Top 5 things to consider before choosing a customer data platform
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People want brands to understand and cater to their unique needs and preferences. But when just 15% of consumers actually expect companies to provide personalized experiences, how can brands develop a customer data strategy to deliver on that promise at scale? We recently hosted a webinar with OneTrust to discuss the current challenges marketers face to collect, organize, and action on these vast pools of data, as well as top considerations to keep in mind when researching a customer data platform (CDP).
Making sense of the noise
The truth is––customer data is literally everywhere. And if that wasn’t overwhelming enough, it’s typically coming from disparate sources, multiple customer touchpoints, and often siloed within different departments or systems.
Without a single view of a customer, it’s incredibly challenging for CX professionals to act on those insights in a meaningful way.
Micro-moments matter more than ever
If you put on your consumer hat, think about all of the quick interactions that you have with a brand. How many marketing emails or texts do you receive on a given day? How many of them are about products or services that are irrelevant?
For a brand, the time and money spent acquiring a valuable customer could be lost in any one of those “micro-moments.” Consumers now have shorter attention spans and less patience, so marketers need to be attuned to every interaction. It only takes one bad experience to lose a valuable customer. In fact, 43% of people noted in an Oracle survey that they would dump a brand if it failed to meet their expectations.
What’s a marketer to do? Be customer-obsessed
A customer-obsessed enterprise operates differently, focusing its strategy, operations, and budget on the customer.
Understanding your audience requires brands to know who their customers are, what they value, and why on a deeper level. To accomplish this, it’s essential to listen by absorbing all of the signals that a customer is giving you, use those insights to nurture them, and then evaluate those tactics to determine how and where to optimize for the next interaction.
How CDPs can help
One of the most powerful tools in a CX professional’s toolkit is a CDP. Forrester’s “Getting Customer Data Management Right” report details that CX leaders are 2.5x more likely to increase customer lifetime value as a result of unified data management. Further, more than 7 in 10 say a unified customer profile is important or critical to personalization.
CDPs empower entire enterprises with a single view of the customer. That way, different departments can work together effectively because they’re able to see if or when someone is interacting with a specific customer. Businesses can then deliver consistent messages and integrated engagement, leading to happier customers.
5 top attributes you need in a CDP
At this point you might be thinking, “This is great, I’m intrigued, but now where do I start my research journey?” Here are the most significant points to consider when assessing options.
1. Privacy & consumer-centricity
CDPs should be privacy-focused and able to implement processes for evolving data privacy regulations, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), with others in the works. Meeting these requirements can be cumbersome when different consumer data is buried in disconnected systems and can be easily overlooked. It’s important to consider integration capabilities with privacy, consent and preferences tools to address compliance and put privacy at the forefront of any customer strategy.
"It is imperative that we activate the data hold as customers and consumers expect nothing less than a personalized experience. Additionally, consumers are ever more aware of their data footprint and have much greater expectations of brands regarding how their data is collected, processed and shared," notes Zac Faruque, OneTrust Preference Choice Offering Analyst. "Trust and transparency are critical for organizations to succeed. The OneTrust and Oracle collaboration seamlessly offers both."
2. Flexible data management
Marketers use so many different sources––email, analytics, CRM, ecommerce, and social sites, just to name a few––and a CDP helps unify all the data from those sources into one unified profile. And since your data is only useful if it’s accurate, a CDP is also helpful to detect and eliminate errors while providing opportunities for data enrichment.
3. Scalable identity management
Almost 60% of brands face hardships with how precisely their identity resolution programs are able to message the correct person across devices and touchpoints. CDPs also ingest all types of identifiers across the ecosystem from unknown to known. This enables marketers to cleanse and reconcile fragmented identities and match IDs in real-time.
4. Real-time intelligence
An instant, unified view of customers across online and offline touchpoints affords marketers with strategic competitive advantage. Powered by AI, CDPs give marketers access to real-time behavioral data and decisioning for better segmentation and propensity modeling. Coupled with performance reports, brands receive confident direction to drive future optimizations.
5. Omnichannel activation
Leading CDPs integrate with your current solutions across front- and back-office to deliver personalized experiences your customers crave and expect. When all these systems talk to one another, marketers make confident, data-informed decisions to deliver the right message at the right time on the right channel, fitting seamlessly into the consumer’s life.
With a solid data strategy and the right CDP, every marketer can achieve their business goals. Oracle CX Unity is uniquely positioned to help marketers make sense of their vast pools of data and use them as fuel for delivering unforgettable customer experiences.
For more insights, watch our on-demand webinar with OneTrust.
by Liz Sze, outbound product manager, Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience