How Customer Data Platforms Power Amazing Customer Experiences at Scale

Ask any marketing professional, and most will agree that there is more customer data available now than at any other time in their careers. This, of course, is an exciting opportunity, but it is also one that often becomes profoundly frustrating as they navigate legacy systems for managing — and gaining insights from — the data. The sheer volume makes identifying and using the right data feel like finding a needle in a haystack.

Customer touchpoints are everywhere: online via websites, multiple social media platforms, ecommerce, and apps as well as offline via in-person interactions, point of sale transactions, kiosks, call centers, and more. The internet has made it possible to know a staggering amount about customers’ interests and behaviors, but the current data landscape makes it difficult to create an actionable, personalized experience.

Rather than making customer behaviors clearer, the deluge of data often makes customers’ behavior even more opaque to marketers. Gaining actionable insights is further complicated when much of the data is controlled by third parties — siloed off from other data — making it difficult for nontechnical marketers to access. Pulling together a single customer profile can involve finding and reconciling data points from more than a dozen different sources. This is nearly impossible to scale.

But there is a solution: the Customer Data Platform (CDP).

A CDP is marketing technology that brings customer data — both online and offline — into a single location, streamlining analysis, testing, targeting, and other marketing-related activities. It provides the right data at the right time to provide personalized experiences across channels and interactions.

This is achieved through a five-step process: the capture, collection, and analysis of data; creation of unified profiles; segmentation; prediction and testing; and activation/personalization. Together, these provide a seamless customer experience.

There are three main reasons why a CDP is a good choice for any organization: It is a purpose-built marketing tool that allows even non-technical staff to engage with data, it will prepare your website for data collection changes that will arrive with the loss of third-party cookies, and it will meet or exceed the expectations of increasingly sophisticated customers.

A CDP is a purpose-built marketing tool . Unlike earlier methods of gathering data from legacy systems, the CDP is all about converting data into actionable experiences for customers, whether it is serving content, providing a discount, or remembering their purchase history through the lifetime of the customer relationship. It is not numbers for numbers sake, but for helping customers and earning their ongoing loyalty.

Third-party cookies are already on the decline with the inclusion of “do not track” technology on iPhones, and Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. These data trackers from outside domains provide information on engagements, customer behavior, and analytics that have traditionally been critical to making decisions on how content and products are positioned online. While third-party data comprises much of the siloed, hard-to-interpret data that marketers currently encounter, it will still need to be replaced to accurately understand customers.

Consumers are more sophisticated and expect better. The seamless digital experiences of giants like Amazon, Google, and Apple have changed consumers' expectations. They expect the same seamless interactions from every digital interaction whether from government, nonprofit, or a small business website. It is the new norm for digital experiences.

Proactively preparing for these changes with a CDP will allow your online and offline presence to work seamlessly together to attract, retain, and build long-lasting, personalized experiences for your customers. ​

A CDP can prove beneficial to both internally and externally. Within the business, time saved on currently-arduous data collection, organization, and interpretation processes and/or on tasks like profile reconciliation can instead be spent on analysis, testing, and personalization — all activities that can have a direct impact on the bottom line.

It is this opportunity for personalization that provides the clearest external benefit. According to Boston Consulting Group, “Two-thirds of [survey] respondents said that they expect at least a 6% incremental annual revenue lift from personalization with companies in several sectors...anticipating increases of 10% or more.”

Personalization has such a strong impact because of the individualized experience it offers customers, generally along two paths: recognition and help. Recognition includes things like knowing who the customer is, what their past interactions and purchases have been, and what they value. This kind of personalization is increasingly becoming a norm, though one that can be time-consuming to achieve without a CDP.

Help-based personalization is the next phase of the relationship-based customer approach that a CDP helps achieve. The kind of help a CDP can provide includes direction to relevant products, new information, and targeted special offers. This attention to past interactions and focus on individualized value boosts customer confidence.

As customer expectations for a consistent online experience and data privacy continue to grow, a CDP is increasingly going to become standard for customer-facing websites across industries — from the private sector, nonprofits and government. With the end of third-party cookies on the horizon, rising customer experience expectations, the time to explore a CDP is now.

Making a switch of this magnitude can, of course, seem daunting, but the benefits of developing a streamlined data approach will prove worthwhile.

Marketing teams can spend less time downloading and organizing data and more time cultivating deep customer relationships. Technical staff will spend less time focused on supporting marketers, allowing them to take on other priorities. Strengthened customer relationships, bolstered by seamless transactions and data transparency, will have a significant impact on ROI.

If your organization is ready to future-proof its digital ecosystem, strengthen customer engagement, and translate data into meaningful outcomes, AgencyQ can help.Contact us.