Data Management & Integration Solutions Archives - Page 8 of 8

Who are you?

Posted on: 27 November 2020

As a philosophical question, you probably have a fairly good grasp of the answer when it comes to your own life.

However, the way businesses see us is patchy at best. Duplicated, incomplete, inaccurate data that is spread around systems creates an issue when it comes to generating an accurate profile of who an individual customer is.

When I consider my own data, I use multiple email addresses, have seen my surname spelt multiple ways, and use Dave and David interchangeably. My postal address can be written in endless ways depending on the input form used. It’s messy data.

Businesses will store this data across finance, operational, CRM and sales systems. You may notice this when you phone a call centre and are asked for policy numbers, order tracking codes, or some other identifier. It becomes more transparent that your records are split across systems and teams when that request is followed by “ah, I’ll need to transfer you to another team in that case…”.

It’s not just the data I provide either. Brands are tracking website visits, the content we consume, our social media interactions, and how we use their mobile apps. This tracking information can then be combined with my first-party data. This opens up further insight into my interests and intentions.

For example, if I’ve just purchased a product and start reading the returns policy on the company’s website, it should be obvious that I’m not happy and considering a refund. Brands that can use this data will retain customers, reduce services costs, and ultimately win share of wallet.

For customer focussed brands, Identity Resolution unlocks real benefits:

Advanced Personalisation: Utilising the full 360-degree view of customer data to serve personalised messaging across channels
Compliance: Ability to gather all PII data from across systems on the individual and to ensure responsible marketing in regulated industries
Improved Service: Less “screen switching” during customer interactions and the ability to pre-empt service problems
Accurate Analytics: Taking account of full customer data set to accurately measure loyalty or predict propensity to take certain action

Failure to get the full picture of who your customer is will lead to issues in making better business decisions that reach a customer. As the old-adage goes, garbage in, garbage out. We can’t expect our marketing to be optimal if it’s only utilising a small percentage of the data available.

To find out more information on Getting Started with Identity Resolution.

If you’d like to find out more about CACI’s real-time ResolvID service for identity resolution, get in touch.

CACI becomes an official Snowflake cloud data platform partner

Posted on: 23 October 2020

CACI is focussed on doing amazing things with data. For that reason, I’m really pleased to announce that through certifications and client case studies, we’ve achieved an official Select Partnership level with Snowflake.

Our clients have always relied on CACI to combine complex and large data sets to improve their business. Whether we’re bringing together data from across multiple brands and systems to build a 360-degree view of customer data, or analysing anonymous data from the UK’s major banks and lenders, we have expertise that brands can trust.

Snowflake is a cloud-based data platform that is gaining significant traction with CTOs. Snowflake is also one the fastest growing tech companies in the world and recently went public with a $60bn valuation.

Through its unique technology, Snowflake can power critical real-time use cases for CMOs and achieve improved time to value. Jon Ede who leads CACI’s Snowflake practice said:

I’ve built more SCVS and CDPS in my career than I wish to count. A lot of the functionality that a modern platform needs to deliver is out the box with snowflake, allowing for a CMO to cut down on the upfront implementation time and deliver value sooner. As a technologist who has spent most of their career working in marketing, I see immediate benefits of snowflake to a CMO.

CACI AND SNOWFLAKE FOR CMOS

CACI and Snowflake combined bring together a cutting-edge data platform with expertise in delivering customer marketing solutions.

As already demonstrated with our real-time Customer Personalisation Platform architecture that is built on Snowflake, CACI is developing answers for real CMO needs.

CACI has also integrated our identity resolution services into Snowflake, enabling marketers to bring together multiple data sets and, in real-time, combine duplicates. Improving the accuracy of reporting, attribution, and campaign selection.

GET IN TOUCH

Should you need help with your customer and marketing needs, get in touch with me, David Sealey through dsealey@caci.co.uk.

If you’d like to understand more about the data challenges that marketers are facing, I recommend you read our recent article on the challenges of personalised marketing.

Five challenges of personalised marketing

Posted on: 10 August 2020

PERSONALISATION IS A CHALLENGING TOPIC

Some organisations just don’t get it. How do you change things at your company?

Almost two thirds of consumers expect to receive personalised offers as standard and 63% of consumers would stop using companies who provide poor personalisation. Effective personalisation presents a huge opportunity for marketers who can master it. The rewards are potentially great. But so are the risks of delivering it badly.

Marketers are finding it harder than ever to reach and convert consumers across channels. So smarter targeted messaging is an absolute must to connect with customers.

Working with clients in a wide range of sectors, we’ve been helping marketers crack the conundrum. The most successful organisations are combining a range of technologies and expertise in data, campaign management and channels to achieve impactful results.

Typically, we find there are five main challenges to overcome in creating an effective and sustainable personalisation model that can continually adapt to changing customer needs.

