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Realizing the Largest Benefits of Using Customer Data Platforms

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are a modern solution to a modern problem: disconnected customer data. We’re currently living in a world full of data, but data is useless unless you have the tools to interpret it. This is the value that a CDP can bring to your organization. This guide will explain the benefits of CDPs to everyone in your business, with examples from Microsoft Dynamics 365, so you can get ahead with understanding your customer data.

Why You Need A CDP

With so many brands, products and services on the market, and millions of new businesses opening each year, customers can become overwhelmed with choice. When multiple organizations offer high-quality products or services, customers begin to pay more attention to how brands interact with them. Customers want to feel recognized, valued, and understood by the brands they interact with and the only way for you to create this feeling is to have data about them. Lots of data.

It would take a long time to manually collect data for each of your existing and potential customers across all platforms, not to mention how resource-intensive it would be. AI-powered CDPs have the capability to collect masses of data, including behavioral data from customer interaction, demographic data, and transactional data. Not only this, but the AI in a CDP can analyze this data for you, creating a unified customer database that can be used to personalize customer touchpoints and increase engagement.

There are three main ways CDPs can help you understand your customers better:

1. Centralize customer data, creating a single view of a customer using data from each step of the buyer’s journey.
2. Analyze data to provide insights and recommendations.
3. Empower businesses to deliver personalized experiences, which are now expected by customers, in response to customer desires and needs.

Benefits of CDPs

Implementing the use of a CDP in your businesses can benefit all departments but especially the marketing, sales and customer service teams. Marketing teams benefit from the ability to deliver targeted marketing across channels, using content they know is relevant to a specific audience to stand a better chance of a conversion. This in turn raises the company’s marketing ROI.

Sales teams benefit from personalized information on customers such as their loyalty, buying frequency, spending and recent purchases. Sellers can use data like this to optimize sales opportunities by delivering personalized sales engagements.

Meanwhile, customer service reps can view complete profiles for each customer, allowing them to provide proactive support to customers in a way that makes them feel understood.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

One example of a powerful customer data platform is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights provides a single view of customers by connecting data from a full range of sources. In addition, Microsoft’s CDP ensures all data is managed securely and in compliance with GDPR regulations. Its capabilities can be split into Audience Insights and Engagement Insights.

Audience Insights

Microsoft Dynamics 365 combines both B2C and B2B data to generate real-time AI-powered insights that marketing, sales and customer service teams can all use to make informed decisions about customers.

Predict Customer Desires and Needs

Built-in AI and analytics help to predict customer lifetime value and transactional and subscription churn. The same models the CDP uses for these predictions can also identify opportunities for cross-selling and upselling with recommendations of products and services, increasing the value that each customer may bring. The AI makes recommendations for dividing your audience into demographic segments you can target separately, though you can also define your own audience divisions.

AI-powered Insights Deliver Meaning

Marketing, sales and customer service teams benefit from real-time customer data collecting from Dynamics 365 Marketing, Sales and Customer Service. This comprehensive data allows them to deliver personalized journeys to clients across marketing, advertising and engagement platforms.

Deliver Personalization for Your B2B Clients

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 system allows the sales team to shorten sales cycles with unified account profiles, complete with client activities and insights. On top of this, third-party integration means data from other sources can be used to increase the accuracy and quality of leads, while AI models will identify at-risk accounts so you can respond with a proactive retention strategy.

Build Customer Trust

Data itself is a sensitive topic. Customers want to know they can trust brands to keep their information safe. With Microsoft’s customer experience platform, customers are linked to their consent preferences, which refresh automatically so you can honor them easily. It also has tools to easily secure customer data so you can achieve your marketing goals while complying with GDPR and CCPA.

Engagement Insights

The other side of the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps businesses understand customer behavior with cross-channel analytics.

Optimizing the Sales Funnel

Built-in features allow marketing, sales and customer service teams to view how many and what type of customers are moving through each step of the customer journey so that you can optimize your website and mobile app for conversion. These insights can be even more specific with the ability to carry out funnel analysis on different customer segments.

Understand Customer Behaviour

AI-driven insights from your website and mobile help marketing teams understand customer engagement. The system tracks customer behavioral data and creates real-time reports so teams can easily identify patterns and make informed decisions to increase engagement and conversion rates.

