In today’s digital economy, customers are continuing to set the bar higher and higher in terms of what they expect from the brands they interact with. The power that was once held by the providers of goods and services has now shifted to the customer, whose demand for a seamless and highly relevant experience at every interaction is driving a shift in the way businesses must operate.
Customers today have access to more content, buying channels, and brand options than ever before. With an overload of information and choices available, businesses can no longer survive by simply providing the bare minimum necessary to keep customers from leaving; instead, they must deliver exceptional customer experiences and outcomes. Personalised interactions allow businesses to cut through the white noise of irrelevant engagement and offers to not only drive sales but establish deeper, lasting customer relationships. Customers are more likely to shop with brands that recognise them and provide relevant offers or recommendations, making it vital for businesses to implement a personalisation strategy in order to remain competitive.
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Personalised engagement is clearly no longer an option, it’s a necessity. Yet the reality is that many companies are still falling short of providing the individualised experiences that customers expect. In a market where customers are free agents and where adoption and abandonment occur at the blink of an eye, companies must demonstrate that they both understand and value their customers.
This is where data comes in. Customers generate enormous volumes of data as they engage across various channels, and organisations that can successfully leverage this data for personalisation will set themselves apart, while those that do not will lose business to their data-savvy competitors.
Historically, it has been a struggle to successfully capture, integrate, interpret, and act on all this data effectively, and for many companies, still is. Adding to the challenge are disparate systems across organisational silos, making it difficult or impossible to unify data in order to generate the holistic customer profiles and insights needed to positively impact the customer experience.
The ability to effectively personalise at scale requires a complete, unified view of customers from both transactional and behavioral data, that when brought together enables intelligent, actionable insights. That’s where the customer data platform (CDP) is helping to evolve the personalisation landscape. With the ability to consume and unify customer data from multiple sources, CDPs provide holistic customer profiles and management, support real-time customer segmentation, and integrate customer data with other systems.
Many vendors have offerings that are primarily analytics or engagement based but lack the rich data unification and synthesis that defines a true CDP. With increasing pressure on businesses to provide deep personalisation, the need for richer data platforms is mounting and vendors are scrambling to get on the bandwagon whether they have the necessary capabilities or not.
CDPs offer organisations the opportunity to deliver more meaningful, individualised engagements to customers, as well as streamlining the capabilities of marketing teams to make their efforts more effective. CDPs give marketing teams unified, on-demand access to customer data pulled together from a range of initiatives and interactions like online engagement, advertising campaigns, or purchasing histories, providing greater visibility into their customers’ needs. With this enhanced, 360-degree view of customer behaviors and preferences across all touchpoints, organisations can provide not only the highly personalised experiences that customers demand, but can cultivate deeper relationships and in-turn drive increased customer loyalty and retention.
Until now, the data leveraged for customer experience efforts was primarily drawn from straightforward customer actions like website clicks or purchase histories. Yet with enormous volumes of data now being generated from customers engaging across numerous devices and channels, as well as the addition of AI-driven interactions, organisations need more power than ever in order to manage, interpret, and act on all this data at scale, and the customer data platform provides the solution.
Among the authentic customer data platforms, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights stands out with an even greater depth of capabilities. It not only enables complete data synthesis for holistic customer profiles, but also integrates directly with the rest of the Dynamics 365 engagement, AI, and analytics tools, as well as Azure-based machine learning and power apps, providing both rich customer insights and the means to act on them.
With an enhanced customer data platform like Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, companies can unify their customer data across all of their sources to gain a truly 360-degree view of their customers, empowering every employee to provide personalised, authentic engagement at every touchpoint.
To learn more register for our Customer Insights in a Day Workshop on the 24th of March 2021.
