In one of his interviews, Jeff Bezos quotes, “We see our customers as guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job to make every aspect of the customer experience better.” This explains Amazon’s unparalleled excellence in harnessing and executing ‘Big Data’ making it the undisputed leader in customer data usage to provide them a seamless experience.
Providing a smooth customer experience is imminent, but what exactly aids brands to win customer trust and loyalty? Customer Data Platform (CDP) is the answer. Let’s understand what CDP is, and how it boosts the business oomph.
Consider owning a food delivery business and catering to mere ten customers. It’s easy to know them personally, understand their food habits, and provide a friendly experience to gain their loyalty. Over a span of time, your business is a hit and you earn hundreds and thousands of customers.
Now, will you be able to keep a track of the set of needs of all the customers you are adding every day? Maybe, not. Every customer needs a personalized experience, they want to feel cared for and assured. To make that happen, you may have to note what food a particular customer usually prefers, from where they order, and keep a history of all their orders and experiences.
To manage this information and handle thousands of profiles, we leverage Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Integration of these two develops Customer Data Platform. CDP humanizes customer experience at scale with no bar. Simply put, what you could do for your ten customers, can now be done for millions and billions of them.
Nitro-Boost your Growth Engine
Being a consumer marketer, you should be on the top of the customer data heap. It is needless to say how overwhelming it can become to use it effectively without the right capabilities in hands. But, what primary functionalities can an ideal CDP provide to ease up work for you and boost your brand growth?
How to achieve retention-led growth with a strong CDP?
- Build a unified repository of your customer data to collate all the scattered data pointers in one place for a 360-degree customer view.
- Get hold of comprehensive and actionable user insights for an effective communication strategy.
- Multiply your performance with detailed campaign analysis and knowing what triggers active user response.
- Leverage customer data to make targeted user segments. Personalize your communication for each user with real-time insights.
- Capture behavioral data to fuel the predictive power of the engagement engine and achieve increased conversions.
- Create a powerful and agile platform that not only sustains customer data at scale but also integrates well with your campaign orchestrator for a smooth flow of information.
A Consumer POV
Consumers have evolved with rapid digitization. They are available at different digital platforms and expect higher relevance when it comes to brand communication. Mass-blast campaigns and spamming them with non-contextual engagement can derail them from your loyalty track.
To solve this and help build a brand of loyalists and evangelists, you need a complete retention suite built on a solid CDP base.
For Amazon, CDP enabled a recommendation engine that accounts for about 35% of their overall revenue. Amazon uses CDP to gather data from customers while they browse. Using this data, it builds and fine-tunes its recommendation engine. The more Amazon knows about you, the better it predicts what you may buy. Retailers pick this data and streamline the process of persuading you to buy what they recommend – their products, of course. Yes, now you know!
Even Netflix is a crowned champion of a hyper-personalized customer experience because it optimized the use of customer data. Netflix recommends precisely what our subconscious would approve. This is all based on the data Netflix holds. What we watch, what we add to the watch list, which series/movies we finish and which we shut and never resume. By using CDP and recommendation channels, Netflix gets a fine understanding of our choices and eventually helps us to make content choices that resonate the best for us.
Ultimate Goal
CDPs help go-to-market teams create better, more personalized customer experiences. A unified customer profile provides not only a complete view of each and every customer in the business but provides a complete view of the entire business. Therefore, to hold onto one of the most important assets of any business – customers – your Retention Suite requires:
- Customer Data Platform
- Omnichannel Campaign Orchestrator
- Personalization Tool
Whatever industry you cater to, take the responsibility of being a great host for your consumer party. And the guide to being the perfect one will ask you to adopt the right CDP, which will become the base of your retention suite.
(The author is Brand Marketing Executive, WebEngage and the views expressed in this article are his own)
