Channel-Centric to Customer-Centric: How Unified Data + Data Activation Takes Marketers There

As a mature marketer working in a complex, multi-channel environment, you’re striving to deliver seamless customer experiences at scale. But even mature marketers are often constrained to act as channel-centric marketers instead of customer-centric marketers because their data sources and activation plans are driven by the primary channels they operate in, rather than individual customer journey events.

In the last issue of the CDP in Practice Explainer seriesOpens a new window , we introduced you to the idea of Customer Data Activation Platforms (CDAPs) that act as empowered CDPs by activating unified data intelligently, at scale. In this issue, we dig deeper into how a mature B2C marketer can effectively bridge the gap between unified data and activation for customer-centric marketing in practice.

The secret lies in a two-pronged approach that addresses challenges of both – the data and the activation.

This approach requires an acceptance of the fact that unified data as delivered by a CDP does not automatically mean automated, intelligent and orchestrated activation of that data.

It also means contextualizing the ‘single view of the customer’ as it relates to activation. This definition of ‘single view’ goes beyond data storage or completeness that may be designed for other use-cases. The activation-focused ‘single view’ understands the context of the multiple events in a customer’s journey and stitches them together in a way that the intelligent decisioning engine can use to run orchestrated campaigns across channels.

The characteristics of this kind of customer-centric marketing are

• Acting on unified data in real-time
• Being more intelligent in the experiences you deliver – more 1:1, more personalized, more contextual
• Unifying the experience across different channels

Mature marketers are realizing that delivering orchestrated campaigns based on unified data is not as simple as buying a single technology solution or building superficial channel integrations.  In fact, it requires addressing not one, but two major challenges with distinct solutions.

Challenge # 1: Managing siloed Data

Challenge # 2: Managing siloed Experiences

1. The problem of ‘siloed data’

In channel-centric enterprise-scale companies, each team owns a different channel and relies on a different source of truth for customer data. Sales teams rely on CRMs and analytics teams rely on data warehouses. Marketing teams are the biggest victims of the cross-channel environment – ad tech managers, social media managers, web managers, mobile marketing managers etc. – all build and execute plans based on their own data sources. These channel-specific tools not only generate customer data built on a limited view of the larger customer relationship; they lead teams to disagree on which data is accurate. Thus, business teams end up on very different paths to managing customer experience. This fragmented data management – the problem of ‘data silos’ – will ultimately result in fragmented customer experiences.

2. The problem of ‘siloed experiences’

Since customer experience decisions are being made at a channel level based on channel-specific data (ad tech software makes decisions based on ad-interaction data, email software makes decisions based on email campaign outcomes, the website system focuses on website session data etc.), customers will have disconnected experiences on different channels. This is the problem of ‘siloed or fragmented experiences.’ There is no way to deliver a seamless experience when the campaigns are built on siloed data and using separate execution systems with superficial integration and/or orchestration.

Solving for Seamless Customer Experiences in Complex Multi-Channel Environments

Enterprise-scale marketers in complex multi-channel environments need to address the goal of seamless experience with two distinct but interlinked strategies. Let’s take a look:

1. Customer Data Infrastructure Platforms (CDI) to address the problem of siloed data:

• Capturing data robustly with well-modeled APIs and SDKs from different systems
• Cleansing and normalizing the data (ETL or “Extract, Transform, Load”)
• Tag management and Data governance

CDIs bring everything into the same view for business users – and along with a CDAP, which can help build relationships between the data – are able to organize the data by the customer and by events related to that customer – not by the channel where the event occurred (loyalty program, shopping cart or website).

By solving the data silo problem, CDIs act as ‘reliable data orchestrators’ since the outcome is a single source of raw but clean, reliable, event-driven data that can be routed to different systems – from analytics and automation to audience management for ad tech – and their respective business users.

2. Customer Data Activation Platforms (CDAP) to address the problem of siloed experience:

As we just saw, CDI’s can solve the challenge of unified data. Unfortunately, unifying the data alone cannot solve the problem of fragmented customer experiences. Marketers also need to activate that unified data in an intelligent, orchestrated way, across all channels.  While CDI ensures we capture each event of the customer journey, the people building the Customer Experience need to understand it. By ‘activating’, we mean moving from a series of connected customer events to a holistic, seamless customer experience.

That is where the CDAPs come in. They consume data from the CDI to build real-time customer profiles, and start making automated, dynamic decisions by correlating the unified data with what content (creative and offer) to serve each customer, on what channel, at what time. It works with existing marketing automaton and channel apps to not just execute but orchestrate campaigns across channels with real-time decisions enabling ever stronger campaign outcomes. 

Why Digital-first, Multi-channel Marketers need CDI + CDAP to Bridge the Data – Activation Gap

To summarize, mature, enterprise-scale multi-channel marketers need both CDIs and CDAPs to achieve the goal of seamless, personalized, dynamic customer experiences because:

1. They solve different problems:

Customer Data Infrastructure Platforms (CDIs) aim to:

• Solve the technology problem of siloed data – data cleansing, governance, organizing and access through APIs is a core part of the offering
• Change the paradigm from data storing/organizing/completeness to data unification

Customer Data Activation Platforms (CDAPs) aim to:

• Solve the marketing & CX problem of siloed experiences – intelligent decisioning is a core part of the offering
• Change the paradigm of experiences from batch-and-blast + channel-centric (the same experience delivered to millions of customers on one channel at a time) to 1:1-customer-centric (millions of unique experiences, tailored to each customer, and consistent across channels)

2. They serve different customers:

• The customer for CDI is a CTO’s team or a product team.
• The customer for a CDAP is a CMO’s team or a chief customer officer’s team activating Customer Data: Realities, Challenges, and Missed Opportunities

Both put together can help solve the problem of designing and delivering the Customer Experience problem by moving beyond superficial channel integration to behavior-triggered, intelligent, orchestrated marketing automation. If you don’t have the customer data infrastructure, you cannot activate the data; but having the right infrastructure is not sufficient to activate the data either – you need the right automated decisioning systems to do that, in real-time and at scale.

It is important to remind our readers that there is no perfect silver bullet solution – you can have a combination of multiple solutions – and even multiple CDPs – to get what you need! In many ways, most data-mature companies already have some elements of CDI and CDAP – many CDPs offer elements of both – but for digital-first, omni-channel B2C marketers, with a complex product or service catalog that need to operate at speed and scale, a robust CDI+ CDAP  model is worth exploring if the goal is to move to true customer-centric marketing.

Read the full 4-part CDM in Practice Explainer Series hereOpens a new window

Part 1: Activating Customer Data: Realities, Challenges and Missed Opportunities

Part 3: Intelligent Customer Engagement: Data + Automation + Intelligence to Optimize the Customer JourneyOpens a new window

Next steps to execute a cross-channel campaign management strategy