According to a recent Forrester report, “consumers are more aware than ever that companies collect and use their personal data for marketing and advertising purposes.”
In your quest for customer centricity, the more customer data your company collects, the more important it is that all of that data is integrated and applied to your system of record. This means consolidating all of the various types of customer data from different parts of your organization into the main database management system with the aim of understanding your customers in a holistic way and implementing customer experience as a shared service. The better you understand your customers, the more you gain their trust. The Forrester report also shows that consumers will move their business to the brands that prove their trustworthiness.
This is especially true for consent data, which is different from transactional data or basic personal information. Consent data is gathered from opted-in customers and taps into a consumer’s attitudes, opinions, and desires. When you integrate consent data with other data sources like data management platforms (DMP), loyalty databases, or customer relationship management (CRM) systems, this helps provide a unified view of the customer and create optimal products, services, and customer experiences.
Read on and I’ll show you how some of Alida’s customers are finding better business and customer outcomes though consent data integration.
The Benefits of Consent Data Integration
One of the challenges that businesses face is making the best use of all their customer data. As pointed out recently in CIO, “More data, doesn’t always equate to more insight. Brands face a common set of challenges: fragmented data, inconsistent experiences and complicated governance, that must be resolved in order for truly real-time customer experience to become standard...It’s critical for marketers to meet regional and organizational requirements for managing known and unknown customer data, but it’s difficult to achieve this when data sits in different systems and locations. And all of this must be invisible to the end user.”
An article in CMSWire reinforced this idea stating, “Currently existing and potential new integrations offer pathways to new opportunities for marketers, and should be front and center as marketers look to become more relevant, and use their data in smarter ways.”
Detailed customer insights add context and value across your business applications. Our Alida Sparq platform helps you uncover customer attributes like motivation, preferences, and beliefs that aren’t available through your other second- and third-party data sources. It also offers many APIs to support all your integration needs. Combining more nuanced consent data with existing transactional data is where the magic happens.
Applying consent data to your system of record so that’s all in one place and available to the entire organization:
- Breaks down data silos and increases the power of your customer data
- Ensures data integrity
- Eliminates the need for inter-departmental data requests, saving employee time and company money
- Allows all areas of the organization to work from the same data set for a 360-degree view of customers
- Helps with data privacy and regulation compliance
Canadian Tire: Bridging Data Silos
Over the past century, Canadian Tire has evolved from a small automotive business into Canada’s largest retailer with 1,700 stores and $12.6 billion in annual revenue. When the company faced the challenge of changing customer expectations and increased competition, their Consumer Research team needed direct access to their customers in order to empower the organization to customize marketing messages, test products to improve quality perception, and ensure an exceptional customer experience. Additionally, the Data Science team wanted to create predictive models to impact business outcomes, but had a hard time identifying specific customer groups with only their purchasing data.
To solve these problems, the company created The Triangle insights community. Canadian Tire bridges data silos by combining transactional data from the Triangle loyalty program with demographic, psychographic, and attitudinal data from approximately 200,000 Triangle Community members.
A data integration between the Alida Sparq-powered insight community and their loyalty database enables unified, granular customer profiles, look-alike modeling, and greater confidence in predictive models. This leads to increased accuracy in targeting customized marketing messages to the right customers at the right time over just using transactional sales data. As a result, Candian Tire has tested over 500 products in one year, seen 70% of sales growth attributed to tested products, and saved $1.8M in research costs, all thanks to data integration.
Salomon: Accelerating Strategic Innovations
Salomon is an outdoor sportswear and sports equipment manufacturer based in France. Salomon wanted to increase its customer centricity and use the voice of its customers to support its strategies for product innovation and development. Its Salomon Research Community launched in 2015 and has 10,000 client members in eight countries. Members play an integral role in the company’s decision-making processes.
Salomon Research Community is fully integrated with Salomon’s CRM system—their primary consumer information database. Integrating Alida Sparq directly with their CRM system gives all CRM contacts the chance to be part of the insight community and allows wider internal access to ask survey questions to their customers and more fully involve customers in all stages of the product innovation cycle. This merging of data enriches the customer profile and improves the customer journey.
In addition, the CRM integration enables Salomon to efficiently fully comply with GDPR and other data regulations, by centralizing and consolidating data and managing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and data consent.
How You Can Succeed
As you have seen above, data integrations help you use your customer data in smarter, more efficient ways. Customers know what they want and are eager to share their insights with companies they trust and that they know will listen to them. When you capture the voice of your customers and make that impactful consent data available to everyone in your organization, you can achieve greater business success, and, ultimately, provide outstanding customer experiences that consumers expect and hope they get from the brands they engage with.
What Do You Think?
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