Asia Pacific The Coca-Cola Company

 

Customer data platforms (CDPs) have been on the market for nearly a decade. However, many brands still do not realize the benefits they can expect from this platform.

Departments at any organization may have the same ultimate objective, but gaps in data often prevent a connected, consistent customer experience. A marketing team will create a campaign and hand it off to the sales team, but they will not have visibility into how it is performed.

A customer will call customer service to ask about a marketing promotion. But the customer service rep has no insight into what promotion the customer received from marketing. In-store customer loyalty programs are not integrated with a customer’s online profile and their rewards do not transfer.

The list of fragmented experiences between customer touchpoints continues with a lack of customer profiling in a unified way resulting in insight loss and poor experience.

When first-party data overtook cookies as the top currency for marketers, we entered the CDP era.

Consumer expectation is that brand should know who I am. I can trust a brand with my information, and the brand should know about all my previous interactions whenever I engage with them. For instance, I assume customer service knows about the product I ordered. They recognize the promotion I am referring to without me having to provide context.

However, most enterprise customer-facing touchpoints are not linked. They cannot keep up with the volume, velocity, or variety of data to create a seamless experience for customers.

Today, three fundamental shifts are occurring in the CDP space that will help us deliver on the promise of the “right person, right message, right time.”

Each of these CDP developments involves a new way of thinking about customer data platforms.

1. Customer identity and access management (CIAM) becomes core to the MarTech stack

2. Innovative marketing tactics will leverage backend connectivity

3. The advent of true enterprise CDP

While one of the primary drivers of CDP technology, and will continue to be, driving more personalized experiences in marketing (better e-mail) and advertising (more relevant ads), true customer experience must go beyond those channels and consider more human interactions: call center conversations, sales interactions, in-store moments at the point of sales terminal and even what happens at a vending machine.

Your CDP is live! What comes next?

When the CDP is live, collecting data, and offering actionable personalization insights, marketing teams will need to put those insights into action. The actions inspired by CDPs will be from ethically collected data with cross-company support and should be easy to slot in as priorities for campaigns, promotion updates, and more.

You have already done all the work and felt each of the shockwaves. Now it is time to get the value out of your new platform––and start improving the customer experience while you are at it.

Turns out, each shockwave builds a better mountain for your company and your customers to stand on.

Advancing the next phase of CDP

CDPs improve customer experience and we must define customer experience more broadly with a “beyond marketing” imperative, what will drive CDP success?

But the “know” element of the modern MarTech stack cannot just be about managing consumer identity keys. While creating a single profile from dozens of identity keys (e-mail addresses, cookies, device IDs, mobile advertising IDs, etc.) is critical, the real challenge is mastering the ability to continually enrich that profile with the metadata that drives value.

“Today, three fundamental shifts are occurring in the CDP space that will help us deliver on the promise of the ‘right person, right message, right time’.”

Namely, what are the most recent e-mails someone opened, the last five SKUs they bought online, the last three calls they had with the call center (and their outcome), and how many loyalty points do they have?

The first is obvious: identity. Building a modern data management infrastructure begins and ends with mastering customer identity – the notion that knowing your customer is the key to everything and is the basis for the modern technology stack.

Why does customer identity access management an essential component in your MarTech stack and how does it help retain customers?

As we look ahead to the future of CDP, the first thing to focus on should include changing the way we think about “identity.” In a world where digital-only interactions have increased rapidly from a baseline of 25 percent to over 50 percent, the way customers access digital experiences is more important than ever. It is odd that a key foundation of customer identity management (CIAM) has not had a real seat at the table with marketers and advertisers.

CIAM services such as customer registration, self-service account management, consent, and preference management, single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, access management, and directory services have been almost entirely the domain of the IT buyer.

For brands in the MarTech and AdTech spaces, “identity” meant cross-device graphs, user matching with big platforms like Google, and maybe “onboarding” through services like LiveRamp. All of those critical services were delivered without the intervention of the customer.

Simplified customer identity management protects and enhances customer experience. Without a customer identity management plan the laborious requirements of customers can reduce conversions, and push customers toward competitors with easier authentication processes. CIAM and CDP do not require customers to log in each time they visit an e-commerce site or interact with your brand. Instead, customers will be welcomed back and given a seamless experience.

End to End Customer Consent Management

Brands must have a scalable way of capturing detailed consent and managing preferences from the entire customer touchpoints. This is today’s version of “permission-based marketing.” Thanks to GDPR and continuing privacy legislation, it is no longer a marketing framework, but a real requirement.

Enterprise consent and preference management enable brands to start a meaningful value exchange. As a brand, if you offer me something I never asked for, you have failed.