How a Customer Data Platform uses real-time data to deliver greater marketing ROI

As they move across the online landscape, your customers leave their digital footprints in many different locations – on your website or mobile app, on social media, in their responses to promotional emails. It’s a treasure trove of information that will only become more important as CPG brands embrace Direct-to-Consumer strategies. The challenge is to bring all of this data together in one place to drive greater insight into their behaviours and demands. That’s where a Customer Data Platform (CDP) comes in and it opens up a myriad of possibilities – including that of a Digital Twin of the Customer.

Touchpoint

Consumers leave footprints across the digital landscape every time they interact with a brand, whether via a website, a mobile app, or social media. The challenge for CPG companies is to consolidate this data into a single, unified view to provide a comprehensive understanding of customer behavior and preferences. This is where a Customer Data Platform (CDP) comes in, not only breaking down data siloes to provide a single 360o view of the customer, but cleaning, deduplicating, and enriching that data, ensuring accuracy and reliability for analysis and personalization.

This gives CPG companies real-time access to customer data, allowing for timely decision-making and personalized interactions and powering personalized marketing campaigns. So, by effectively leveraging CDPs and first-party data, CPG companies can build stronger customer relationships, drive loyalty, and gain a competitive edge in the market.

Today, your marketing and CX activities can only be as good as the data on which they are based – and how well you are able to use it. Your customers expect a high degree of personalization – and that you adapt to their preferences rather than be forced down a journey of your choosing. This puts a premium on customer insights.

More and more marketers are recognizing that they need access to rich, real-time customer data in order to deliver this. In fact, according to DataStax, 78% of marketers feel that real time data is a “must-have,” not a “nice to have”. Yet, according to Gartner, only 14% of organizations have achieved a 360-degree view of the customer.

Introducing the Customer Data Platform

At Orange Business, we define a CDP as “a solution designed to centralize customer data from various sources to enable omni-channel activation. It offers model flexibility, real-time actionable capabilities, and is typically managed through a user interface. (!)”

A Customer Data Platform collects real-time data from various sources and builds a single customer profile, providing a comprehensive view of the customer's journey, behavior, preferences and interests. This allows businesses to understand their customers better and make more informed decisions.

By leveraging the advanced analytics and automation incorporated into a CDP, you can take your marketing to the next level – building insights, creating personalized marketing campaigns, streamlining marketing operations, and complying with data privacy regulations.

How a CDP pulled it all together and powered marketing at a major food group

Challenge

This leading European food producer generates huge volumes of customer data across multiple brands. However, data was typically scattered and siloed, and the company lacked one, true, 360-degree view of its customers and their activities.

Solution

Orange Business worked with the company to gather customer data from across 30+ brands and data owners and then to set up and deploy a CDP. The goal was to drive value for consumers without relying on data from retailers. The solution included:

• Consent management as a key pillar of the platform

• Omnichannel enablement through centralized CDP

• Cloud-based solution to reduce CAPEX

Outcomes

The CDP implementation dramatically increased customer data quality through centralized cleaning, duplication and merging rules via a marketeer-friendly low-code environment. It also reduced time to market for marketing activities and had a positive impact on CAPEX costs

The Value of a CDP

Today, many organizations position CDPs as part of a broader customer data, AI and activation ecosystem, where the CDP acts as the real-time customer activation and decisioning layer on top of enterprise data platforms. A traditional 360-degree view is no longer enough to meet customer expectations and deliver a CX that sets you apart from competitors. Instead, you need a CDP to provide real-time customer profiles that change and update as your customers change. This will help you maximize your marketing enable omnichannel campaign orchestration, keep your customer data secure and improve CX overall

Maximize Marketing ROI

By automating data collection, integration, and activation, you can streamline your marketing operations, minimizing manual efforts and reducing costs. A better understanding of your customers means you can create more targeted, personalized and effective campaigns that deliver higher conversion rates for the same budget. You can also make adjustments to your campaign based on real-time data. A CDP can also improve the attribution conversions to individual marketing channels, allowing for more efficient allocation of marketing budgets.

Reduce Time to Market

As noted above, a CDP can automate data activation to increase time to market for any activity. All relevant customer data is therefore centralized into an actionable 360° customer profile providing a single solution for segmentation building can help dramatically decrease your time to market on new customer journeys. This means marketers can more quickly create customer segmentation profiles for their campaigns (see also the section on Digital Twin of a Customer below) and also simplify testing and measurement.

Improve Customer Experience

A CDP can help you drive enhanced customer service and support. Understanding each customer’s preferences and behavior can drive enhanced overall CX and increased customer satisfaction. This comes in the shape of faster resolution times – bio; built on having a complete overview of each customer’s interactions – or proactive support, where your CDP helps you identify at-risk customers and target retention efforts more effectively.

