Identity strategies essential to delivering a truly personal customer experience
There seems little doubt that the big business battle being waged now is for customer experience. The winners will be those businesses that can make every customer moment really matter, by curating relevant and engaging interactions that add meaning to people’s lives. This should take place anywhere that a customer chooses to interact with a brand, across the many business functions of marketing, commerce and service. We like to think of this as the total customer experience.
At the heart of being customer-centric is truly knowing your customer
For businesses that are serious about connecting experiences for their customers across this entire ecosystem, there are of course many considerations, but right at the heart of being customer-centric is truly knowing the customer: understanding them at a human level that transcends simple demographics of lifestyle attributes; and listening and connecting their many moments across their journey to gain a meaningful perspective of their needs and wants from the brand.
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If you can’t connect these many moments, then although you may still be able to collect data that arises from these interactions, you won’t truly know and understand the customer. If you don’t know the customer, you risk that data not providing the insight that you need to create these connected experiences, and not delivering on the cost of collecting it.
It is identity that sits at the core of making these connections, and in Merkle’s latest thought leadership paper you will read more about:
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What identity is and why it is the very foundation for knowing the customer
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The benefits of mastering customer identity
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The risks of not having an identity strategy
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The importance of having a clear identity strategy
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And the way forward for developing an identity strategy
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An identity strategy should give us the confidence to recognize these individuals when we encounter them, and to build a fully connected view of all of their needs. If you’d like to read this paper, you can download it here.
You can’t deliver connected and personal experiences for your customers without the ability to confidently connect their many moments, which a well-formed identity foundation will provide. However, identity is only the foundation for connecting moments and on its own doesn’t lead to engaging experiences for customers.
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The business must use the knowledge the identity solution can connect to know and understand its customers and translate this knowledge into personal moments for customers. To do this, identity must be seen as a customer-focused initiative, not purely a marketing one, and so can be used as a catalyst for cutting across silos and aligning the entire business around the customer vision.
When seen in the broader context of this total customer experience, the benefits of getting it right are significant – increased speed, reduced wastage, incremental sales, comprehensive compliance, relevant product development, improved customer engagement and, with that, the ability to truly compete on the experience battleground.
Listen to the podcast
Tune into our podcast to hear our experts talk about how mastering customer identity is essential to delivering a truly personal customer experience.
In this podcast you will discover the fundamentals of identity and the benefits of mastering customer identity, and how – when you get this right – first-party data can be utilized to deliver a truly personal customer experience.
Talk to us
If you would like to discuss how you can form an identity strategy for your business, please contact us.
Content by The Drum Network member:
Merkle
Merkle is a leading data-driven customer experience management (CXM) company that specializes in the delivery of unique, personalized customer experiences across platforms and devices. For more than 30 years, Fortune 1000 companies and leading nonprofit organizations have partnered with Merkle to maximize the value of their customer portfolios.
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