You’re not getting the most from your customer data.
Unify online and offline data to get the most from your customer data
Know your customers. It has been an aspiration for many companies for years—and one that has become increasingly achievable as types of data have become more robust, and the cost of collecting and analyzing that data has decreased substantially. In fact, customer profiles, generated by customer data platforms (CDP) that promise to unify customer data into a single source of truth, accessible by other systems a company operates, have been presented as a holy grail that everyone needs—the secret to unlocking the ability to achieve precise targeting, giving customers exactly what they want, and earning more loyalty (and revenue) from them. Sounds awesome, right?
So why are your credit card holders still getting three mortgage refi offers and two checking account enticements a month? It’s the same reason why some financial institutions say they aren’t getting enough value out of their CDP.
The problem?
It all comes down to your first party data and how it is integrated. Many firms gloss over how critically important it is to spend the time to understand how their digital and offline data are integrated. Unfortunately, many firms put too much faith in the CDP vendors’ sales folks who over promise to solve all their data problems with a couple of API integrations. The hard truth is that there are technologies out there that can make your digital and offline data integration easier, however, it requires focus and attention, as well as experts who can guide the way.
What good would the thousands of points of unified third party data about your customers if you fail to marry up the vast first party data you have on your own customers? First party data integration. It’s not the sexy part. But it’s the piece that could make all the difference.
Yes, it’s important to know what your customer does, buys, cares about, and searches for outside of your ecosystem via third party data. But that’s like having a painting of the Mona Lisa that ends at her nose. It’s the details of the half-smile that make the painting what it is.
The true nature of customer data
So, let’s talk about customer data and what you need to consider as part of the integration. There are two aspects of a successful customer data profile. One—all things digital—is what everyone is talking about. You know, the unified, centralized, one-stop, golden ticket. It is all the interaction data across all the digital channels. It’s the shiny object most people are chasing when they tap into big data for customer insights. It is a gold mine of information that can help with intent and driving engagement signals.
But what about all the other data? The offline data. All the transaction, application, balance and other account and interaction details that are stored in your legacy systems. I would argue that this is the true steak behind the sizzle. Yet, most organizations are primarily chasing after the shiny digital data. Both need to be solved, sized up and unified in order to really get value out of your customer data.
Chances are, you aren’t getting good offline data right now. For most, it is mediocre at best. Many firms haven’t spent the time to help ensure that data is integrated correctly. Don’t feel bad, there are a lot of companies that aren’t.
So, what’s the holdup?
Truth be told, at many companies across industries, most of this offline data is a mess. It’s not uncommon for, say, a financial institution to have checking account data stored in one place, mortgage data in another, credit card accounts in two different systems—all for the same exact customer. Now, extrapolate on that. This also means you don’t know when someone clicks, applies or is approved for something within your own customer base. Yet, these internally-held data points tend to be the most predictive of what a customer is likely to respond to.
So, it’s not uncommon that when a company hires a CDP provider to create a data profile for a person with just the digital aspect, the software might not even have the capability to include the fact that someone is a customer of the very company doing the data profile. (Hello, mortgage offers sent to a customer who just refinanced with you two weeks ago… a waste of marketing dollars and annoying to your customer.)
The way out? It’s through Customer Link
Cleaning up the messy offline data that sits inside a company’s own servers and systems is key to truly knowing a customer, reducing wasted marketing dollars and getting better results from consumer data platforms and profiles.
Once you’ve married up third party data and organized your own first party data, you can more confidently prioritize and profile high-value customer and business segments
This means, for instance, connecting credit card, mortgage and bank accounts of an individual customer behind the scenes—an undertaking that isn’t as fast as the sexier digital tracking, but it is infinitely as (or more) valuable.
Once you’ve married up third party data and organized your own first party data (digital and offline), you can more confidently prioritize and profile high-value customer and business segments across the customers you already have and with customers you want to bring on board. Then you can truly orchestrate the journey for a customer—after all, now you’ll really know them. Only then can you more actively tailor and optimize how you reach customers, where you reach them and take them from awareness to consideration to a purchase or action across different channels.
The payoff is real
To take the headache out for customers and kick out the repetitiveness and wasted dollars, you have to leverage information on current customers. It is table stakes. In addition, with the deprivation of the third party cookie and the myriad of customer privacy laws that are coming down the pipe, having clean, compliant and complete first party data is a vital asset to glean insights that will no longer be available in the third party data ecosystem. Clean and complete first party data will be needed for things like look-alike modeling, access to second party data exchanges and other partnership opportunities.
You’ll find insights that have been right under your nose, but inaccessible. True meaning from your data. It’s all there. To get the most from it, you’ll want a data platform that gives you a view of your customer profiles in real-time and that gives you call-to-action triggers so you’ll know when you need to act.
Only then can you have a robust, holistic picture of customers, so you can increase your budget, create precise audiences, orchestrate targeted campaigns by market, and be more analytical and personalized with your customers. The holy grail of customer data.
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