MULTIPLE VIEWS OF THE CUSTOMER

Customer data is typically acquired over time and is kept in different repositories and formats. Multi-channel personalisation requires a complete and accurate 360 degree view of every customer. Identifying, matching, cleaning and integrating diverse records and information is a complex challenge.
SEPARATE TOOLS AND CHANNELS

Enterprise businesses currently use up to 91 different marketing cloud services. Marketing technology (even when it comes from a single vendor) is hard to connect, because different tools have their own unique data models and capabilities. To provide a personalised, seamless, omnichannel experience, tools need to work in harmony.
DISCONNECTED DATA

Many customers are willing to provide more data, if they can see that it’s being used to their advantage to provide more relevant communication. Around the organisation, there’s demand for different insights at different times, so teams collect new data from a range of sources to meet a particular need. It’s hard to funnel this relentless deluge of new data into the mix and making it accessible immediately, to match current behaviour and preferences.
SILOED DECISIONS

Communication decisions may be made by a number of different teams – from customer services, marketing and sales to IT and operations. Customers receive communications from several platforms – they can be contradictory and repetitive. This undermines the whole purpose of personalisation, creating an impression that your organisation doesn’t understand the customer and places little value on quality. To compound the problem, feedback from different campaigns isn’t built back into a central knowledge base. Effective personalisation strategies avoid this by using automation to combine technology and decision-making.
OPERATIONAL INEFFICIENCY

Collectively, customer engagement teams aren’t productive because they’re underusing the technology in the business. That’s typically either because of its inherent complexity or a lack of training. Through a single personalisation platform, you can integrate all your campaign and communications systems into a single marketing stack that gives more power and insight to everyone.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

We’ve partnered with Braze, Tealium and Snowflake to combine world-class technologies that create a powerful, user-friendly platform capable of high-volume delivery of sophisticated, personalised campaigns.

CACI’s Customer Personalisation Platform empowers marketers to model and deliver incisive and high-impact personalised campaigns. Our experts help clients customise and deploy it to start delivering ROI quickly.

Why it’s time for Telecoms to prioritise Master Data Management

Posted on: 2 June 2020

The year of 2020 has brought with it many challenges, not least of which is the need to stay connected. The recent reliance on digital services to keep families, friends and businesses in touch is an added pressure and opportunity for the Telco industry who are already taking on the challenges presented by the Internet of Things (IoT) and the roll out of 5G.

Along with these new challenges and opportunities comes a time for these companies to ensure one thing moves up in the list of priorities: Master Data Management (MDM).

A MDM solution not only brings systems and information together, but creates a single version of the truth. An accurate and trusted, complete view across customers, operations, supply chain, governance and more.

Here we look at some of the key uses and benefits telecoms can get from MDM.

The customer is king

It may seem obvious that we would list the importance of the customer and their data to any telco company, but what is often less obvious is just how complex customer data can get; and that without a full view of the customer, new opportunities can be easily missed and the chances of them jumping ship are substantially increased.

When we start to delve into the sources and various data held by just one customer, it can span across subscriptions, family members, tariffs, bolt-ons, bundles and more. If this information isn’t properly stored and managed, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) can quite easily make big missteps that make the customer immediately think “you don’t know me” – which in the world of tailored online marketing, creates negative brand associates overnight.

While customers might not say it out loud, the expectation is that their CSP has a complete 360-degree view of them, across from their accounts, their relationships, their history with the CSP, interactions (whether that’s by phone, email, in-store or social media) and more. Plus, to really stay on top of future opportunities the CSP also needs to be looking at the customer’s network usage and behaviours. By taking this 360-degree approach the CSP is far more likely to create the right offer at the right time, reduce customer churn and even increase products bought within their existing customer base.

Considering these facts and that it is widely accepted that customer retention and relationship building provides more potential revenue than the acquisition of a new customer, CSPs must prioritise implementation of solutions such as MDM that allow them to better understand and react to their customers and access this potential revenue.

Protecting and producing products

Managing the chain of suppliers and products is not as straightforward as it may sound, especially where CSPs are concerned. Between the contract products of various tariffs, the digital subscriptions such as video and channel content and the hardware of different suppliers, “product” suddenly sounds much bigger.

Across these products, information is stored, managed and presented in different (and sometimes multiple) ways, creating a complicated task, especially if it’s being done manually. This will often be done by various people across the business, working in different departments.

What MDM solves for products is a way to centralise all of this information, turning large volumes of data into a manageable data set that helps a CSP to better manage all of their processes.

Opening up new revenue streams

As some more traditional revenue streams dry out, the pressure is on CSPs to look to other areas of their ecosystem for opportunities and new revenue streams.

One of these opportunities may come from the growth of connected devices and the IoT. As more and more consumers connect their home appliances, CSPs can gain increased data insights from larger volumes of data than ever before.

In addition to this, as we meet the new reality of 5G rollouts, previously unthinkable volumes of data will soon become the norm. This could not only help telecoms improve efficiency, but also open up a new stream of revenue by taking a network slicing approach to enhance network monetisation.

Once telecom’s begin to go down this route the importance of MDM becomes apparent very quickly as the data volumes need to be effectively managed.

The future of MDM for CSPs

To keep the competitive edge and meet customer demands, implementation of a MDM solution is becoming increasingly crucial.

CSPs have historically invested in key systems to support these goals such as CRM, ERP and Network management systems. With those in place a solid MDM solution provides the boost the CSP environment needs to drive improvements, efficiencies and ultimately business growth.

Find out more about how CACI are supporting telco companies in master data management.