Digital Maturity Reinforces Value of Customer Data & Golden Records

Solutions Review’s Premium Content Series is a collection of contributed articles written by industry experts in enterprise software categories. In this feature, Redpoint Global Chief Strategy Officer John Nash offers a commentary on how digital maturity reinforces the value of customer data and golden records.

In a time of economic uncertainty marked by rising interest rates, inflation, technology layoffs, and low consumer confidence, among other indicators, brands across industry verticals, including retail, travel and hospitality, and healthcare often devalue digital transformation initiatives with an eye toward cost savings.

This is a misguided approach. Digital transformation projects that result in the creation and delivery of personalized, omnichannel customer experiences (CX) have a proven ROI through enhanced customer expansion, retention and lifetime value.

Digital-first consumers who interact with brands across multiple engagement touchpoints expect to receive a consistent experience across physical and digital channels, and they will go elsewhere if their expectations are not met. In 451 Research’s Voice of the Connected User Landscape, Quantifying the Customer Experience (2022), nearly 9 in 10 consumers said that having a negative experience (in-store or online) makes them less likely to interact with a brand/retailer again in the future.

In a 2022 survey from Propel, more than half of respondents (54 percent) said they would stop using a brand after just one bad experience – and 58 percent said they recently switched from a brand they loved to a competitor for that very reason.

According to research from Dynata, these experiences are all-too common. In a survey of US consumers, 70 percent said they receive mistargeted information monthly (24 percent daily), and more than half (51 percent) claim that it negatively impacts their overall customer experience with a brand.

Customer Data & Golden Records

Reduce Costs with a Single View of the Customer

In addition to meeting customer expectations for personalization, digitally mature brands that achieve one-to-one personalization at scale are also adept at reducing marketing costs. Before exploring those cost-savings, what do we mean by a digitally mature brand? According to an Accenture report on driving customer retention, they are the brands that provide cutting-edge personalization for each customer, including unique content, messages and treatment as a core part of their customer engagement strategy. They have arrived at true customer-centricity by applying analytics to behaviors, journeys and purchases, and then orchestrating hyper-relevant experiences across omnichannel journeys; customer strategy is now a core business strategy.

Cost savings (or cost avoidance) is achieved through having a single view of the customer derived from precise customer data that reflects a real-time understanding of an individual customer journey. A comprehensive, accurate and real-time view of the customer that combines behaviors, transactions, preferences and all known devices and identifiers with a full list of data aggregates is known as a Golden Record. This unified and persistently updated profile of a customer or household is a key requirement for keeping pace with the cadence of the customer across an omnichannel journey.

A real-time representation of the customer, the Golden Record helps a brand reduce cost in a few different ways. First, it significantly improves match rates to eliminate wasteful spending. Second, it is used by brands to consistently deliver next-best actions to the intended customer or household on the optimal channel and at the optimal time – meaning that a next-best action is optimally aligned with the cadence of the customer. Blast email, batch uploads, mis-targeted promotions and surface-level segmentation that does not capture the essence of a customer all become relics of a bygone era. Those are the tactics that brands yet to transform CX rely on that increase customer churn.

It’s important to note that how a customer responds to a next-best action – did the customer purchase the product, sign up for the loyalty program, download the brochure, open the email, etc. – immediately becomes part of the Golden Record. The additional data point is then used to enhance a personalized CX with deeper personalization and added relevance as the customer journey progresses.

From a marketing operations perspective, cost savings are realized when the Golden Record is used to not only deliver a next-best action, but as the foundation for the orchestration of omnichannel customer journeys and execution of real-time interactions. With a single point of operational control, marketers and business users can design and deliver simple or complex multitouch campaigns to execute true omnichannel experiences across all touchpoints. This robust view of the customer that is accessible enterprise wide minimizes the number of interactions – and the costs of those interactions – required to achieve marketing objectives.

A Streamlined MarTech Stack

In addition to saving cost through precise data, a digital transformation that focuses on improving CX will save cost through a streamlined marketing technology stack that offers marketers a single point of operational control through a single interface. For retail marketers in particular, fixed infrastructure is often a big sunken cost when paying for processing power that is not needed, such as with having to account for seasonal variance. Furthermore, when CX is aligned on a channel basis, functionality is often replicated across channels with multiple systems doing the same thing. That’s not just a cost issue, it also means different records for the same customer across multiple channels of engagement. An email marketing team, for example, will likely not have insight into a customer’s social activity, or call center interactions.

By adopting a customer-centric, omnichannel approach to CX and aligning people, processes and technology around the customer, organizations reduce cost by avoiding the unnecessary replication of functionality across channels.

Becoming customer-centric – truly organizing the enterprise around the customer – begins with possession of the single customer view through a Golden Record. Organizations that undertake digital transformation with a goal of a significantly improved CX will find that the right foundational capabilities will deliver best ROI over time.

Customers will leave after just one poor experience, but if you provide a personalized CX that demonstrates a deep understanding of the customer and what’s important to the customer, that’s a problem you don’t have to worry about.