3 Things To Consider When Looking To Obtain a Unified View of Customer

Learn from Eugene Saburi what marketers should consider when looking for a single view of the customer.

November 8, 2022

A unified view of the customer helps marketers unlock personalization, which is the key to business growth. However, most marketers don’t have a 360-degree view of the customer. Here, Eugene Saburi, chief business officer,Treasure Data, explains what marketers should consider when looking for a single view of the customer.

“Single,” “unified,” and “360-degree view,” are descriptors marketers throw around when promoting their customer data capabilities. For many, obtaining a single customer view has become the marketing endgame, and for a good reason. A unified view of the customer that considers every touchpoint unlocks true personalization. No more wasted ad dollars on the wrong message, let alone the wrong audience. This is the key to success in today’s business world.

By establishing conduits to various channels and data sources, marketers today are capable of compiling a complete record of every customer. But that does not necessarily mean that these same marketers have attained the all-important single customer view. Brands also require a neutral platform that can not only ingest data from the right sources but also has the underlying technology to harmonize seemingly disparate touchpoints. Without these tools, marketers cannot claim to have a true 360-degree view of the customer. They have simply inundated themselves with data with no insights to come of it.

It can often be easy to conflate customer data with customer intelligence, and yet, the value of customer intelligence should not be confused with data itself. Data only becomes intelligence after it is translated into actionable steps that drive brand engagement and sales. With the right data and analytics infrastructure in place, marketers can actually dig below the golden profile of the customer, enabling them to perform critical marketing functions such as frequency cap, measurement, and more in real-time at scale. For brands looking to obtain a single customer view and beyond, consider the following.

See More: Improve NPS Collection and Opt-in Handling to Enhance Customer Experience

Interoperability

The need to combine data across these silos has become critical as customers expect a unified, consistent experience based on complete information about their relationship with the company. Connecting data across silos also helps brands, as it allows them to make more profitable decisions, eliminating costs that come with duplicate functions and workflows.

In today’s environment, most marketing tech stacks include data warehouses, data lakes, CRMs, DMPs and CDPs. What makes this challenging is that not every solution on the market is conducive to integrations. As a result, IT teams find themselves with ad-hoc infrastructure that may work at the moment but will not be able to update and scale with the company. Above all else, companies must prioritize interoperable technologies that can connect with outside systems and completely unify the tech stack. Only then will marketing departments have the ability to begin collecting and organizing the data behind each and every customer touchpoint. CDPs often serve as the focal point of this architecture, so, at the very least, brands should ensure that theirs can connect to all relevant systems.

Identifying Users

The truth is that advertisers cannot extract any real intelligence from a customer touchpoint unless it can be tied to a previous or future touchpoint. Third-party cookies on Chrome and (at one time) Firefox, as well as mobile IDs from Apple and Android, were the go-to tools to track consumers throughout the open web. But with the deprecation of the cookie, advertisers have begun to explore alternative identity solutions that authenticate audiences across different channels.

With many top digital publishers adopting different identifiers, blue-chip brands now have to resolve these disparate identity solutions to match datasets. Consequently, a platform that cannot connect the UID2.0 identifier with RampID will quickly become inferior in the post-cookie ecosystem. There is now an immediate need for customer relationship management tools that are interoperable with the leading IDs in the market. Advertising technology that does not have key integrations with the leading identity solutions will quickly lose the scale needed to fully map (and leverage) the customer journey.

Consent Management

Once advertisers can resolve identity, they can then begin to actually track consent across the entire customer journey. This was easier in digital advertising’s golden age when brands merely had to service creative that would likely resonate with the audience. Now and in the near future, brands will have to ensure that they have explicit consent to collect and process users’ personal data. This, of course, presents a great challenge to those that are not ready for it.

The ever-evolving privacy rules in the U.S. are pointing towards a regulatory scheme where brands will have to keep track of a user’s consent status at all times. Without a platform that can track a customer across the entire customer journey, brands run the risk of losing the consent signal in the media supply chain. Advertisers must adopt a customer data management platform that can not only resolve a user’s identity but also maintain the consent preferences that are attached to it.

See More: 3 Market Research Methods To Develop an Exceptional B2B CX Strategy 

Acting on the Journey

Addressing authenticated audiences is a crucial step in personalized marketing, but it is only just a step. From there, marketers need direction to maximize customer engagement. The aforementioned customer data platform is a solution that can collect data from a variety of sources as well as synthesize the data to inform the journey. For example, the top customer data platforms in the market offer data cleansing capabilities so that companies can automatically remove irrelevant or inaccurate information from the equation, ensuring that the data is trustworthy in real-time. With the data now cleaned, brands are ready to apply analytics so that every numerical insight can be uncovered.

Today’s AI- and ML-powered tools that help derive insights from the numbers can also be used for testing that creates even more inputs to consider. Customer data platforms today need the intelligence and the flexibility to perform A & B testing so that campaigns are only delivering messages that are most relevant and consistent to the individual, measuring incremental lift in the process. The combined effort to tap into ad networks, connect to certain channels, and build integrations is nothing to sneeze at. However, these enterprises, by themselves, will not automatically start enriching a brand’s customer intelligence. Advertisers need a marketing-tech stack that goes above and beyond the traditional customer relationship management solution.

What steps have you taken to obtain a unified view of the customer? Let us know on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .

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Eugene Saburi
Eugene Saburi

Chief Business Officer, Treasure Data

Eugene Saburi is the Chief Business Officer at Treasure Data, a leading customer data platform. Earlier in his career, Saburi spent nearly two decades at Microsoft spanning across the U.S. and Japan. At Microsoft, he served in a variety of executive roles, including General Manager in the Server and Tools business, where he had global responsibility for products including SQL Server, Windows Server and Azure. Before joining Treasure Data, Saburi was a founding Partner of GeoFusion, an advisory firm that helped late-stage technology start-ups. Prior to that he served as the President at Adobe.
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