Set Up Customer Insights Today

With such a comprehensive view of each and every one of your customers, you almost can’t go wrong when it comes to delivering great customer experiences that will keep customers coming back to your brand. Contact us to help optimize Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights today.

Businesses can no longer just offer the best product or service at the best price and be done with it. Consumers are now choosing to spend their money with companies that provide the best Customer Experience. It is possible that by investing and implementing Customer Experience programs and strategies, you could potentially double your revenue in three years.

More than two-thirds (around 86%) of buyers will spend more on a product or service if it means that they are receiving an excellent and memorable Customer Experience. More than that, nearly half of people have made impulse buys because they received a personalised experience from a brand.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer Experience is sometimes simply referred to as CX. In an eCommerce setting, this could be referred to as User Experience or (IX).

In general, Customer Experience is how your customers think you are treating them. The reality is: if customers feel like ‘just a number’ to your business, your business will likely be ‘just a business’ to them. Offering tailored and personalised experiences mean customers link interactions with your brand or company with pleasant emotions and memories. This, in turn, drives their loyalty, which could generate repeat sales and lead to new acquisitions as these happy customers spread the word.

How data can be used to enhance your Customer’s Experience.

In the past, many companies used surveys to gather data on their customers’ experiences. A survey conducted by McKinsey & Company in collaboration with AlphaSights and Gerson Lehrman Group in 2019 and 2020 found that nearly all of their respondents (93%) used survey-based data to track their customer’s experience. However, only 15% thought that surveys were the best way to measure their customer’s experience. Very few (6%) believed that using surveys provides them with the data they need to make informed decisions.

Today companies have access to vast amounts of customer data. This data can be ethically sourced and combined with a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to improve your Customer Experience.

The data that is sourced and used by a Customer Data Platform is usually first party data. That means the information is gathered directly from individuals who interact with your company, business, or brand. Gathering data directly from persons who have interacted with your company means the data closely reflect your target demographic.

By harnessing this data, you can make informed decisions to improve your customers’ experience in general. More than that, a customer data platform creates profiles of individual people who have engaged with your brand. That means you can tailor marketing messages and experiences to speak directly to each specific customer. These tailored experiences make each interaction with an individual and unique customer an opportunity to provide them with a personalised and custom Customer Experience.

Customers want to be important to you. They do not want to be just another order number. So much so that they are willing to give you permission to gather their data in order to make their interactions with your brand more personalised.

What kind of data can be used to better understand your customers?

When you use data to better understand customers, it is generally referred to as Customer Analytics. This involves everything from gathering to storing, analyzing, and then making decisions from what you’ve learned from the data gathered on your customers.

When you collect information on your customers, you are primarily interested in how they interact with your different marketing channels and how they interact with your products or services. Bear in mind that every interaction with your company or brand that does not directly relate to an interaction with your product or service is a marketing interaction.

Everything from a like on Facebook to reading an article on your blog or searching the location of your brick-and-mortar store are steps along the customer journey. A journey that would potentially and hopefully end with them making a purchase from you.

Suppose you know how your target audience (or, better yet, any specific customer) prefers to interact with your company. In that case, you can generate highly targeted marketing messaging specifically aimed at that group or individual.

More than knowing how customers interact with your brand, you need to know which products or services are the most and least popular. Even then, you cannot stop there; you need to know why this is the case.

This is because products or services that are selling well could potentially do better if marketing efforts for these products or services are tweaked according to customer feedback (both directly and indirectly).

Products or services that sell less well may need to be dropped from inventory. On the other hand, harnessing your customer data and improving your Customer Experience could see these products or services selling better as they are strategically marketed to particular individuals.

In today’s marketplace, it is vital to gather and harness not only digital data but also real-life information on your customers. Real-life data could include information about their trips to your brick-and-mortar store, what they purchased, and the overall experience of their visit. It could even be as specific as what they thought of your window dressing, their interaction with your sales staff, or whether they tried any samples while at your store.

Businesses often have multiple platforms and databases where they gather information on their customers. That means they often have vast amounts of data to store, process, and analyse before they can use it in a logical and strategic way. In many cases, the data is so much that businesses only use a fraction of the data available to influence their customer’s experiences.

Using a customer data platform allows you to integrate all the first party (and sometimes second and third party) data that you gather on your customers or even potential customers. You can then use this to cultivate highly unique and personalised Customer Experiences and give your customers exactly what they want or need, when they want and need it.