Customer Data Integration Essentials

Transcription

1 Customer Data Integration Essentials By George Kaminski Director of Solutions Consulting Knotice, an IgnitionOne company Customer Data Integration Essentials 1

2 WHY CDI MATTERS Marketers today require the intricate linkage of both offline and online data in order to truly understand the behaviors of customers and prospects throughout various product and brand interactions, which is why the need for Customer Data Integration (CDI) to clean and standardize customer data is business critical. The demand to know and understand your customer is nothing new, but the tools and processes that allow you to create a trusted source of information to make decisions on your customers has evolved. Of course there are challenges and complexities that lie within your data; however, regardless of role or responsibility it remains important to be clear about the latest data nuances as we close the loop on end-to-end customer lifecycle marketing. Moving Beyond Merge and Purge Previously in the 1980s and 1990s, traditional data processes dealt with a limited set of customer contact data, such as: Name, Address, and Phone Number. Data integration consisted of batch filebased merges and purges of an organization s house files, as well as prospect data sources in order to create a marketing list. Back then, data analytics for most marketers consisted of recency, frequency and monetary (RFM) segmentation combined with basic demographics. As a result, data hygiene and data integration was limited to scrubbing names and providing corrected street addresses based upon the USPS data products. Fast forward to the digital era of today where new online channels, data types and the sheer volume of customer data have exploded. Marketers must not only deal with collecting the same traditional customer contact data, but also understand interactions and behavioral data such as: First-party cookies Web logs Social network IDs/handles SMS/Texting Third-party cookies IP addresses activity Mobile Customer Data Integration Essentials 2

3 Each of these marketing channels and attributes has its own unique data elements and requires specialized data hygiene and linkage techniques to provide a true 360-degree view of a customer or prospect and their interactions with your products and brands both online as well as offline. New questions now need to be asked about what data is available and how we truly want to view this customer to serve them with more effective and relevant messaging. Where does this customer live? How does he/she want to be contacted? What company channels (website, s, phone, direct mail) does he or she use regularly? Integrated Channels and Services Direct Mail Analytics Strategy Data Management Web Mobile Data Integration Planning Targeting Search Display Knotice LLC, an IgnitionOne company For customer lifecycle marketing, customer data integration can no longer rely solely on merge/purge and name/address hygiene solutions. CDI now requires a very robust solution set developed and deployed by integration partners who understand today s marketing channels, the nuances involved with these channels, along with related data elements to fully understand your customers and drive sales and profits. Data Complexity Explosion Because customer contact data was historically limited to a field like Address, former CDI solutions had to deal with sorting multiple addresses (billing, ship-to, location) and how to link these disparate pieces of contact data to a single customer or prospect. Today CDI solution providers are faced with the increased complexity of linking multiple points of content, such as addresses (work, home, Customer Data Integration Essentials 3

4 disposable), social handles/ids (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube), telephone numbers (work, home, mobile) and web behaviors across multiple web sites (logs, cookies, IP addresses) to a single customer. While many vendors claim to properly address the online aspects of managing and integrating customer data, very few have been able to effectively bridge the nuances of hygiene and linkage of terrestrial (name and address) data to their online counterparts. How do they handle different name deviations like Jim vs. Jimmy vs. James, and is the street address 101A Main St or 101 Main Street, Apt A? Do they associate the fact that a smartphone, tablet and computer (each with a unique device ID) are related to the same individual or household? These are important questions to ask when considering technologies to support your long-term goals. Data complexity increases when targeting international customers. Some of the international address hygiene-processing components that can be found in differing formats include address sub-buildings, sub-locality, premise number, thoroughfare, and more. Be aware that countries across the globe have varying data privacy and PII (personally identifiable information) requirements. These range from blocking certain social network domains, prohibiting processes not performed on a country s native soil, and other compliances. Be sure that your integration partners are active and familiar with various data restrictions for each country and continent. It is extremely important that data integration partners continue to develop solution sets and expertise in traditional marketing data assets, as opposed to focusing on the shiny objects and buzz of the day. The end game of CDI is to link all of your data assets into a unified and trusted view of your customers and prospects. While tempting to exclusively focus on the emerging online data and marketing channels, be sure to cleanse your traditional data to aid in the integration and attribution of your current client database. Using an Integration Partner Knotice, an IgnitionOne company, continues to invest in CDI by developing very sophisticated hygiene solutions and providing a state-of-the-art, single-vendor solution for cleansing, integration and management of all your online and offline data. Customer Data Integration Essentials 4

