Capability: Data Management & Integration Solutions
Discover whether you have a source of insight you can rely on for business decision-making or if you need to address inaccuracies in your data sources with an identity resolution project
An error-free, up-to-date and de-duplicated Single Customer View is the holy grail to deliver exceptional, personalised customer experiences. It’s also vital so you can analyse customer behaviour and campaign performance continually, evolving and adapting them to sustain performance.
Of course, it’s not a simple aspiration for a modern, competitive and fast-growing business. With multiple data sources in a range of systems and repositories, real-time data flowing in and out and an array of customer channels, you have your work cut out.
The rewards of getting the Single Customer View right are compelling – truly personalised marketing, exceptional customer engagement and loyalty that deliver great campaign ROI, revenues and profits. With a deep understanding of what your customers want and need, driven by highly relevant engagement and analysis of customer behaviour and propensities, you’ll have the insight to design and deliver what your customers want ahead of your competitors.
Without an accurate Single Customer View, it’s impossible to achieve that level of sustained performance. Errors in data create a lack of trust, both within the business and with your customers and audiences who are on the receiving end of poorly targeted campaigns. Campaign planning becomes subjective rather than data-led, while customers turn to competitors who can deliver the experiences and information they want in a timely and relevant way.
FOUR CRUCIAL QUESTIONS
You need a positive answer to all four of these questions about your Single Customer View, if you want it to be a reliable and effective source of decision-making insight:
- Does it hold unique, real-time customer records?
- Is all the data clean, reliable and standardised, with matched addresses?
- Does it bring together customer data from every online and offline source in your organisation?
- Is it scalable for future needs?
Not many organisations can answer all four questions with a resounding yes. If you have any doubt about the integrity of your Single Customer View, or if you don’t have one that you can rely on, you need to take action quickly.
To make it easier and quicker to fix or establish your Single Customer View, CACI’s specialist data team has developed the ResolvID application. It’s a powerful tool to create a trustworthy source of customer data for reliable analysis. It resolves data from disparate sources – including your CRM, e-commerce and finance systems as well as offline data and mobile apps. You can use the accurate and unified outputs with confidence for analytics and data science, campaign activation, BI and reporting.
If you’d like to find out more about how ResolvID can help you clean up your Single Customer View so you can deliver high performance campaigns and analytics that are trusted by everyone in the business, get in touch with our team.
Identity Resolution, customer segmentation, and real-time multi-channel communication tools have the ability to surprise and delight water customers in the UK. What can be learnt from the success of other sectors?
The dreaded “Beast from the East” of February and March 2018 left over 200,000 consumers in England and Wales with little or no water and resulted in OFWAT releasing their “Out in the Cold” report – measures and requirements to prevent something like this from ever happening again.
Then, Covid hit. When whispers of a distant virus first circulated in the UK, I don’t think anyone truly anticipated just how serious it would be. Over a year into it, everyone is still trying to make sense of the changing consumer habits and how household and non-household consumption will change moving forward. Regardless of anyone’s opinions on how the future might look, one thing is clear – demand is high.
If you’re not familiar with the nuances of demand forecasting or operations for the water sector, you may be thinking “well of course demand is high, everyone is at home”. However, the consequences of this are much more far reaching – from consumers completely changing peak usage as a result of later waking times due to mass non-commuting, to children not being at school during an unseasonably hot Spring in 2020, causing paddling pools to be filled across the nation. This caused a big headache for many departments within the water sector – such as diverting water supplies to meet demand for those at the extremes of reservoir distance, adjusting pressure times for household consumption, and massive concerns about the size of pipes being too small to deliver the demand of water at peak times.
One thing was clear, water companies needed to ask consumers to consider how much water they were using. Nothing as extreme as a hose pipe ban was required (yet)…but considering not filling up your paddling pool every day, not having a bath every evening because you’re in lockdown or reconsidering whether the car needs to be washed every. single. day.
CACI is in the fortuitous position where we work across multiple sectors with the sole focus of enabling organisations to “do amazing things with data”. So, what can the water sector learn from other sectors to enhance their communication with their own customers – not only improving engagement, but ensuring consumers are contacted in channels that appeal to them.
If I was the Director of Customer Engagement at a water company, what would I do?
By following the four below points you’ll be enabling your organisation to trust that you’re speaking to the right customer, with messages that resonate with them, via the right channel.
