Introduction: The Need for Unified Customer Data
The fragmentation of the customer data, is one of the most critical concerns business have to face, not only that it causes unnecessary hurdles the overall business operation delay, limitations with regards to personalization, as well as the decision making process if also at stake. With the evolution of time, business are also required to upskill and therefore, need for unification, real time data facilities, along with experiences to be data driven across all the touchpoints are only mere utopian concepts anymore, and has become a mandate for the overall business success.
What Is a Unified Customer Profile?
Definition
When the customer profiles are unified they exists as a uni-dimensional, one single entity and provides customer data which consolidated from across all sources to maximise the ease and efficiency.
Purpose
Having a clear purpose becomes one of the key components to achieve the business’s goals. Purpose helps the business understand the behaviours of its customers, their preferences as well as interaction on a holistic basis and helps businesses attain clarity with regards to their most viable trajectory to follow.
Key Components of a Unified Customer Profile
Data Integration and Collection
The data is collected from multiple sources, such as mobile applications, websites, CRM systems, POS systems and even the third party platforms and then clubbed into one, this effectively ensures that the essential behavioural patterns and key preference point do not go unnoticed.
Identity Resolution
This is the process which includes the matching of the data points from across the platforms and channelling all of it into one, by using the identifiers like emails, contact details, or even the device ID to eradicated the duplication risks.
Data Harmonization
After this the differences in data formats are gone through the process of standardization and consistency of the structure is ensured, hence making it more useable as well as providing better accessibility across the systems for the virtue of analytics as well as activation.
Identity Data
This involves the customer’s name, email address, contact details, as well as other relevant unique identifiers.
Behavioural Data
This would include patterns in terms of browsing, history of purchase, and even the metrics of engagement.
Transactional Data
The orders, payments, return orders, and even the frequency of the purchase comes under this section.
Interaction Data
This section majorly involves customer support, emails, chats, and even feedbacks.
How a Unified Customer Profile Works
Data Collection
The aggregation of the data across the websites, mobile applications, CRM’s and even the third entity platforms belongs to the step of data collection.
Data Integration
The process of combining the data and structing the data which is unstructured into a single system via the optimization of AI and analytics.
Data Activation
The data activation process majorly involves, using the insights, and implementing into the process of personalization, marketing as well as decision making.
Benefits of a Unified Customer Profile
Across the range of numerous benefits, the ones which makes the most impact are, enhancement in term of the personalization, the overall decision making process being more quick, efficient and clearer, along with the experiences of the customers improving being much more seamless.
Use Cases of Unified Customer Profiles
The major use cases at large of the unification of the profiles are, targeting the marketing of the campaigns by making them more personalized, based on their preferences as well as behaviours. The customer strategies for maximising the retention rates is another clever step, usually done by the identification of the churn risks and even the engagement being more proactive in nature. And lastly, optimization of sales via improving the upselling as well as the cross selling opportunities.
Unified Customer Profile vs CRM vs CDP
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
Focus major on the interaction the customers have as well as the sales.
CDP (Customer Data Platform)
It helps in the unification and processing of the large scale data of customers.
Unified Customer Profile
Unified customer profiles mainly represents the overall outputs and gives the complete as well as actionable customer view.
Real-World Examples
- Personalization of the ecommerce market space
- Omni channel retails
These can be better understood by the further given examples:
IKEA (personalization recommendations)
The way Ikea processes its customer data by online browsing history is by closely analysing the behavioural patterns and furthermore recommending the content which is the best suited according to the collected data and thus impacting the overall engagement as well as retention rates making them exponentially higher.
Amazon (Omni channel product recommendation)
Similarly Amazon on the other hand manages the browsing as well as purchase history is via delivering the products suggestions having the highest relevancy rate and it in turn significantly helps them increase their rates of conversion.
How to Build a Unified Customer Profile
Data Integration Strategy
This is the foremost step and helps connecting the data sources into one single platform.
Use of AI and Automation
This process helps in the enabling of the real time updating of the data as well as insights.
Platform Selection
Used in adopting to the tools like CDP’s and even the integrated ecosystems.
Challenges & Considerations
Major concerns include privacy of the data as well as compliance, issues with regards to the quality of data as well as the complications in terms of integration.
Challenges
- Desperate data sources related silos
- Identity Resolution
- Consistency as well as data quality
- Privacy and security of data
- Handling of the unknown audience data
Considerations
- Governance strategy for the data
- Implementation being phased
- Strategy of integration
- Real time updates of the data
- Enablement as well as training
- Identity resolution rules
- Costs and scaling
Future of Unified Customer Profiles
Amongst the list of very potent prospectives the major ones are real time personalization and insights which are mostly driven via AI predictive. The list of the prospective innovations is as follows:
- Personalization as well as prediction powered by AI
- Architectures becoming zero copy
- Orchestration of the real time journeys
- Data collection driven by the vision of privacy first
- Hyper personalization provided at an extensive scale
Conclusion
Therefore unification of the customer profiles are absolute crucial for the nosiness I order to deliver personalization, consistency and the experiences which are data driven, and achieve success in the rapid modern day technology driven business environment today.
