CUSTOMER DATA MANAGEMENT
Effectively understanding the customer journey starts with understanding the customer. This includes data about the customer (that may include name, age, and interests), their behaviour (such as previous interactions with the company’s call centre or website), transactional history (including purchase and returns), campaign interaction data (such as the types of content they engage with and in which channel), and any modeled data (such as their price sensitivity, customer segment or lifetime value). In most firms, these types of data sit in disparate databases scattered throughout the organisation, managed by different teams.
Customer data management requires an organisation to integrate and standardise the relevant data, resolve customer identity to merge data into customer profiles, and to surface this information so that it can inform how the brand or an employee acts at the moment of interaction with a customer. Effectively resolving customer identity requires practitioners to leverage an identity graph to combine all first party and third party data in order to fully enhance the company’s understanding of customer behaviour, transaction, and campaign history. However, in a survey of practitioners conducted for this paper, nearly half of the respondents (49%) indicated that they still manage customer data in individual applications, while a further 21% plan to add this capability. To deal with today’s consumers, having data scattered across individual applications is a recipe for disaster.
