Data driven customer experience: Delivering value at the right time
Data-driven customer experience puts the customer first, delivering exactly what they need at just the right time.
Many businesses talk about being customer centric, but there’s a lot of room for improvement. How do you get to customer centricity, where customers are truly at the heart of everything?
Customer centricity – aligning all products, services, and processes on the customer – requires true company transformation.
Why is focusing on the customer so important? Revenue is needed to drive a company like fuel is needed to drive a car. However, the purpose of a car is not to refuel; it’s to bring someone from A to B. Likewise, the purpose of a company isn’t to make money, but rather to build great products and services to help customers.
How to be customer centric: Break down silos
To achieve true customer centricity, what’s most important is that all departments work close together. However, this collaboration is often blocked because there are three types of silos in most companies:
- Structure silos
- Mindset silos
- Data silos
If we manage to change this, we transform the company. Not an easy endeavor.
Customer centricity: Transformation, not translation
Truly putting the customer first requires real transformation, not just window dressing. What’s the difference?
If we place just a yellow shell around the old blue circle this is no transformation — it’s only what I would describe as “translation.” Getting to customer centricity requires changing the core… and the core of everything is data. From a board perspective, if we want to transform the company, but overlook the data silos, we’re making a big mistake.
Let’s take an example. Today, sales, marketing and services have different perspectives of the customer. Best case, their systems are syncing, but at the end of the day they work with different customer profiles.
But if we implement a central customer profile, all these departments have the same understanding of the customer and the same mindset. With this, they start working closer together. So, by eliminating data silos, we have eliminated the mindset and structure silos, too.
Never break the chain: Use customer profiles to drive consistent CX
Imagine your customer experience as a chain, each link representing an interaction between your customer and your brand. Every good interaction adds another solid link and makes the chain stronger. But it just takes one bad experience – one rusted, cracked link – to break it.
Centralized customer profile: Best practices and key elements
What’s the best way to implement a central customer profile? There are many systems out there, including CRM, master data management (MDM), or a data management platform (DMP). These systems aren’t new and have their own use case.
CRM systems are used for sales and marketing and have no interaction data from the customer, similar to an MDM. A DMP is made for advertising systems like an ad-server. DMPs focus on third-party data, which is stored for maximum of 90 days.
Here are core elements a modern system for building a central customer profile must have:
- Agnostic approach. It can’t be made for one use case like sales or marketing. It must connect all systems with customer data, including backend systems like ERP.
- Bring all data together — first-, second- and third-party data
- Act in real-time to deliver value to the customer at the moment of time when they need it
- Act cross-channel and cross-device
How to get customer centricity: The CDP foundation
The only system which can deliver this is a customer data platform (CDP). The CDP Institute defines a CDP as “packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.”
There are many CDPs built out of a marketing SaaS solution, which don’t fit this definition. On the other side are CDPs that take an agnostic approach, which do.
Agnostic CDPs have three main use cases: IT, business, and board level.
Within each use case, there are many ways a CDP can be applied. The chart above illustrates three as an example.
As you see, the applications for a CDP are very broad, much broader than you might expect. But what’s most important is how it can work as a transformation enabler.
Some industries such as publishing are at the forefront of digital transformation and customer experience, while others are far behind. The transformation of mindset and structure is essential to becoming a power-house when it comes to customer-centricity.