5 When working with Knotice, the team approaches each customer engagement as a consulting opportunity. Data scientists analyze an organization s various data sources as well as how data is captured by multiple systems of record. According to Knotice, many of today s data quality issues can be mitigated by fully understanding how data is initially introduced into their clients systems and by suggesting an approach to data hygiene that addresses higher quality at point of contact within any client-facing systems. It is less expensive and more reliable to correct data at the time of entry than to address it downstream. A great deal of time is spent reviewing client data sources before ever attempting to load or process it into a client s solution set. In order to accurately and efficiently integrate multi-sourced and multi-channel marketing data, data hygiene and integration are a must. Knotice recommends the following data management process to get started: 1. Data Review/Validation Determine data completeness, accuracy and cleanliness 2. Business Rules Recommend data validation and maintenance rules along with frequency 3. Hygiene & Address Standardization Perform data cleansing 4. Data Consolidation Perform aggregation and normalization With today s increasingly customer-focused world, having data that is a trusted source of information that provides an integrated view of all your customer data assets is business critical. Comprehensive CDI services perform critical data hygiene and consolidation of your data in order to provide a complete and comprehensive view of your customers, prospects and market. With the complexity of today s data environment, continuous investment and diligence matters. Customer Data Integration Essentials 5

6 Using Knotice for CDI CDI services by Knotice have the ability to provide multiple integration approaches such as API s for real-time transactional processing as well as large file, bulk data processing. Knotice believes that data hygiene and data integration is a continuing process and, as such, works with clients to not only perform data hygiene and linkages on the full file at initial load but also on a periodic basis to ensure that the full file remains clean throughout. Each engagement is unique, so the team will work with its clients to determine the appropriate frequency of periodic full-file data hygiene processing. Internationally, Knotice provides country-specific services (dependent upon available data) including and country-specific phone formatting and hygiene. The service supports both single-byte and multi-byte name and address data, such as Asian text and other non-western alphabets. Every country will have its own specific set of address elements and presentation/ordering requirements. As a result, Knotice will deploy a standardized address schema that will accommodate all the variances found between countries and support a common data storage mapping of those variances and elements. This will facilitate both query and use of address data regardless of country of origin. Knotice s data management capabilities include: Data validation on all input sources Hygiene & address standardization NCOA processing Customer data integration Suppression processing Phone number verification Data enhancement Data consolidation In addition, the API (as well as batch file processing) is all country enabled which means that Knotice can support new country addresses without any advanced notice or set-up time just pass in the data with a new country name/code and the process will perform the appropriate country specific hygiene and return a normalized set of data back. By continuing to develop and invest in our proprietary CDI technologies, Knotice provides organizations with a fast, cost-effective way to clean, standardize and link your online and offline data in real-time or bulk load to increase the ease and efficiency of your data integration to ensure the quality and actionablilty of all data assets within the system. Customer Data Integration Essentials 6

7 About Knotice Knotice, an IgnitionOne company, specializes in the intake and activation of data for digital messaging and analytics. Their cloud-based data management platform (DMP) lets marketers know more and do more by consolidating customer information across disparate platforms and touch points within a big data environment, while individual data profiles (both known and anonymous) are automatically enriched with a high degree of data fidelity. Using those DMP capabilities, the company is able to offer advanced analytics and key insights on timely and relevant topics that span customer lifecycle communications and strategies in this case, the degree of open activity occurring on mobile devices for permission-based marketing campaigns. This DMP is a central part of IgnitionOne s integrated Digital Marketing Suite SM (DMS), which empowers marketers to buy, manage and optimize digital media, understand client users through Data Management and Cross Channel Attribution, and drive conversions on a marketer s website through Marketing Automation. For more information, visit: George Kaminski George is currently Director of Solutions Consulting at Knotice, an IgnitionOne company, where he supports Sales from a technology perspective. His background spans almost 20 years of experience with large MSP s where he led quite a few enterprise-level data integration and marketing database projects for very large organizations. George has also spent the last five years in digital marketing, specifically dealing with the challenges of integrating traditional offline data with digital data. Customer Data Integration Essentials Copyright 2014 IgnitionOne, Inc. 7