The pandemic transformed the way our customers shop and connect with brands. For many retailers, this huge behavioral shift has been challenging. To succeed in creating deeper customer engagement and loyalty, retailers will need to leverage their own first-party data and adopt a data-driven customer-centric approach.
As part of the Retail in Asia webinar series on how retailers can leverage technology to unify and activate their data in order to drive customer engagement and loyalty, on 30th August we discussed this topic in partnership with Google Cloud.
For more information about how building a unified data platform can benefit your organisation, watch the webinar here.
Together with industry experts from Google Cloud, Bloomreach, SM Retail and Tokopedia, we decrypted how retailers can unify and activate cross-channel customer and marketing data into a single actionable view to optimize customer-centric decision making and increase personalized engagement across the entire customer journey. Here are the key takeaways from the webinar:
Importance of First Party data in a post covid world
The last two years have been truly transformative in retail. Retailers have been at the forefront of this change – forced to do everything better, faster, more efficiently and digitally integrated.
However, this whole transformation has been further complicated by the fact that purchase journeys are no longer linear. New shopping methods and purchase triggers have created this complex web of multiple interactions – a messy middle. As a result, retailers have to stay one step ahead to navigate/ anticipate their shoppers’ next move.
This whole digital dance has opened the floodgates of data. Retailers are now able to collect data not just across their own value chain but also across the whole consumer journey. This data is then used to drive shopper experience and solve complex problems across their value chain- store operations, merchandising, assortments, fulfillment, etc.
Unificiation and activation of x-channel customer and marketing data
Legacy data solutions often hamper a retailer’s ability to store, manage, analyze and act on data in a timely and efficient manner. Common challenges include data existing in functional silos, lack of predictive analytics capabilities, and limited actionable insights for decision makers.
Unfortunately customer data is spread across several fragmented systems such as Ad campaigns, CRM systems, customer service logs, website and app analytics, loyalty programs, etc. This creates data silos which prevent organizations from being able to view their customers holistically, limiting their ability to create optimized customer experiences.
In addition, legacy systems don’t scale or have the capabilities to analyze data (including 1st and 3rd party) at scale and share insights across the organization. A combination of technical and organizational limitations prevents analysis of data being used properly to truly fulfill an optimized customer experience.
This can lead to retail executives being frustrated in having an incredible asset in large amounts of data, but not being able to harness its power to drive enterprise value. Hence it is important to build a single actionable view to optimize customer-centric decision making and increase personalized engagement across the entire customer journey.
Role of a CDP: Mapping out the foundations of a CDP to get a 360 view of your Customer – Data Sources, Analytics, Activation
There are 2 ways to approach a CDP journey with Google Cloud:
First is through Google Cloud’s ISV partners (SaaS products that are in Google Cloud’s co-sell program that solve for specific use cases that fit within the CDP space). These come with pre-built connectors and can help to produce value more quickly than custom built solutions.
The other route is building a custom solution leveraging GCP components, Google’s Ad and GMP products with Google Cloud’s SI partners. This is the more flexible route and is better suited for large enterprises who want greater control of the features & functionalities.
Benefits of building your CDP with Google:
- Clear business impact throughout the CDP process
- 75% of global shoppers have used a Google product in the past to help with their shopping (Ipsos). Consumers are engaging with Google across a multitude of platforms to start, research, and complete their shopping journeys.
- Access to the same technology and infrastructure that powers no less than 9 platforms that are used by 1 Billion or more users: Google Search, YouTube, Maps, etc.