How to Power Innovation With a Cloud-based Data Framework
Brands have hit a wall when delivering new value from their current customer data. The solution is not a more expensive investment but a more expansive approach. Ankur Jain, global cloud practice lead, Merkle, shares a future-forward framework to provide greater command of customer data.
In today’s experience-driven economy, brands win or lose by their ability to deliver contextual and compellingly personal experiences. Personalization at scale has become a unifying priority across C-suite leadership due to its proven impact on value generation and growth by improving customer experience and loyalty, building brand differentiation, focusing on customer experience (CX) innovation, and aligning business strategies. Success or failure hinges on the mastery of customer data and the identity, decisioning, and activation capabilities that empower it through each customer’s unique journey.
But brands have hit a wall when it comes to delivering personalization at scale and driving new kinds of value from their current customer data. Massive growth in available data, continually evolving regulations, and a crowded, confusing marketing technology landscape have throttled organizations’ ability to unlock and unleash data for customer experience innovation.
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Why It Matters
The solution is not a more expensive investment but a more expansive approach. We call this the Connected CX Cloud, a purpose-built framework of technologies, strategies, and best practices that enables customer data with greater speed, scale, and agility. With a foundation built on the cloud, it provides a more effective and future-forward platform for making the coveted and seemingly unattainable phase of “personalization at scale” a reality. Having this ability is important to meet customers where they are across channels in a privacy-safe way.
Key advantages of structuring your technology and data capabilities in this way include:
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- Stronger data quality and governance: Arm yourself with a data fabric designed to automate discovery, governance, and consumption of your data for more hyper-personalized experiences while ensuring compliance and accessibility
- True real-time data services: Advanced real-time processing architecture makes data available as soon as it is acquired or created. This fuels personalized experiences with in-the-moment decision-making, which improves customer service, enables more shoppable moments and optimizes strategy and operations across the enterprise.
- Industry-leading identity resolution: Deliver PII-based IDs and data associated with consumers unknown to your brand, with superior increases in site email linkage rates, the ability to connect in real-time to your CX stack, and the most mature first-party tagging solution on the market.
- Greater flexibility and scalability: The Connected CX Cloud can be built on your existing dedicated or heterogeneous ecosystem to accelerate success. Built on the cloud, organizations are given seamless flexibility and scalability to scale efforts up or down as needed.
Key Components of a Connected CX Cloud
Enterprise data platform
To effectively manage the growing volume, variety, and sources of customer data required to deliver true personalization at scale, brands need a modern data foundation that helps them fully harness and command that data. Routed in the cloud, the enterprise data platform is built with data virtualization and a logical data fabric architecture for higher agility, faster speed to value, greater resilience, and lower IT costs. This helps brands overcome three common hurdles: data unification, governance, and democratization.
Identity management hub
Identity is the foundation of a personalized experience. As third-party identifiers fade, brands must take full command with robust first-party identity capabilities that can deliver and measure addressable, personalized experiences across CRM, media, loyalty, and service channels. Connecting customer experiences to your customer identities accelerates the ability to examine and learn from how customers interact with your brand.
Customer data platform
The customer data platform (CDP) collects each piece of new data across channels. It then stores data in the cloud to help orchestration and audience segmentation.
CDP capabilities vary greatly across specific product offerings. Selecting the right vendor is truly unique for each organization based on what capabilities and use cases are needed and what fits your current marketing tech ecosystem. Therefore, a CDP is not a thing but rather a collection of capabilities found across the tech stack. A CDP can fill many voids throughout the tech stack, acting as audience management and customer journey tool, data collection tool, or test-and-learn tool.
Insights and decisioning engine
Analytics is the defining thread that pulls across your entire business, underpinning every decision and fueling constant innovation and improved customer experiences. It can help you seek answers and make a change by deciphering which markets to expand into, measuring performance across channel partners, modernizing reporting tools, and improving data governance.
As customers opt-in, login, and subscribe, this data can be used to build and scale the right audiences and enhance measurement to understand better which tactics are moving the needle. With the Connected CX Cloud framework, organizations can proactively rethink their approaches to marketing measurement in a privacy-safe way.
Intelligent automation
Infusing AI and/or ML throughout your experience architecture is critical to achieving true one-to-one personalization at scale. In the ambition to deliver more contextual and connected experiences, marketing and CX leaders often underestimate the complexities of data within their systems. As more data pours in through those systems, investments in new CX tools designed for real-time experience activation fail to pay off. They are often throttled by latency and outdated data management practices. By replacing traditional data exploration techniques with centralized processing infrastructures using cloud-enabled AI/ML tools, brands can empower real-time personalization, data democratization, and ongoing optimization by understanding what data drives performance for key segments.
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Powering Data Across the Enterprise
With all these capabilities working together, businesses can leverage this cohesive technology framework to activate customer profiles that update in real-time as new data is collected and customer relationships are strengthened.
Moreover, the Connected CX Cloud provides a singular solution to shared challenges facing business, marketing, IT, and other disparate teams across the enterprise, helping organizations democratize and utilize customer data to more efficiently and effectively address priority use cases:
While piecing together this framework can be daunting, the starting point will look different for each organization. First, understand where you are today with personalized marketing and clearly define where you want to go. The use cases should act as your north star that guides the path forward.
What framework do you have to extract more value from your customer data? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