MAKE SURE MY CUSTOMER DATA IS IN ORDER
If I look at myself, I have multiple email addresses, my surname is frequently misspelt (thanks Rob Brydon), I have two mobile phones with different numbers, even my postal address frequently appears incorrect on certain address look-up providers, which means I’m sometimes on edge as to which of the three incorrect addresses my parcel will be sent to (thank god I live in a little village with a local postie)! Data can get messy. With customer data stored in disparate databases, customer engagement/customer services are often the teams that get the brunt of customer frustration.
Typically, you’ll find a customer who’s disgruntled needing to phone a call centre to complain, to then be asked for their non-sensical account number (which often needs to be found on a letter or via an online account – a whole other kettle of fish trying to log in there), to then be directed to a different team, to then be put on hold. It’s a sure way to reduce C-SAT scores and irritate your customers – probably escalating that complaint and making it harder to resolve.
Now, imagine a world where you can link all customer data and ensure that it’s correct. So, if a customer phones into a call centre with a complaint you’re able to quickly and effectively go to one customer record, with all their contact history. That would improve their experience immediately!
The ability to connect online and offline data in real-time already exists. So, this problem could be a distant memory. Read all about it here.
BE PREPARED IN AN EMERGENCY
If the past has shown anything, having the ability to communicate to customers in real-time across channels is vitally important. The great news? There is already tonnes of technology out there to enable you to do this. Imagine the water supply is being cut off in an area due to a burst main. Well how about if you could:
- Immediately send out a text or email to all residents affected
- Provide them an update once the issue has been resolved and direct them to an information hub if they need any further details
- Send them a letter/email 7 days later apologising for the disruption and informing them of customer service information should there be any further problems.
That’s just in an emergency, imagine if you could set up customer journeys for all sorts of other reasons, e.g planned engineering works, hose pipe bans etc – rather than the typical letter consumers receive.
All this technology exists in the market already and is used very successfully for marketing campaigns. The utilities sector is pretty unique in the requirement to contact customers in these situations – why not take advantage of this powerful technology?
MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE TOOLS TO COMMUNICATE THROUGH CHANNELS THAT APPEAL TO THEM
Emergency communication is one thing, but consumers are expecting you to provide them with interesting content. We’re already working with lots of water companies to understand financially vulnerable customers and providing the tools to inform them of social eligibility tariffs, for example, but a key area is understanding what channels a consumer is going to respond to, and having the campaign tools in house to deliver this content.
Customer journeys are used widely within sectors such as auto, retail and leisure – there is no reason why the water sector shouldn’t also embrace this to drive engagement (and increase the C-MEX and C-SAT scores).
David Sealey from CACI, interviewed Gareth Ballard from Braze in April last year, and it’s definitely worth a watch if you’re looking to form human connections with your customers.
MAKE SURE I REALLY UNDERSTAND MY CUSTOMERS AND THEIR NEEDS
We talk about this all the time at CACI – segmentation is our bread and butter. I can’t re-iterate enough – understanding your customers is so important. How would you feel if you received a letter asking you to stop watering your garden so much in a lockdown when you’re in the top floor flat in 30 degrees with no access to outside space? Not great.
Trying to encourage behavioural change can be supported further when we add attitudinal information to a rich demographic segmentation. Lessons can be learnt from EDF’s Smart Meter Roll Out programme, where CACI built out attitudes to understand the drivers for people to get a smart meter, and then built an integrated communication journey to encourage change.
How could this work for the water sector? Well, perhaps something like the below:
- Creative One (Environmental Families): Content around family activities to encourage water saving.
- Creative Two (Frugal Flat Owners): Content around the money individuals can save around the home by engaging with their water provider, e.g free toilet flushing water savers + a water meter
- Creative Three (Nosey Neighbours): Use demand metrics to say how much water a neighbourhood is using vs another within the area – or simply provide a number of free water saving equipment delivered within the area to encourage uptake.
Does any of this resonate? I’m very happy to talk you through any of the above as part of an Art of the Possible session and bring in Subject Matter Experts to really drive forward your customer experience. Just get in touch and I can set up a 45-minute session with you today.
Get your PII data under control to help mitigate the risk of reputational damage and financial penalties.
Organisations need to be able to demonstrate that they know where all the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) they hold is located and how it’s linked to specific individuals. If you work in a highly regulated sector, the demands and penalties here will be particularly stringent. Obligations may vary by territory, and even between US states. In the UK and Europe, GDPR regulations apply to any data controller.
Identity resolution is a key discipline for responsible organisations who collect data from more than one source about individuals who engage with them or provide personal information of any kind. It means being able to gather all PII data from across a range of systems about an individual. A consistent identity resolution process is the only way you can be sure that you are delivering marketing experiences and engagement in a responsible and compliant manner.
