What does it mean to be data driven?
Historically, when we talked digital customers, we thought of them in terms of email addresses and cookies—a digital trail of their browsing behaviors. Now, marketers can’t rely on cookies alone to know their consumers and measure performance, especially considering Google’s announcement to remove support for third-party cookies by default on its Chrome browser, following Apple (Safari) and Mozilla (Firefox). It’s even more critical that companies use data from diverse sources, create stronger data architectures, and build governance frameworks to truly understand who consumers are and, more importantly, what they desire from brands.
Successful businesses have likely formed a unified identity graph, or an understanding of each customer. They use AI models, analytics tools and techniques to bring together a wide range of previously siloed, structured and unstructured data sets, and merge them with data from ecosystem partners. It’s this convergence of transactional data, demographic data and psychographics that helps brands infer what customers are thinking and when they might make a purchasing decision. Pulled together in a responsible way that protects individuals’ privacy, the data paints a more complete picture—a Living Customer Profile—of every existing and potential customer.
In the past, what prevented us from getting critical insights to best serve our customers was not having data that connected siloed data sources. Now—with the help of our data partners and Accenture accelerators—we can better know the customer.
Align your data to your business objectives
Once organizations have created these customer profiles, they need to figure out what insights they want to generate, levers to pull, hypotheses to test and experiments to run against their business objectives.
In an events-driven market landscape, this could mean driving incremental sales revenue by prompting shopping experiences based on social media activity. Or sending an email with tailored products and promotions based on historical purchases. Importantly, AI and machine learning (ML) tools can automate these touchpoints based on deep and even real-time customer insights at a scale never before possible—with the added benefit of continuously improving experiences over time. When an offer is extended and a customer responds, these signals create a benchmark from which businesses can automatically optimize and recommend their next offers and experiences.
Bring the data together for maximum impact
Take Accenture’s Consumer 360 (C360) Platform, the data engine that fuels Accenture’s AI-powered marketing solution and enables next best action and hyper-personalization capabilities. Accenture partners with key technology providers to securely bring together data into one architecture where Accenture can apply proprietary AI and ML algorithms to build rich, comprehensive consumer profiles. Models can then accurately predict what, when and how the consumer will buy next. By tapping into insights from data across Accenture’s multiple ecosystem partners instead of just a single provider, brands can expand their online audience and boost their shop-to-order conversions.
A global cosmetics manufacturer used C360 to double the number of customers with known identities in its database. As part of this effort, more than 35 data sources were centralized into a single cloud ecosystem and customer identities were created across multiple brands using secure data collection and analysis methods. This enabled the company to predict how customers will act and what kind of engagements will resonate with them.
By aggregating, activating upon and optimizing insights from customers, one company was able to increase engagement by 25% and average revenue per visit by 10%.
Know your customer to grow your business
With the right combination of data, AI capabilities, analytics tools and partnerships, companies across industries—from retail and telecom to financial services and the auto industry—can know their customers at a granular level. This opens up companies to a myriad opportunities to create and deliver experiences that will strengthen customer loyalty and drive new business growth—and ultimately provide the kind of competitive differentiation all companies strive for today.
