Unification of Online & Offline Customer Data

Why integrating all of your customer data is key to get to know your customers and deliver a personalized customer experience.

Eliminate customer data silos to enable a 360 customer view and deliver great experiences

If your customer data is scattered across different solutions and departments, you’re unable to track customer behavior across your channels and systems and create a unified customer view. 

According to 451 Research, half of the organisations had on average more than 11 separate repositories of customer data including CRM, DMP, offline in-store purchase data, etc 

This is a serious problem if you’re looking to better understand what drives your customers, and don't know where to start to deliver the experiences your customers expect. Most leaders still face this challenge, which makes them raise the question:

How can I get a 360, unified view of all my customers' interactions and behaviors with my organization?

A customer data platform (CDP) might be the missing piece in your puzzle to eliminate customer data silos and unify the data in a single repository. 

The challenges of siloed Customer Data

When businesses cannot unify the customer data coming from their different data sources, they are missing the opportunity of having a 360 view of the customer that enables them to personalize experiences, get to know them and anticipate their behaviour to be able to exceed their expectations. 

Not having a unified customer data repository for all online and offline data creates many challenges, such as: 

  • Lack of insights on customer behaviour across all channels.
  • No ability to connect valuable (previous) anonymous data to a customer's individual profile after consent has been given.
  • High dependency on third-party cookie data to understand customer intent with the data deprecation.
  • Customer insights scattered on different channels and departments.
  • Not being able to translate the data into actionable insights.
  • Challenges with adapting or following the changing data privacy and compliance requirements.

And, therefore, it prevents companies to create a consistent customer experience, across all channels and personalize the interactions based on each individual previous behavior, preferences or intent.

When a company overcome these challenges and gets a grip on their customer data, the company's communications become much more relevant, and therefore, more effective at engaging customers at the right time and with the right message. 

How a CDP helps you create a 360 view of your customers

A CDP collects all data from online and offline sources in real-time, from both known and anonymous visitors engaging with your brand across and channel, and is able to match all these interactions with a single customer profile. This creates a 360 view of all users that interact with your brand across any channel and captures the development of your relationship along the customer journey. This greatly increases both the amount of data you gather and its usability, as it’s all centralized in a single platform. 

Through integrations, a CPD can collect the following data:

  • Events: behavioral data that arise from a user’s actions in a session on a website, in an app, a mobile browser, or interactions with wearables and IoT.
  • Customer attributes: these include names, addresses, contact details, and birthdays. Advanced CDPs can also store machine-learning powered predictions, such as likelihood to purchase.
  • Transactional data: purchases, returns, and other info from e-commerce or POS systems, both online and in-store.
  • Campaign metrics: engagement, reach, impressions, and other metrics from campaigns across all advertising platforms and channels.
  • Customer service data: live chat data, number and length of interactions, frequency, loyalty status, NPS scores, other data from CRM systems.

With the following key features of a CDP you will therefore be able to unify and effectively use you customer data:

Customer data unification

All data sources (including online and offline marketing channels) are centralized within a CDP, breaking data silos and creating a unified single customer profile. The data is updated on the CDP on a real-time basis with new information coming from these sources. The data is therefore unified on a single system for its analysis and activation.

In-depth, automated data-analysis and action

Which products are each customer interested in? How long ago did they engage with the brand? What was their last purchase? Did they buy through a link in an e-mail? Previously, answering these questions was near impossible, as this data is commonly scattered across different channels without a way to link customer information to individual identities. A CDP provides these answers and enables you to personalize your communications, greatly improving relevancy and timing, to meet the needs and wants of your customers.

Enables data activation through any marketing channel

In the era of connectivity, more and more customers are using new channels to engage with companies such as voice search or IoT, the amount of channels that customers use will continue to grow. CDPs will be the key to connect these channels easily with your stack and data sources.

Marketing efficiency and reduction of marketing waste

Picking the right channel to engage with each customer based on their preferences and stage of the journey eliminates marketing waste as you'll avoid spending budget across all channels that will not be effective for them. Only if you have unified channel customer data you'll be able to understand which channel performs better

Our Expertise

Here's what we can do for you:

  • Define your strategic data assets and data audience.
  • Gather the required data and implement new collection methods.
  • Get the most out of predictive analytics and machine learning.
  • Select the right technology, data infrastructure, and key data competencies for your specific wishes and needs.

We can support you in crafting a digital strategy to reach your customer in a more effective and efficient way and implementing the right CDP solution for your business. We have helped companies like Carlsberg, Sligro, Kawasaki, ForFarmers create the best Digital and E-commerce Experiences for their customers and we can do so for yours.

QUESTIONS ON CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORMS?

We help you develop a digital strategy to reach your customers more effectively and find the right CDP solution for your business.

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