microservices

Stores, share and organize Internally developed services

digital assets in a central (i.e Recommendation
location Engines/Product Catalog)
that power the
assembly engine

We see a mix of third party and homegrown services to enable Dynamic Content. This
architecture is likely to evolve and grow as your business and technology change over time.

The 4 Pillars of the Next-Gen Digital Engagement Architecture 9

ACTIVATION

Deliver Incredible Customer

Experiences
OVERVIEW

There is a missing link between the sea of data and technology a business has and their
ability to meaningfully incorporate them into the way to service, market to, grow, and retain
customers. We call this missing link Activation. It is what goes the final mile and enables
an organization’s massive investments in technology, teams, and data to work in harmony.
Without activation, many businesses struggle with being customer-centric and aren’t able to
connect what they know about a customer with the experience itself.

Activation is what delivers the experience to the customer, and in today’s complex
technology and data landscape, it requires orchestration. Data, models, and content are
useless if you can’t activate across channels and orchestrate experiences in the context
of the journey. Activation brings all three pillars together and enables you to move from a
company to customer architecture to a conversational architecture.

KEY COMPONENTS

Context Journey Monitoring

Remembering past Awareness of where the

conversations with customer is in their journey
customers

Air Traffic Control A/B/n Testing

Knowing when not to Experimentation that

engage and prioritizing the enables you to test and
highest value interactions learn on the journey level

The 4 Pillars of the Next-Gen Digital Engagement Architecture 10

Technical Requirements for an
Evolving Engagement Architecture
This engagement architecture is intended to be adaptable, and for good reason. Businesses
don’t need to think about their engagement architecture for the challenges of today, but for
the business and customer needs of the future. This is why it is mission critical that business
adopt an architecture that is future-proof.

The basic principle is to build each pillar with the ability to manage change. What is change?
It might be a change in the type of data you’re ingesting. Or perhaps you want to add a new
channel or system. Or maybe you’re building your own microservices or data science models.
Each of these different requirements that make or break your engagement architecture.

Below we have listed a few of the key requirements to consider as you assemble your
engagement architecture along with the impact to understand how those decisions might
help or hurt your ability to manage change down the road.

Requirement Impact

Open Data model • Gain the ultimate customization

Maintain your own custom data schema and flexibility

3rd Party Models/Services • Adopt the best AI/ML and services to

Leverage models and services fit your needs
outside of core stack • Break free from native/generic services

Model Ingestion • Maximize investments in AI/ML

Ingest and activate models in real-time • Eliminate batch processing and delays

Defined SDK • Easily add any channel or system

Integrate to any channel, SaaS application, • Enable a future-proof, best-of-breed
or homegrown/legacy system architecture

Dynamic Workflow
• Enable 1:1, conversational
Monitor and adapt to customer
relationships with customers
activity in real-time

The 4 Pillars of the Next-Gen Digital Engagement Architecture 11

To help contextualize these requirements, it is helpful to back back overlay them onto the
architecture itself. Each requirement maps to one or multiple pillars and their ability to
connect, operate, and build on one another.

Dynamic Content
3RD PARTY SERVICES

DEFINED SDK DYNAMIC WORKFLOW

OPEN DATA MODEL DEFINED SDK

CRM ADOBE

ERP WEB

3RD PARTY
Collection Activation
MOBILE

GEO OPEN DATA MODEL CALL CENTER

IoT IoT/ATM

DATA SOURCES CHANNELS

MODEL INGESTION DYNAMIC WORKFLOW

Data Science & Insights

3RD PARTY MODELS

WHY DOES THIS MATTER?

Every business dreams of a world where customers are captivated by every interaction.
Where no email goes unopened -- no push notification turned off. They want regular, if
not constant, engagement with their customers so that they can learn more about them
and continue to grow their relationship. At the end of the day what we’re talking about is
personalization. But how can you personalize customer engagement? For that, you need
data, and it’s on that foundation that the Customer Engagement Flywheel perpetuates.

The 4 Pillars of the Next-Gen Digital Engagement Architecture 12

THE CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT FLYWHEEL ent
em D

at
ag
The customer engagement flywheel is a simple

a
Eng
concept where the more data you have about
Customer
customers, the more you can personalize their Engagement
experience. As you personalize experiences, you Flywheel

ti o n
can more easily generate loyalty and drive greater

iz a
engagement. And the more you engage with

Lo
al
ty on

al
customers, the more data you are able to collect. s
P er

No company has leveraged this concept better than Amazon. They didn’t do this
overnight, but by thinking data and customer first they were able to captivate the market
and grow an ecommerce platform that now accounts for over 44% of the US ecommerce
purchases. How did they do that? By making sure that when you need to make a
purchase, you can easily find the product that is right for you and have it shipped to your
door in under 48 hours. They knew that by being the easiest to do business with, they
could collect more data, personalize more offers and drive greater loyalty.

The 4 Pillars of the Next-Gen Digital Engagement Architecture 13

Conclusion

The way customers engage with enterprises is evolving, and what they expect from
you is changing everyday. Every business needs to find creative ways to be easier to do
business with digitally, and a critical part of that is developing the right technology, teams,
and capabilities to compete in today’s marketplace.

The future engagement architecture is going to need to evolve as well -- which is why we
developed the Next-Gen digital Engagement Architecture with a component approach
versus the monolithic approach of single platform vendors. A critical aspect of your
success is focusing on owning and futureproofing your technology decisions so that
as customer and business demands continue to evolve, you aren’t locked into a single
vendor or solution.

The premise of the Next-Gen Digital Engagement Architecture is simple. Collection

enables you to get all of your customer data in one place. Data Science & Insights helps
you learn from that data to gain insights that drive growth. Dynamic Content spins up
the right creative experience in the moment. And Activation allows you to deliver that
experience to the customer in real-time and in any channel.

Activation is often the missing link at most enterprises. They have the technology,
models, and data, but they aren’t able to make all the pieces work in harmony to deliver
highly personalized and relevant experiences across their business. That’s why Usermind
built the Experience Orchestration (XO) Platform -- purpose built to enable enterprises to
activate highly personalized digital experiences across channels.

If you’re interested in learning more about Usermind or the Next-Gen

Digital Engagement Architecture, visit www.usermind.com