YOU NEED A FULL REVIEW OF DATA IN YOUR DIVERSE SYSTEMS, SOFTWARE AND TOOLS
Compliance is made harder because even if you use the latest digital campaign delivery platforms, you’ll likely have a number of legacy systems, a diverse estate of software and some cloud-based tools in the mix. Somehow, you have to resolve identities across all of these.
The first step is to assess the risk – you need to examine all the data you hold across the organisation and make sense of it. This is a challenge, because your data will be fragmented and the quality will vary. You’ll need a thorough and systematic approach that takes in finance, CRM and e-commerce systems, to address:
- Accurate data capture and storage
- Duplication of data and customer records
- Data validity and standardisation
- Maintenance of data and recency of updates
- Data understanding
With a complete and accurate assessment of the quality and completeness of your data, you can look to improve your data collection, storage and identity resolution processes to avoid non-compliance in the future.
Tackling identity resolution for data compliance across your organisation is a daunting task. CACI’s experts have developed the ResolvID application to help customers with complex data and system estates to manage identity resolution reliably.
ResolvID can bring together data from multiple sources, standardise and cleanse it then report on it to reveal issues that need tackling. It’s ideal for managing compliance risk and mitigating against fines and reputational damage. It also provides the consistent, unified customer data you need to deliver successful personalisation and differentiated customer experiences, for revenue and customer growth.
If you’d like to find out more about harnessing ResolvID to assess and tackle your compliance issues, get in touch with our specialist data team.
HOW IDENTITY RESOLUTION ENABLES ADVANCED PERSONALISATION IN BIG DATA ENVIRONMENTS
Most organisations have plenty of data. The issue is not how much you have, it’s what you can do with it. You may be sitting on a goldmine of data insight, but you can’t use it to refine personalised communications and marketing unless you can connect it with the digital platforms and tools that will deliver the personalisation.
Tackling this challenge is key to success in a world where consumers are increasingly intolerant of content and approaches that aren’t directly relevant to them. You need to use all the information you have to create unified identities that can inform personalised customer experiences, if you want to compete effectively.
The problem becomes more acute if you are using a data lake as the primary store of customer data. The concept and architecture of data lakes do not lend themselves to the enforced structure, maintenance and standardised logging that good identity resolution requires. At the opposite end of the spectrum, more traditional data warehouses can lack the structure or ability to capture and use large quantities of digital data which can form the backbone of modern identity resolution. These platforms may also be difficult to integrate with other MarTech and AdTech.
TACKLING IDENTITY RESOLUTION IN DATA LAKES
If you work in a big data environment, you may struggle to identify unique customers. It can be risky to rely on insights developed from data lakes, because they have no enforced structure at the point of data capture. This makes it challenging to define a customer view in a consistent manner, with all data points incorporated.
CACI’s identity resolution application ResolvID has a smart way of tackling this problem. It takes in all potentially identifiable information as it’s loaded into the data lake and continues to iterate and develop the customer picture over time. It adds up small quantities of data from sources including transactions, ClickStream data and geolocation to build the identity of a customer. The structure of the customer is defined within the platform: ResolvId makes its keys available for use within any and all resources.
TACKLING IDENTITY RESOLUTION IN DATA WAREHOUSES
If your organisation uses enterprise or operational data warehouses, it can be difficult to connect the finance, CRM and order data held within them directly with digital customer data platforms (CDPs) that serve web, automated marketing and mobile app content.
CDPs maintain digital identifiers, but they need a single customer identifier to truly connect the business with digital channels. Because of the complex nature of data held in the data warehouse, it can be challenging to resolve to an individual’s identity.
Using ResolvID as a middle layer, you can create a unified identity and identity graph that can work in both environments. It connects the systems to enable rapid deployment, unlocking value in your data for personalised campaigns. You’ll achieve a single view of the customer and can report crucial unified measures such as lifetime value.
Read the previous blog to find out factors to consider in delivering personalised content and marketing that fuel sales and retention in competitive consumer markets. Get in touch if you’d like to discuss identity resolution in your big data environment with one of our campaign data experts.
Your customers and prospects want and expect you to communicate with them as individuals. It’s a very natural human desire – no-one wants to feel like they’re just a data point.
Today’s sophisticated data management and campaign delivery technology makes this possible in theory. But effective personalised communication has become more complex in recent times because of the challenges of identity resolution.
