We live in an always-on world where customers are increasingly interacting with brands across multiple touchpoints and “channels”. Not only have newer channels of engagement emerged, but more of the traditional broadcast channels have become “people addressable”. Ten years ago, we could not have imagined that banks would be engaging with customers over chatbots, or that TV advertising could be segmented and personalized. At the same time, traditional channels like email, SMS, direct mail, telesales and more have continued to stay relevant.
The Challenge of Intelligent Customer Engagement
Having so many people-addressable channels at their disposal gives brands the opportunity to drive true 1:1 Customer Engagement at scale. However, brands must overcome the challenge of delivering relevant and consistent messages on every touchpoint. This can be challenging with an ever-expanding set of tools and apps for each channel. Each of these channels and tools has a limited view of the customer, and that makes it challenging for marketers to intelligently engage customers. Common challenges include:
- One-to-One: How can I personalize at a one-to-one level on each of these tools, merchandising the best offer or content for each customer at the right time?
- Real-Time: How do I understand my customers and respond to them in real-time?
- Cross-Channel: How do I deliver a consistent experience across touchpoints?
Without a complete view of customer data to aid these decisions, marketers often resort to simple batch-and-blast techniques that lead to irrelevance and incoherence across channels. How can brands escape a fragmented customer experience, or worse still, an experience that lacks any relevance to customers?
Activated Customer Data is the Glue
The problem lies in putting channels at the center of our processes rather than people. Marketers regularly build programs for paid media, email, and so on. But that approach means we’re always following (and attempting to catch up to) the customer. When we flip the order to focus on the customer first, the output becomes much more valuable. Customer data contains clues to customers’ intents and interests, but the data often lies dormant and disconnected from most channels. Activating this dormant data can help brands move from channel-centric to customer-centric.
In an always-on world, relevant customer engagement involves making millions of intelligent decisions in real-time, across multiple channels. Intelligent decisions that are made with a consistent view of customer data can help brands deliver a highly relevant and consistent experience for each customer. In other words, activated Customer Data is the glue that can make customer engagement relevant again. That is why I am excited about Blueshift’s launch of the Customer Data Activation Platform (CDAP) today.
Announcing the Customer Data Activation Platform (CDAP; “SEE-dap”)
The CDAP is a vision we have been working towards with our previous release, including AI-Powered Cross-Channel Journeys, Predictive Audience Syndications, and Live Personalization. Today, we released our App Framework that completes our vision. In simple words, the CDAP helps brands deliver intelligent customer engagement on every touchpoint on the tools they already use, by activating a full circle view of their Customer Data.
It’s not hard to imagine when and where a platform like this would be useful, but some key use cases include:
- Personalize messages across engagement channels. Increase the relevance of messaging across online, offline, or proprietary custom built apps including email, mobile, direct mail, and chat
- Increase paid marketing return on ad spend (ROAS). Identify high-intent customers through predictive modeling and keep them continuously updated in Google, Facebook, Twitter, Taboola, Linkedin, etc. through Blueshift Audience Sync.
- Coordinate and optimize customer experience across channels. Trigger real-time, behavior-based messaging across customer touchpoints. Self-learning models optimize the journey flow.
- Power CRM, analytics, and other systems with the latest user behaviors and dynamic segments. Automatically update and keep all your BI tools, analytics systems, CRM systems, and other technologies synced.
- Streamline the customer experience across the full customer journey. Have customer service teams and messaging applications access a complete customer understanding and trigger real-time actions.
You can read the full press release here.
Winning through Data Activation
For years, brands have been investing in projects that help them “manage” data. While data management is a worthy goal, successful brands are more often defined by whether they can activate that data to drive intelligent customer experiences. Winners move beyond working for their data, and put their customer data to work for them.
Activating your customer data leads to a virtuous cycle for brands:
- Customers interact with your brand and leave behind some first party data
- Activating this data helps deliver personalized experiences
- Personalization leads to trust with customers
- The increased trust leads customers to interact more with the brand and share more data
This virtuous cycle of “data -> personalization -> trust -> more data” is the key to winning with today’s customers. In fact, a recent study by Blueshift and Techvalidate showed that the brands that activate more of their customer data also drive revenue success.
With the Customer Data Activation Platform, brands finally have the full set of tools they need for activating their customer data on every touchpoint with their customers.
