Why Customer Data Platform Is A Must Have In Retail Today?

With an array of options at their disposal, customers are becoming more and more demanding with each passing day. Expectations are high and if you cannot meet them, they will move on and find another brand to lavish their time and money on.

To put it simply, brands must pay more attention to its customers to deliver an experience the customer will want to return to, again and again. A thorough knowledge of the customer and his/ her preferences are therefore mandatory, as it has become essential to provide every customer with a very personalized experience.

Personalization is daunting as customers today interact with brands through a variety of channels both online and offline. The collection of customer data is scattered in legacy systems – with departments such as sales, marketing and customer service holding information in silos. In addition, information contained in sources such as social media, mobile apps, email, SMS, POS, coupons, loyalty programs etc. add to the barrage of data.

Having all this data is pretty useless if the retailer is unable to connect it and utilize it to make customer-centric strategies and decisions.

Creating a unified view of the customer requires data cleansing, curation, resolution, and transformation. It is also imperative to provide seamless access of customer data to business users without requiring IT intervention.

Nothing is more important in retail today than a single view of the customer, irrespective of where she chooses to do business with your brand.

Consider a hiking enthusiast who buys shoes online and talks about how excited she is about the new shoes and her upcoming trip. She may then later visit the store to buy a jacket and nylon pants. She also redeems her loyalty points with a coalition partner brand to rent backpacking camera equipment.

The amount of information around this one customer alone is a complex amalgam of data. By factoring in more information (such as Instagram feed as to where she is hiking, her lifestyle), a clear, unified 360-degree view of the customer can help retailers and their partners know what products and content to promote to drive conversions.

Enter the Customer Data Platform: A business managed a system that brings together a company’s customer data from multiple departments and channels to enable customer data modeling and optimization of timing and nature of marketing messages.

Let’s look at some specifics of how a Customer Data Platform can help retailers get results:

1. Increased revenue from existing customers through personalized customer engagement and special offers based on individual preferences.
2. Improved customer satisfaction through improved customer focus – the better you know your customers, the better you’re able to anticipate and give them what they need.
3. Optimized ad expenditure by knowing exactly where a customer is in his purchase cycle, and intelligently targeting them with relevant messaging.

All of the above have a direct and immediate impact on both revenue and profitability of a company, making the need for customer data management real and urgent for retailers.

Data science is today a game changer in marketing, and the importance of having the right Customer Data Platform in place becomes even more apparent.

We define CDP as the core data infrastructure that can ingest, manage and serve data. Manthan Customer360 is a CDP that also houses analytical and data science capabilities such as segmentation, look-alike predictions, data exploration, micro-segmentation, and self-service analysis.

To learn more about how a CDP can serve your retail business beyond customer analytics – operations such as assortment planning, pricing etc., download our Customer Data Platforms handbook