Both the COVID-19 pandemic and the tightening of privacy restrictions have led to a shift in how brands interact and transact with customers, even within a face-to-face engagement. However, this shift presents an opportunity to better identify known and unknown customers in a privacy-safe way and alter the way brands utilize customer data to power in-the-moment experiences. Industries that were not impacted by the pandemic should learn from those who were quick to make this change and are now succeeding. It may be in their best interest to continue with a digital and offline identity strategy.
Identity for Foundational Knowledge
Because of these changes, identity resolution (the task of linking across your known and unknown customers and prospects) has become a coveted and must-have capability for organizations today. This is also the starting point needed to operationalize your data, as first-party data collection is critical to fuel identity. Brands have always strived to maximize the number of known versus anonymous customers. But now, this is more important than ever, as the third-party cookie will soon become an unreliable tracking option as anticipated privacy restrictions tighten.
But it is not a one-sided coin. Your customers expect to see value in exchange for their data, but that value is not always present. Ensure that you are thinking about what value means for your customers. This could be in the form of free gated content, discounts and coupons, or loyalty points. By connecting those customer experiences to your customer identities, this accelerates the ability to examine and learn from customer interactions with your brand.
See More: The Future of Data-Driven Marketing Is Inside Data Clean Rooms
Collect the Right Data To Meet Your Goals
Data collection will vary across industries and is not the same for every organization. When thinking about your identity strategy, take a step back and think strategically about the experiences you want to put into place and the data needed to fuel them. When you have rich first-party data, you can leverage that data for more compelling and personal messaging.
For example, for a clothing company, a critical data point to be collected is feedback on material preferences. If your new line of sweaters is the same material that you know is a favorite of some in your database, then the material type is something you will want to include in messaging to these customers. Within travel, an airline will want to collect data points on favorite destinations and the frequency of visits. If a customer has traveled to New York on numerous occasions, this data can be used to personalize messaging to not only deals on flights to New York but also add-ons such as hotel and dinner deals around the city.
Broad data collection is not helpful and can create real risk, as consumers around the world now have the right to see and even delete their data. If you do not have an efficient system for compliant customer lookup and erasure, this could be a real problem. Not only can it be risky, but for your customers, it can be annoying to be asked for excessive amounts of data that will never be used. For example, if an ice cream shop chain asks for your birthday but does not send a gift or discount on your birthday, what is really the point?
Real-time Activation in Action
Real-time capabilities to activate your data may be inherently increasing as part of operational shifts. However, it is equally important that brands resolve customer identity, update customer profiles in real-time, and make decisions so that in-the-moment interactions can be orchestrated and activated on quickly. To show this activation in action, let us say a customer logs into a transportation company’s app and buys a train ticket. On a previous trip, this customer purchased coffee at the train stop’s snack bar. When the day of the trip arrives, the customer’s train is delayed. The company decides to send out an apologetic message through the app, with a discount for coffee at the snack bar to make the delay more bearable.
These real-time interactions do not happen overnight. Start small with what you have to gain quick wins. From there, you can further understand the data needed to build more complex experiences and leverage attributes like customer preferences and other more personal data attributes. If you do not have an identity capability today, your first step is to have a technology consultation with an agency to understand your current level of maturity and decipher what technology is right for your organization.
Critical Components of Operationalization
Operationalizing this process can be a chicken and egg situation: you need the right data to fuel experiences and use cases, as well as the tech as the engine. But to truly operationalize data, you need organizational support from stakeholders to give the green light and an aligned strategy to make the right moves. Each component is different and equally important, providing key aspects to effective integration. When building your strategy, think about the capabilities you want to put into play. As an example, of the organizations that can now collect customer data in real-time, some top capabilities implemented could be marketing audience distribution and data unification.
 See More: Share and Bolster Data in a Privacy Safe Way With a Clean Room
New Channels Bring New Challenges: Resolving Siloed Data
The pandemic has driven a rapid shift from in-person customer contact to virtual contact has created a wealth of data in new platforms, but integrating this with existing systems is becoming an urgent requirement.
This brings up an even deeper issue of data silos, as this is where many organizations often fall short. While data collection is increasing with the influx of online interaction, teams around the organization have no single unified place where the data lives. Thus, the barriers of siloed data can often exist. A common data layer is important to enable data connectivity from across the enterprise. Here, the organization’s first-party data is unified to a common definition and is not excluded but conformed to a common definition for centralization. To break the seemingly unending cycle of siloed data, organizations must come together and put an intersection in the road to create a centralized place to unify data within a common data layer. For some, that may be in a CDP, a cloud-based data lake, etc., to create a single customer profile that can be updated the moment actions are taken.
Using Identity to Influence Innovation
Brands that do not typically “own†the customer relationship are using identity to drive insights for better consumer understanding and influence product development and innovation. At best, identity efforts should be used to collect the right data to activate and meet your experience goals. From there, it can be used to narrow segmentation efforts and bolster customer profiles for personal and valuable experiences for your customers, creating more loyal advocates for your organization.
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