Kelly O’Hara, vertical delivery leader, technology services at Merkle, discusses how to create a more connected customer experience and better use your marketing technology investments.
Don’t get me wrong, most brands have some level of understanding of their customer journeys, at least at a surface level. Some documentation may even exist, which details welcome travels for email sign up, loyalty tier progression, etc. But these may not be at a level that will help you get the most out of marketing technologies. We have not come across many clients who have a complete understanding of these journeys from customer identity, data capture, and connection levels.
What do we mean by customer identity, data capture, and connection levels? We’re talking about detailed data flow documentation, which captures customer engagement points, the data (specifically identity data) captured at these points, and how these data points flow through internal and external systems and ultimately contribute to a holistic view of your customer.
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Lacking this understanding can lead to two things:
- Disconnected customer experiences
- A perception that their current technology is “not working†and needs more investment
The Disconnected Customer Experience
A typical example of where a customer experience can become disconnected is when the customer toggles back and forth between “identified†and “unidentified†experiences. Identified experiences are things like logging into a website to complete a purchase online or giving your email address or loyalty number for a point-of-sale (POS) transaction. In contrast, unidentified experiences would be transacting online as a guest or neglecting to provide personal information at POS.
For example, imagine that we have made a single identified purchase with your brand. You have associated that to me in your marketing systems when you go into a store and complete another purchase, maybe several purchases, without providing any personal information. In your marketing system, you will look like a one-time buyer. If you have single to multi-buyer conversion journeys, you may be receiving confusing messaging that undervalues my interaction with your brand.
If you had the POS experience mapped out from a customer identification, data capture, and data flow perspective, you could recognize this as a gap and look for ways to close this gap. In this example, a solution could be other identifiers like credit card tokens or different ways to incentivize personal information capture.
Why Is My Marketing Tech “Not Working�
A common question, especially as the complexity of the marketing technology landscape continues to grow. And most commonly, with technologies like the customer data platform (CDP), each vendor has its unique collection of capabilities. An example of where this question comes up with CDPs is explicitly connected with the guest check-out experience.
In this instance, the customer chooses not to authenticate on the site, identifying and connecting with any previous activity, including purchases, site, or other engagement, slightly more complicated.
Depending on when customer IDs are assigned, how terrestrial address is utilized in identification processes, and what customer profile information is being passed to the CDP from source systems, you may or may not be able to connect the dots.
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One missing piece in this identification data flow can cause a significant portion of your customer activity to appear anonymous. Customer journeys’ documentation, data capture, and connection levels can illuminate gaps early, ideally in the implementation, to avoid disconnects and business impact further down the road.
Suppose you have already implemented your marketing technology. In that case, these customer journeys can be a great asset to audit how current technologies are being leveraged to maximize identification and relevant data capture.
As you can see, it’s essential to not only identify the gaps in your customer journeys but find how to fully harness your marketing technologies to fill in the gaps and create a more connected customer experience.
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