Enhancing retail customer experience is driven by the right engine to run data

In today’s data-driven world, retailers, like other organisations from every other sector, agree data is the new currency and key to serve customers. All accurate business decisions made by the leadership team or heads of different business units, are backed by data, which delivers a competitive edge to stay ahead of the curve. However, just acknowledging that data is valuable isn’t enough. It has to be extracted, cultivated and leveraged effectively for serving customers and delivering the best experiences. Yes, all data, collected from various sources has to be run on a high-performance engine for any value to be created.

Data has to be integrated, rather than remaining in silos, where in the latter instance, applying technology will become a challenge leading to only an incomplete view of the business. A 360-degree view can eliminate the risk of a bad customer experience. Other data related challenges could be data duplication, human errors or loads of outdated information that have to be addressed effectively.

Only a suitable platform can facilitate in consolidating data from different sources and streamlining it to extract value. The hidden data can be transformed into powerful business insights, delivering high-quality buying experience to each customer in addition to accelerating accurate decision-making for businesses.

Customer Data Platform (CDP) - a snapshot

Ms. Anjna Bhati Director Data Analytics and AI BluePi

With the engine, which is a Customer Data Platform, retailers can gain the knowledge of customer behaviours and demands to deliver personalised content for marketing communication and aid in developing an evidence-based marketing strategy. CDP is a packaged software solution which centralises customer data from diverse sources, such as, e-commerce platforms, emails, CRMs and others. It is then made available to other systems for marketing campaigns, customer service and all customer experience initiatives.

A CDP puts together behavioural data that is produced from user’s actions on various social media platforms, capturing of customer attributes such as, names, addresses, contact details and birthdays. Transactional data on purchases or returns and customer service data from live chats, frequency, number and length of interactions can also be fed into the platform. The platform collects customer’s historical data and most recent preferences and guide brands in developing solutions and services. In addition to these, the CDP can also work with campaign metrics that covers, engagement reach, impressions and other related metrics.

Empowering businesses with data for better customer service

The power of the CDP can help translate information about the customer into delivering superior customer service. The CDP works on the principle of creating unified customer data for all marketing programs. It enables brands to configure customer experience initiatives at a much quicker pace, while remaining cost-effective. Data integrating capabilities of the CDP delivers a single, centralised view of the customer. Online event data can be applied to existing customer data for creating unique customer identities. The platform supports in real-time monitoring and analysis of digital events, such as web activity, campaign engagement, Internet of Things (IoT) interaction and app usage.

Processing the raw data to generate meaningful and aggregated data is thus made possible. With customers present in every channel or platform, frequently switching between apps, it is critical for retailers to keep track of every real-time engagement. The generated data with the help of CDPs can be leveraged to provide recommendations and new offers to customers. CDP supports by exposing application programming interfaces (APIs) for real-time data and accessing of insights for all marketing applications while ensuring security. The platform also generates standard insights and reporting besides having advanced query capabilities, dashboards and visualisation for marketeers and data scientists.

Delivery of effective Customer Experience is key

A holistic CDP undoubtedly houses data from various sources and its implementation makes marketing more efficient and drives personalised omni-channel communication for customers, reducing the clutter and improving customer experience. Furthermore, AI/ML capabilities can be leveraged to implement more use cases and business metrics can be applied across organisations to assess revenue increase. CDPs are agile, flexible and gives a single view of the customer behaviour that can be used to drive comprehensive and better customer experience without any blind spot. The platform saves hours of integration work, duplicated efforts and reduces overall costs. Customer journey across different devices can be tracked from the very first contact till conversion.

Sales data per customer can be generated where the metric is leveraged to provide insights to sales trends and be used for promotional campaigns to deliver the best products for each customer. Cart abandonment rate that is captured on the platform reveals the quality of any user experience and data can be analysed to improve it. This will certainly lead to a decrease in the cart abandonment rate metrics. Customer engagement activities can be increased and businesses can build the most suitable customer experience strategy.

The CDP also helps in creating an error-free, integrated, structured and accessible database of the customer, which can support in mitigating several risks related to data governance and compliance.

According to Fortune Business Insights, the global customer data platform market is estimated to grow from US$1.42 billion in 2022 to US$6.94 billion by 2029 at a CAGR of 25.4% in the forecast period. The real-time and personalised data analysis capabilities of the CDP contribute towards this high growth. The CDP supports to secure customer loyalty as well, contributing to the many factors that increase its demand across the retail sector.

Author: Ms Anjna Bhati, Director Data Analytics and AI, BluePi