Are Brands On The Verge Of Connected Customer Experiences?

Despite an almost universal commitment to improving customer engagement, brands are still falling short of offering a truly connected customer experience (CX). Whether it’s a targeted online ad promoting a product a customer already owns, or a customer service interaction that requires the customer to repeat a product issue for the third time, most brands have clearly not innovated beyond surface-level personalization. However, there are technology companies attempting to fix this.

I recently spoke with Kazuki (Kaz) Ohta, co-founder and CEO at Treasure Data, a customer data platform (CDP) solution that provides brands with real-time data insights and analytics. During the interview, Kaz and I explore the burgeoning enterprise-wide emphasis on customer data, modern use cases involving data enablement solutions, differences among leading CDPs, and the trajectory of CX in the personalization era.

Gary Drenik: Tell us about Treasure Data. Where does it fit in the modern marketing tech stack?

Kaz Ohta: Founded in 2011, Treasure Data is partially responsible for the CDP boom that helped shape digital marketing in the mid-to-late 2010s. CDPs became in vogue because brands had been forced to manage first-party, second-party, and third-party data from multiple channels.

Before marketers can activate this data on their demand-side platforms, for example, they first need to combine the data in order to enrich customer profiles. CDPs accomplish this by ingesting and integrating customer data to attain a more complete view of individual customers for more personalized and sophisticated targeting. Once an emerging technology used by the biggest brands to centralize customer data, the CDP has now established itself as the foundational piece of any martech stack.

The value of CDPs is not restrained within the four walls of marketing departments, however. As a leading CDP, Treasure Data has expanded its scope beyond marketing over the past year, looking to apply CDP capabilities in customer service, sales, and even operations to fully unite the entire enterprise. Treasure Data’s CDP for Service is already being used by brands to harmonize marketing and service data for more unified experiences.

Drenik: Is CX primarily a concern of marketing or customer service?

Ohta: Historically, the concept of CX has been more ingrained in customer service. Countless consumer surveys have demonstrated that poor customer service can have a negative impact on customer loyalty. If it’s marketing’s job to acquire customers, it is customer service that retains them by delivering positive post-sale engagement. The reason that CX is now top of mind for marketers as well is the advent of personalized customer touchpoints.

The hottest trend in the CX space has been around personalization. Real-time audience analytics enables brands to deliver personalized ads at scale. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing tools into the contact center similarly helped customer service interactions become more personal. Brands have invested a lot to make customer engagements more unique and personal. As a result, the customer journey is changing, and the distinct roles of marketing and customer service appear to be blurring.

Drenik: What kind of insights and analytics should brands expect from CDPs?

Ohta: The best CDPs on the market today are more than just a repository of customer data. CDPs can natively support the use of ML models to segment audiences and improve retargeting accuracy by connecting customer data with advertising data. CDPs can also deploy AI models for predictive analytics. In retail environments, this can be a real gamechanger.

According to a recent Prosper Insights & Analytics survey, more than half of consumers (58%) participate in a customer loyalty program. These loyalty programs have proven to be a never-ending source of customer intelligence, as retail brands, for example, can tap the underlying data to predict a particular brand of cereal a customer will gravitate towards on their next in-store visit.

The beauty is that consumers are comfortable with brands using loyalty program data to personalize experiences compared to, say, mobile location data, which 62% of consumers dislike the use of in advertising, per the same Prosper Insights & Analytics survey.

Predictive analytics can also be applied in customer service operations. Much like marketing, predictive analytics allows brands to deliver support proactively, leveraging customer histories to predict and preempt product issues, or to recommend upsell and cross-sell opportunities that drive revenue. A great CX strategy today ensures that every customer touchpoint – whether it’s an outbound marketing email or an AI-powered chatbot interaction – is productive and cared for.

Drenik: Are all CDPs the same or do they offer different capabilities?

Ohta: When marketers claim they have a unified view of the customer, they more often than not are referring to their omnichannel capabilities. With omnichannel marketing, brands can capture customer interactions cross-devices so that engagements over email, social, and the open web are accounted for. Treasure Data and some other CDPs take this connectivity a step further.

Customer intelligence is limited when companies are only drawing insights from certain ecosystems and not the entirety of the enterprise. Each department, whether it’s marketing, customer service, sales, or operations has its own set of initiatives and data workflows that ties to customer value. With leading CDPs, brands can align the various departments that make up the enterprise to create a customer-centric strategy that delivers connected experiences.

Drenik: What is the next big innovation in CX and how do we get there?

Ohta: According to a recent Forbes survey commissioned by Treasure Data, three-quarters of business leaders believe that superior customer experience is vital to growth, but most admit they cannot address it on an enterprise level. The next generation of CDPs can change this. By connecting various tech stacks across the enterprise, companies can make real-time judgments about customer sentiment and product inventory levels, tailoring the customer experience accordingly. The goal is to consolidate, rationalize, and deliver all available relevant information into the hands of the salesperson, customer service agent, marketer, or operations manager who needs it.

The end game here is a customer journey that is truly connected. Connected CX ties each touchpoint to the previous one, producing a coordinated journey in which every department, team, and system is a participant. The result: no more redundant ads selling products a customer already owns, and no more repeating product information on phone calls with customer service. Connected CX without friction is on the horizon.

Drenik: Thanks, Kaz, for taking the time to discuss the evolution of CDPs and the alignment of the enterprise for customer-centric initiatives. It appears that brands are on the cusp of connected CX. I look forward to seeing how this plays out.