Identity resolution has always been important. It means matching identities across different touchpoints to create a unified profile for every customer. The advent of GDPR intensified the need to use identity resolution to manage data preferences robustly across channels and media, to comply with data protection laws.
But legal compliance is only one reason for the extreme complexity of the identity resolution challenge today. For marketing personalisation and for analytics, you need an accurate view of an individual, so you can always communicate with them in context of who they are and what matters to them.
We need to be able to resolve identities better, faster and more efficiently across a much greater amount of data to keep pace with competitive pressures and market demands.
CONSUMERS ARE UNFORGIVING
Your customers are ever more demanding – they want and expect to know about the right products and services at the right time and to be served content that’s relevant to their current preferences. 63% of customers say they will stop using companies who deliver poor individual marketing, according to data cited by the Forbes CMO network.
DIGITAL BEHAVIOUR IS CONSTANTLY EVOLVING
There’s an ever-growing number of channels enabling consumer engagement with brands. Consumers also have more devices. They use them to graze across a range of channels and media – frequently their interactions are superficial and transient. They no longer adopt a consistent pattern of behaviour, nor do they always log in or identify themselves directly when they view content.
YOU CAN’T RELY ON THIRD PARTY COOKIES
The third-party cookie is on its way out. That makes it harder to connect interactions through online advertising on third party sites. First party data is becoming more important, and it must be accurately resolved with other sources.
SOPHISTICATED TECH CAN OVERREACH YOUR CAPABILITIES
Technology is at hand to help and many vendors are pushing their solutions. These are based on complex data science and may include visualisations, digital reporting platforms and next best action platforms. Many are excellent tools, but you need to bring your data together in a consistent, de-duplicated way before you can obtain value from them.
THERE ARE SHADES OF GREY IN DIGITAL IDENTITIES
In the previous digital era, identity resolution was relatively simple – you either knew or did not know who a person was. But it’s no longer black and white. You can also personalise and understand preferences without knowing exactly who the individual is, learning about them through behaviour and touchpoints.
These factors all create obstacles to delivering the personalised content and marketing that fuel sales and retention in competitive consumer markets.
Organisations need to upweight their data science and marketing analytics expertise to deal with the ever-evolving challenges of identity resolution and get the best value and differentiation from their digital marketing campaign tools and tech.
Increasingly, clients are asking CACI to step in as an expert third party resource to tackle these challenges, using the purpose-build ResolvID solution.
CACI is a frontrunner in identity resolution and has pioneered innovative ways to consolidate customer data since the issue first arose. We started with matching services based on name, surname, address. Today, we have built far beyond that expertise to create ResolvID, a real time API-driven product that learns as it resolves a wide range of different data sets. It can also address digital applications where there may be no first party identifiers, instead using IP addresses and device IDs.
Our next blog will be to find out exactly how identity resolution supports advanced personalisation, compliance and accurate analytics, and why this is crucial for your success in today’s digital marketplace. Or get in touch if you’d like to discuss how we can help you tackle the challenges of identity resolution in your customer data.
CACI and Snowflake hosted a webinar on the benefits of marketers getting involved in Snowflake’s Data Cloud. Whilst real-time data infrastructure may sound like the focus of the techies, this webinar sets out the why and how of playing an active part in your data infrastructure.
I was fortunate as webinar host to be joined by Paul Coward of the RAC and Jon Ede who leads CACI’s Snowflake practice. As Strategy & Insight Director at the RAC, Paul has been heavily involved in their implementation of Snowflake to drive real-time marketing and insight capabilities. Jon has a wealth of experience in building customer and marketing data platforms, and was an early adopter of Snowflake’s technology.
Five takeaways on snowflake’s data cloud
- Failure to engage on data infrastructure may leave marketers with something that is not fit for use.
- Data provides an edge for marketers who are seeking to continually optimise marketing activities.
- Snowflake enables marketers and IT teams to quickly deliver high value insights.
- Optimised marketing comes from a continual cycle of using data to hypothesise, test, measure, learn and improve.
- The frictionless data infrastructure that Snowflake delivers connects all the data in your organisation straight to the customer.
Enabling your marketing data transformation
CACI is here to help marketers do amazing things with data. Whether that’s building a Single Customer View, creating clean data feeds for your marketing technology, or augmenting your customer data with demographics and lifestyle variables. There’s a host of technology, consulting and data science work that we can do to improve your marketing results.
If you’d like to see a recording of the event please get in touch!
We will soon be releasing the CMO’s Playbook for Snowflake, if you’d like to register for a copy of that in advance, please contact me with your details!