New departments and strategies depend on insights coming from data analytics. The data banks transform into an assembly line sequencing and prioritizing data. These data needs arising from different parts of the organization are no longer treated with equal importance. In this centralized approach that businesses adopt, marketers do not have access to real-time customer data.
So, the question here is — “who owns customer data?”.
Data-Driven Marketing
Customer-centric businesses use customer data to enhance marketing functions for better targeting, segmentation, engagement, and retention. But, they also use this data to aid other business functions such as finance, information systems, security, operations, human resources and the rest.
A study has revealed that by the end of 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. This puts pressure on all customer-centric businesses to know their customers better by all means. But, to achieve impeccable customer experience, marketers need tools that provide in-depth customer data in real-time available across all available marketing channels and interactions.
Having recognized the problem of ownership, it is clear that the marketer needs to be the central owner of customer data. To maintain a true marketer’s data ownership one needs to build an infrastructure that enables a marketer-empowered data system.
Marketer-Empowered Data Systems and Infrastructure
A report brings up that a majority of executives, 52%, report that while they are leveraging a variety of tools and technologies in functions or lines of business, there is little coordination and there’s a lack of the right tools. Customer Data Platforms(CDPs) pivot the marketing ecosystem and become the central system for all marketing intelligence. CDPs by design develop the necessary infrastructure for a marketer to own customer data.
Multi-channel Servicing
One or two channels do not tell you everything about customers. Every single customer chooses to tread on a unique path of product discovery and purchase. Though customer journeys could be orchestrated, customer choices cannot be predicted.
Wholesome customer data coming from all marketing sources would provide input to machine learning algorithms for predictive recommendations. It also aids in the automation of multi-channel customer experience.
Automated data systems
Marketers enjoy the automation of data cycles within each tool that they use. But, apart from some chosen partnerships and APIs, it is not always possible for these tools to talk to each other. A CDP becoming the central system automates data standardization, classification, and recognition for the entire data system configured into it.
Recommendation Engines
Machine learning algorithms implemented by a CDP leaves behind human bias, preparing for recommendations that marketers need. The in-built information filtering system sieves across large data sets to identify patterns that come in as handy insights for marketers.
These also aid product teams, credit and payment redemption teams. In consultation with data scientists, CDPs like FirstHive instill multiple recommendation models for risk-awareness, content discovery, collaborative filtering, context-sensitivity, personalization, and more.
Data Ingestion Mechanisms
CDPs like FirstHive are equipped to ingest data from across over 200 marketing tools and sources in different categories such as social media, mobile app, campaign dashboards, analytics, customer experience, CRM, social listening, brand management, personalization, and many others.
Tool integrations into FirstHive are just a toggle away. Apart from source integrations, CDPs also support data cleansing to avoid the cost of duplication and fraudulent data.
A one-stop solution for Customer Data Management
CDPs come in all shapes and sizes. We have customized modules that cater to both B2B and B2C business models. Apart from these features, CDPs that are GDPR compliant ensures customer-level data security and longer data storage durations.
We have covered earlier the functions and capabilities of FirstHive’s Customer Data Platform which provide a comprehensive view of how a CDP empowers marketers.
