As business becomes increasingly digitized and competitive, customer engagement that makes clients feel valued and appreciated becomes more critical. Covid-19 adds another complicating factor—a heightened risk of customer churn across a number of industries. It is clear that companies need to take every opportunity they can to maintain customer loyalty, and today’s technology makes it easier to do so.
A customer data platform (CDP) is software that collects and synthesizes data from various touchpoints into a holistic view of each customer. Having access to a comprehensive customer profile allows you to identify where improvements need to be made and create more personalized engagements. For example, accessing data such as product engagement or satisfaction scores can inform your CS team, enabling them to refine their processes as necessary. Here are 3 key areas where a CDP can benefit your organization:
- Improve Data Protection & Privacy Compliance
- Centralize your Data in a Non-Siloed Hub
- Power your Customer Operating System
Read on for a breakdown of how these benefits can optimize your customers’ experiences.
1. Improve Data Protection & Privacy Compliance
CDPs collect data from users so that companies can create the best customer experience possible. With this collection also arrives a host of data protection laws like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) which set the standards for security and consent. Organizations need to comply with these ordinances for both the benefit of the consumer and to avoid fines or reputation damage.
To aid with this compliance, CDPs are often built on foundations that prioritize security and privacy, enabling companies to protect customer data by:
- Complying with Key Industry Standards: Security standards like ISO/IEC 27001 detail requirements on how to properly manage information security. The frameworks within CDPs are built to comply with these standards, ensuring organized data management.
- Maintaining a Digital Chain of Custody: In addition to connecting all your data in one place, CDPs provide a paper trail of where each piece of data came from. This is critical, as you must know the origins of your data in order to remain in compliance. Using a CDP assures you stay in compliance by ensuring the information on where your data is coming from is retained.
- Storing Data In a Secure Area: Data laws dictate security requirements for data collections and establish consequences for non-compliance. Accordingly, well-made CDPs will store data on servers that accommodate these concerns, keeping your business within its legal rights.
2. Centralize Your Data in a Non-Siloed Hub
For years, companies have been using customer data insights to provide better value and retain customers. The capability to record every interaction with customers makes it possible to avoid contradictory information and duplicate inquiries, streamline department collaborations, and run smooth handoffs from sales to onboarding. While collecting and organizing this data is important, it is also critical that this data is easily accessible to teams across your organization.
A CDP can track and widely distribute many types of valuable information. With one central platform, all of your organization’s members will be able to make great data-driven decisions based on access to the following types of data:
- Product usage
- Contract and transactional data
- Support tickets and status updates
- All logged interactions a customer has had with your entire organization
- Demographic and behavioral data
- Customer feedback such as customer survey responses and satisfaction scores from various survey tools.
In addition to mapping customer data, customer data platforms integrate information from the tools you have already been using. This integration is critical in order to supply all members of your organization with the same detailed customer information. Without this seamless unification of data, your organization might face some challenges.
| Example: An executive is unaware of how customers are doing because they cannot tell how many people have unresolved support tickets. This same executive might not be able to identify who is up for renewal, because they cannot see what percentage of customers are at a certain level of product usage. This executive is in the dark about their own customers because each of these crucial data points is housed in a different, inaccessible place. Today’s customer data platform features are attuned to this siloing issue and take major steps to prevent it. |
Although it previously cost a significant amount of effort, time, and money to prepare data for a shared platform, today’s technology is well-equipped to handle this issue. When you pick the right platform, you can quickly transform any imperfect data collected from streams into intelligent insights that only become more refined as time goes on. As a result of sharing this data, your platform can help foster a customer-centric culture.
3. Power your Customer Operating System
While having a holistic view of your customers is fascinating in itself, all that data is not useful unless it informs concrete, actionable improvements. The best way to take action is to connect your CDP to a Customer Operating System. The data connected to the Customer Operating System can power early warning systems, campaigns, and reporting and analytics, as well as help democratize data, making sure each team has access to the data needed to guide data-driven decision making.
By linking the data in your CDP to your Customer Operating System, you empower your company to continue:
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Providing the Right Message at the Right Time:
At each customer stage, you should set actionable goals that will help your customer find value with your product. You can do this by monitoring customers’ progress across the journey and viewing how they interact with the product. Over time, you can turn this data into action by suggesting features, offering personalized resources, and providing educational opportunities that will improve usage.
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Listening to Feedback for an Improved Customer Experience:
By monitoring health score changes and tracking feedback metrics such as net promoter scores, customer satisfaction surveys, and customer satisfaction surveys, you can have an informed outlook on how different customers view your business. As you see these forms of feedback, you can address individual customer issues, find points of improvement in your enterprise, and capitalize on upsell/cross-sell opportunities.
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Establishing an Early Warning System:
A Customer Operating System, when used in conjunction with a CDP, allows you to stay vigilant about client health through an Early Warning System. This System views a number of metrics, including product usage, business outcomes, and service utilization, to develop a health score that shows whether clients are as engaged as they should be. When these scores dip below ideal levels, you can leverage engagement plans from the Operating System that are specifically created for correcting the issue at hand.
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Reporting Analytics:
Each stage of the customer journey will have different goals and KPIs that must be tracked. This tracking will allow you to stay aware of what is going on in real-time and monitor progression towards goals. Tracking goals and KPIs will enable you to see how effective your activities are at driving goals and adjust accordingly.
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Creating a 360 View of Customers:
Many teams across your organization will play a role in the customer journey, therefore, they all need access to the same data. Making the same data accessible to all allows your organization to analyze and review insights, create frictionless collaboration, align goals, and take data-driven action.
Optimize Your Customer Data Platform Benefits
When you take advantage of the benefits provided by a CDP, you can learn more about your customers to better serve their needs. With a CDP, organizations can collect data through regulatory-compliant methods, place said-information in an illuminating context, and share these insights enterprise-wide. Combining these capabilities with a Customer Operating System allows you to leverage proactive action plans that respond to specific customer health needs. As a result of these efforts, you can deliver more informed, personalized engagements and stand apart from the competition.
Totango’s customer operating system is powered by a customer data platform to help you take proactive action. Start analyzing trends, predicting needs, and launching value-driving campaigns by trying Totango out for free.