By collecting and organizing data from all customer touchpoints, a CDP can help you visualize the entire customer journey, from initial awareness to post-purchase engagement. In doing so, it can help you identify points of friction and help you optimize the experience for your customers.

Enable Omnichannel Orchestration

With its integration capabilities of both inbound and outbound channels, a CDP succeeds in a key marketing goal: being able to offer customers a true, consistent, omnichannel experience. It helps to ensure consistent messaging across all channels, providing a seamless customer experience. By understanding customer preferences and behavior, GPG companies can optimize their marketing efforts across different channels. Additionally, the centralized and real-time segmentation that this approach enables can drastically reduce time-to-market for omni-channel campaigns and journeys, resulting in better overall marketing performance and ROI.

Secure Customer Data

A CDP is also a powerful tool in securing your customers’ personal information: it leverages customer consent and identifies customer preferences to deliver a robust, secure platform that is compliant with data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA and helps to builds trust with your customers.

A CDP also consolidates customer data from various sources into a single, centralized location.  This reduces the risk of data fragmentation and inconsistencies, making it easier to manage and protect your data and enabling better governance and control over access and usage. Data cleansing and quality assurance features are often included in a CDP, helping to ensure that data is accurate and consistent and reducing the risk of errors and inaccuracies that could compromise data security.

CDPs typically employ encryption to protect data both during transmission (in transit) and while stored on the platform (at rest). This prevents unauthorized access to sensitive customer information.

The Emergence of the Digital Twin of the Customer

Imagine a scenario in which you could engage in dialogue with AI-powered representations of your customer segments: for example, if you are deciding which messages to use for your next marketing campaign, you can simply ask the digital twin which one they prefer and why. This Forbes article (!) can foresee a time when these Digital Twins of Customers could, ‘leverage AI to simulate human behavior, decision making and interactions [and] replicate the nuances of human traits and preferences. When integrated with a conversational interface, AI twins can provide us with personalized marketing insights and support.’

This is the promise of the AI digital twin: it combines the comprehensive, consolidated customer data set enabled by a CDP with Generative AI to enable you to better understand your customers. Data on customer preferences and behaviors can be used to tailor marketing strategies and product offerings. And you may even be able to create personalized products that cater to specific consumer needs and preferences, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Gartner describes a digital twin of a customer (DToC) as, ‘a dynamic virtual mirror representation of a customer that organizations can use to simulate, emulate and anticipate behavior.’ It claims this technology will help you better understand your customers – many of whose buying habits change repeatedly – and provide a personalized, empathetic service to them.

“DToCs can transform the way organizations sell products or services and provide customers with better experiences, which will result in increased revenue and lasting customer relationships," said Guy Wood, Senior Director Analyst in the Gartner Sales practice. “DToC can be an engine of transformation and disruption. Organizations need competency in machine learning algorithms and staff with data science skills to build or manage DToCs”

Gartner believes that DToCs will have a transformative impact on the sales function in the next decade; but currently, this technology is at the Innovation Trigger stage of its Hype Cycle so it may be some years before its promise is fully realized.

Implementing a CDP

To gain the maximum value from your CDP, Orange Business recommends a use case-driven approach that starts with a top-down assessment, followed by a deeper dive into how you’re using your customer data. A four-stage process is optimal:

• Intake – identify your “as is” situation and then establishes “to be” goals; 
• Analyze – evaluate key elements intrinsic to the CDP’s success such as data sources and their quality and content. Then, formulate and put in place a planned road map of prioritized use cases. 
• Implementation – integrate your CDP with your channels and establish a continuous setup for growth. 
• Insight – continuously improve and expand the use cases you have identified to drive ongoing value to your business.

CDP implementation requiring a combination of digital and data capabilities. As the world’s leading management consultancy and system integrator for data intelligence and digital experience, Orange Business has the data governance expertise that empowers you to maximise control and usability of your data assets. Together with our data science and AI expertise, our consultants provide you with state-of-the-art solutions that help you put your data into action. We have also established a high degree of interconnectivity between our extensive system of eco-system partners allowing rapid implementation of your chosen CDP solution and accelerating time to value. The competitive advantage is shifting from building static 360° customer views toward enabling continuous, real-time customer intelligence and execution across marketing, sales, service and digital channels.

Conclusion

A Digital Twin of the Customer may be a technology of tomorrow but implementing a CDP can result in immediate benefits for your marketing activities today.  A CDP helps you to truly understand your customers and, by responding to their changing needs in real time, give them a continuously enhanced experience. By automating the collection and aggregation of your customers’ myriad digital footprints, a CDP delivers the marketers’ Holy Grail – a single version of the truth. This real-time platform has the potential to dramatically improve ROI by enabling personalized campaigns, optimizing performance, enhancing the customer experience, and streamlining marketing operations.