Customer Data Platform Key to Driving Real-time Marketing and Customer Experience

When the demand for better consumer experiences is high, companies that want to be successful are being driven by data and the insights it can provide. They know they need data to drive personalization, but many lack the tools to make that data digestible and useful at a reasonable cost.

Are you:

• Struggling to close the loop between your customer data and develop actionable metrics?
• Finding it challenging to optimize your different sales and marketing channels and orchestrate them effectively?

Hitachi Solutions experts Alexandre Crespo-Perez and Brittany LeMaro tackled these questions in a recent webinar and distilled how a customer data platform can help bring data together and connect all your organization’s touchpoints so you can deliver clear, consistent, and personalized messaging.

What customers expect

Post-pandemic, nearly every organization has a digital presence. Many were spun up without the needed forethought into how that presence and related technology tools work together to serve customers in the best way possible.

“Now, maybe I have an app that’s managing my chatbot experience and an app that’s managing my social experience and another app that’s driving my customer success team, and another app that’s driving my e-mail,” said LeMaro, a Hitachi Solutions Customer Engagement senior architect. “There is increasing demand for those tools and systems to be integrated across all customer touchpoints, and it’s trickling down into all industries and all sizes of organizations.

 “We’ve all received an e-mail or received a communication from a company, where you’ve already made a purchase and you’re getting sold that same product again. It feels like the company is out of touch. When we don’t get the right messaging, the poor experience stands out even more,” she said.

The unified customer profile

When customer messaging is misaligned it’s an indicator that internal systems are working in silos and making decisions based on disparate data points. If you have a different profile in marketing and a different profile in sales, it’s impossible to work in a cohesive fashion.

To build that 360-degree view of the customer, companies need to collect data from different systems in one place via a customer data platform (CDP). The data can be unified from all related systems and sources including social media, email, web analytics, and first-party CRMs, to create a comprehensive profile of the customer’s interests, behaviors, preferences, and needs.

When companies have a unified customer profile, marketers can tailor their messaging and promotions to each customer, increasing the likelihood of a positive response and conversion. Moreover, a unified profile can help marketers identify patterns and trends in customer behavior, so they can optimize strategies that will improve engagement and retention.

Once you have the profile, LeMar said, you can understand who your customers are and then use that as the foundation to build all the messaging. “Basically, marketing can be the department that takes all of those touchpoints and ties them all together. And it’s all through using cloud technologies and a CDP.”

An intelligent customer data platform

CDP deployments are optimized for big data processing, so they can match and merge data across various sources and handle large data sets in real time. CDPs can also connect to machine learning and AI tools to provide more predictive analytics.

CDPs become ‘intelligent’ when they have the ability to use advanced technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing, and predictive analytics to drive insights from data and improve decision-making.

“You can learn the channels that people engage with the most, and how much time they spend engaging with your messaging,” said Crespo-Perez, Hitachi Solutions Chief Technology Officer for Retail and CPG. “You can get predictive insights, like those customers who are likely to purchase again. You won’t be shooting in the dark to make sense of all this data on your own.”

Real-time marketing

These insights go far beyond traditional demographics– ensuring that your campaigns can be extremely specific and targeted and generated in or near real-time. One simple example, Crespo-Perez said, is being able to dynamically generate personalized messages based on geographic region. “So, I could have one message and send it to one set of customers in a cold weather state, and another set to send to customers in a warm weather state.”

He also mentioned advanced segmentation capabilities, such as incorporating credit scores. “For example, let’s say there are some customers that may or may not be a fit for my product based on their credit score. I would love to have that information accounted for within my specific segment to better target personalized marketing.”

Next steps

If you’re interested in learning how to remove data silos, reduce data duplication, and facilitate customer insights to build true cross-channel marketing campaigns at scale, let’s talk. Hitachi Solutions is a premier Microsoft partner with the technical and industry know-how to bring retail solutions to life.

Companies and leading brands are moving fast to find new and innovative strategies to stay ahead of the curve. With our expertise and unique ability to innovate, Hitachi Solutions can help you do the same. For more detail, you can check out this whitepaper on how to kickstart a comprehensive customer service and experience strategy.