The COVID-19 pandemic has taught businesses many valuable lessons. One of the most relevant learnings is that being suppositional is a sure recipe for disaster. While instinct and surmise may have worked in the past, today marketers need to recognize exactly what customers want, when they want it and how they want it. Also, it is not enough for marketers to just ‘know’ their customers; it is important for them to be one step ahead and predict what they need and how they will behave.
This is where an insights-led customer data platform (CDP) comes into play, as it helps businesses accurately understand and assess their customer needs and aspirations and tailor a relevant experience that aligns with their requirements.
During the pandemic, people dramatically changed the way they viewed products and services and the way they shopped, and this trend is set to continue and evolve in the days to come. In the current scenario, what customers expect from brands is often changing in a dynamic manner.
For retailers to be in sync with all this in a concurrent manner, they need to be equipped with a smarter and more innovative customer data platform (CDP) — a real-time CDP that will help them keep pace with changing customer expectations, needs and behaviour — then and there, here and now, as and when they happen.
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Real-time CDP helps companies bring together known and anonymous data from multiple enterprise sources to create a consolidated customer profile, which can be used to provide personalized customer experiences across all channels and devices — all in real time.
Factors Driving the Need for Real-Time CDP
Rise of omnichannel shopping habits: Not only are customers shopping online and offline, but they are also switching devices while shopping — moving from a mobile phone to a laptop to kiosks or more. Take a customer who browses through the men’s shirts category for a red-checked shirt. He has clicked on ‘add to favourites.’ The next day, he could walk into a neighbourhood store and ask for his ‘favourites’ that he found online. A real-time CDP will help retailers keep track of customer behavior across channels to provide a ‘phygital’ or ‘omnichannel’ experience to customers.
Improved expectations from discerning consumers: Customers now expect a high level of shopping experience while they shop online. Let us go back to the same example of the man who has browsed and ‘liked’ the red-checked shirt on an ecommerce website. The next time he lands on the website, he will expect the banners on his homepage to show him offers on a similar product. Or, at the very least, he would expect to see ‘red checked shirts’ showcased in the ‘Recommended for you’ section on his landing page. A real-time CDP comes in handy here as it has the ability to deliver a highly-targeted, unified, personalized experience that customers are looking for, with the right contextual awareness and relevance.
Features of Real-Time CDP
Real-time data ingestion: Real-time CDP allows marketers access to the most updated customer snapshot based on real-time inputs. For example, if a customer has clicked on a push notification on the mobile app, it is captured on the marketing response action. An agile infrastructure captures and ingests this clickstream/real-time data. The marketer can then bring this data into the customer data layer and take action accordingly, so when the customer goes shopping, the marketer can target the customer with relevant product recommendations and offers, thus possibly increasing the average basket value/size.
Real-time analytics: Real-time CDP can perform real-time analytics on a customer’s persona to derive actionable insights. For example, real-time analytics helps understand why a customer has moved from being a high-value spender to a medium-value spender. Understanding this will help a retailer engage with the customer in a way that satisfies her and brings her back into the high-value cohort.
Real time marketing/downstream system activation: Real-time CDP can orchestrate the right marketing actions in real time, thus enabling real-time marketing. For instance, if a customer has clicked on ‘add to cart’ and not taken any action to complete a transaction, real-time CDP sets up their ‘default’ actions to save-a-sale. This helps with remarketing, retargeting and sending push notifications in a matter of seconds to the customer.
Use cases
- Personalized web experiences like real-time surveys on exit: A real-time survey helps understand why favourite/frequent customers closed the browser after browsing through particular products. Using a real-time CDP, marketers can refine the customer journey with razor-sharp focused targeting by eliminating customers with a lower affinity for particular types of communication. Customers can also be ranked and targeted through possible lifetime value-based cohorts.
- Triggered real-time journeys on push notifications/carousels on cart abandonment: Using a real-time CDP, marketers can capture cart addition as an event and entice the right set of customers on multiple channels by bringing in more relevancy and appropriate timelines. Marketers can also try out a multi-image carousel-based push notification campaign.
- Products recommended on emails based on search: A real-time CDP empowers marketers to capitalize on the power of search terms and bring back the customer’s ‘purchase intent.’ Let us say a customer searched for ‘size 8 sneakers’ but didn’t buy any of the products she clicked through. With real-time CDP, retailers can store such customers as ‘possible customer segments for sneakers.’ These customers can then be mapped to their preferred products whenever there is a new marketing email campaign or a strategy for sneakers. This will make sure potential customers open the related email and possibly buy the product.
- Understanding app uninstalls or transaction failures: Though customers are increasingly shopping on mobile apps, some bad experiences force them to uninstall certain apps. Thus, it is critical for retailers to reach out to and follow up with such customers, on channels such as email, SMS or WhatsApp, to figure out the glitches and rectify them so that they are back on board soon. Similarly, in the case of transaction failures, marketers need to reassure customers and build and earn their trust through sustained interactions so that they remain loyal.
- Contact center query resolution based on customer snapshot, orders and queries: A real-time CDP can enable integrations beyond the regular marketing channels, into any API-enabled customer-facing channel such as the contact center. Take for instance a QSR retailer dealing with too many irate customers dialing into the contact center to enquire about order delays. By integrating the real-time CDP, the mobile app or ecommerce order management system, the contact center will ensure that such queries are resolved quickly. The real-time CDP must be the center of the martech stack to ensure that the contact-center agents have enough information about specific customers, such as customer persona, last five orders and offers related to their favorite menus.
- POS coupons personalized to customer needs/personas: Loyalty-based coupons are a great way to retain customers and ensure repeat purchases. A real-time CDP integrated with the loyalty engine and POS helps marketers track coupons (or bonus points) and set up the coupons to be printed at the till/POS machine or through email receipts.
Real-time CDP integrates both real-time and non-real-time sources of customer data and utilizes the same to create the most relevant and updated customer personas. By using them, retailers can serve personalized experiences to customers. Retailers are increasingly prioritizing real-time CDP as part of their product strategy and marketing roadmap because digital data generated in real time, along with long-term customer data, can unlock valuable insights for them and help achieve better leads and conversion rates.
Sachin Dev is Director of Pre-Sales and Solutioning at Algonomy. He has over 17 years of experience in solutions consulting in the space of customer analytics, digital marketing and data-driven marketing operations across multiple domains like banking, insurance and retail/ecommerce. Currently as part of Algonomy, a global leader in customer experience product solutions), Dev evangelizes and proposes solutions for clients in the Asia region in the customer experience space, and manages and leads complex multi-product client engagements in the spaces of customer data platform, customer analytics, retail analytics, restaurant analytics and experience personalization.
