To be able to serve the modern, digital-first customer effectively, brands must understand their customers holistically.
Many forward-looking organizations are deploying customer data platforms (CDPs) to understand customer behaviors, wants, and needs across channels. These insights are then used to customize messaging and activate personalized experiences to achieve goals like improving customer retention, and developing customer loyalty.
To attain this level of customer insight, brands should look for a CDP that has robust analytics capabilities. Properly integrating data analytics into your organization allows you to quickly react to unpredictable events and consumer trends, as well as differentiate from competitors. This allows so marketing, sales, and customer service teams to act with speed and confidence when interacting with their most valuable customers.
Here’s what you need to know when looking for the right analytics capabilities in a CDP:
1. An Intuitive User Interface
It may seem obvious, but one of the top features to look for in a CDP is an easy-to-use user interface (UI) for monitoring analytics in real time. A CDP should give business users self-service flexibility and access to real-time analytics that will empower them to act quickly and effectively. CDPs should also have permissions and governance controls, so IT and data teams can limit access to sensitive data across different business units.
2. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Enterprise-grade CDPs will have advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities to analyze customer behavior and offer next-best action recommendations. With AI-powered predictive modeling, marketers can identify customer preferences, propensity to purchase, frequency to buy, and where they are in the customer journey.
Look for a CDP that can create machine learning models and activate them in real-time to enable marketers to easily interpret and modify where needed.
3. Data Analysis for Marketing Efficiency
Having the right analytics capabilities in a CDP can ensure your brand can activate data for customized messaging and personalized customer experiences at scale. Real-time campaign analytics enable marketers to quickly measure the success of their campaigns, and make any adjustments needed to optimize campaign performance. The ability to conduct A/B and multivariate testing also gives marketers an opportunity to test and optimize messaging early, reducing the risk of wasted ad spend.
4. Identity Resolution & Identity Matching
Digital-first customers want and expect brands to deliver personalized customer experiences. According to PwC, customers are willing to pay 16 percent more for products or services when they feel known and appreciated.
This can only be accomplished by using a CDP that creates a unified customer profile. Part of that includes stitching together multiple and redundant identities from disparate data sources through a process called identity resolution. A CDP can help you de-dupe customer data, remove inaccuracies, and create a single customer identifier, so your entire company can have a single source of truth for your customer data across the organization.
5. Customer Journey Orchestration
According to Pointillist, high-performing enterprises rank customer journey analytics as the second-highest priority on their list of customer experience investments. The report also found that high-performing companies are 1.7 times more likely to use customer journey analytics than under performers.
Many CDPs now come with customer journey orchestration capabilities that enable them to process information in real time. This gives organizations the ability to react quickly to changing customer behaviors. Using a CDP, companies can see and analyze customer journeys at scale, address discrepancies between channels, and map the customer journey more effectively.
Customer journey analytics centralize direct and indirect customer feedback in one place. This helps marketers correlate customer-provided information with indirect feedback to better understand what has the most impact on the customer experience.
Mastering Analytics with a CDP
By deploying a CDP with advanced analytics tools, marketers can finally move on from reacting to data, to being able to take immediate, real-time action.
Enterprise-grade CDPs will have not just analytics reporting capabilities with an easy-to-use UI, they will typically be powered by AI and ML-algorithms that analyze customer behaviors and offer next-best action recommendations.
CDPs collect data and bring it together into unified profiles so it can be analyzed and delivered to different teams across the organization. With that ability, brands can now fully orchestrate the customer journey with data-driven insights.
