Abandoned your Customer 360 strategy? Here’s what you may have gotten wrong.

Once upon a time, we downloaded songs to an iPod. That worked for a while, until higher bit rates and changing consumer behaviors made 5GB of storage seem insufficient. Increasing device storage allowed the model to work for a little longer. Then streaming disrupted it altogether. We no longer needed 1,000 songs on our device, because the cloud had all those songs — plus nearly every song ever made. Our devices started to serve more as a vehicle to deliver songs from the cloud to our ears, which fundamentally changed the way we thought about our music catalog.

Your customer profiles are undergoing a similar shift. And they need to, in order to keep up with the experiences your customers crave, to make the most of your high-value customer data, and to embrace more agile, cloud-based approaches to data pipeline management.

Enter: Next-generation customer profiles

First-generation customer data platforms (CDPs) once created profiles that represented all the data that you sent to it, and created profiles that carried all of their data on their back. Think: customer profiles from first-generation CDPs are like first-generation iPods — portable but disconnected. We’ve now entered the second wave of CDP.

Now, what we at Lytics are calling next-generation CDPs are creating better profiles that can both carry data on their back and deliver data directly from the cloud (more like iPhones). Why? Because we believe the future of CDP incorporates your existing data warehouse technologies to create an integrated, agile customer data system, instead of another standalone silo. Lytics’ modular approach to building a customer data architecture and strategy, for example, not only fits into your existing stack and workflow, but also uses your cloud data warehouse to build and store your Customer 360 profiles, and integrates with downstream tools for activation.

Embracing profiles and technologies that enable a streaming-like model have extremely important consequences (i.e. they allow you to sidestep some of the most common pitfalls brands attempting to create a 360-degree customer view, or “the golden record,” fall into).

The idea of a complete Customer 360 view is nice, of course. But aiming for a Customer 360 ideal? That’s where lots of organizations go wrong. Most commonly, we see brands go into their Customer 360 journey with unrealistic expectations or with a lack of clarity on how to get there and what it will take.

Avoiding major Customer 360 pitfalls starts with recognizing them

So, how can you make sure your organization lands among the mere 14% of organizations that have successfully achieved a 360-degree view of the customer? You can avoid the major hurdles by understanding what to expect, and then preparing ahead.

Mistake #1. Creating overly complicated profiles

There’s a reason why analyst guidance is shifting away from Customer 360 initiatives after years of rallying in support. For many, the costs can outweigh the benefits, and as a result, organizations are starting to abandon the initiatives in droves. As the name implies, Customer 360 profiles attempt to capture everything about a customer: all 360 degrees of context. There’s a problem with that.

Over time, systems change, data migrates, and policies adapt, which means that wrangling profiles that depend on those systems can also mean you struggle to find, unify, activate and secure your data. This is especially true given that some organizations are running more than 60 applications, plus a wealth of data sources, content, and digital asset management platforms (Technology Magazine).

Even if your profiles can keep the pace, the reality is that most organizations attempting to use Customer 360 profiles don’t end up using more than 9% of the data they worked so hard to bring together. Let’s not make things more complex than they need to be (which brings us to the second mistake).

Mistake #2. Believing data replication is a necessary part of the process.

Pro tip: you should stop replicating and routing so much raw data. While it may seem innocuous enough to some, there are real costs to replicating data feeds just to make them available to a CDP.

• Infrastructure: Shuttling and storing replicates of your data is not free.
• People: The time that an organization’s resources spend ensuring redundancy of your data feeds is time that they could be spending on more valuable projects.
• Exposure: With both security concerns and privacy compliance increasingly at your heels, the less exposure you have, the better.

Since next-generation profiles could just stream the data that they need from your data warehouse, dumping your duplicate data feeds yields more dollars and better sleep.

From first-generation to next-generation customer profiles

Unsurprisingly, 84% of businesses today agree that recognizing their customers across channels and over time is extremely important. Still, only one-third of consumers are confident that businesses can repeatedly recognize them online. Next-generation customer profiles can be the difference makers.

But how do you make the leap?

1. Start with Conductor

The newest product on Lytics’ customer data platform, Conductor collects and transforms first-party data to create rich customer profiles. It gives our customers all the tools they need to handle building robust user profiles from all kinds of data sources. Built on top of a flexible and powerful identity graph, customer profiles built with Conductor enjoy:

• Resilience: Profiles are built with your business in mind, and Conductor’s identity resolution ensures the integrity of profiles amidst inevitable anomalies.
• Flexibility: Map new profile fields and update identity resolution to align with emerging needs and strategies.
• Security: Conductor profiles live at the cutting edge of security and compliance protocols.
• Portability: With other tools in the Lytics’ CDP suite, Conductor profiles can then be activated in over a hundred different locations across ad platforms, email service providers, data warehouses, enrichment providers, commerce platforms, and more.

2. Stream with Cloud Connect

Lytics’ data warehouse-activating and reverse ETL-enabling tool lets you comfortably get the right data on your profiles, and only when you need it. With Lytics Cloud Connect, you can take customer data straight from your data warehouse and use it to create highly specific segments across all your existing ad networks. Eliminate silos, gain better insights, and use those insights to improve marketing ROI: all with a proven solution that supports top cloud data warehouse connections, including Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Microsoft Azure, etc).

Don’t give up on Customer 360 just yet. There’s a lot at stake.

As a practicing data scientist, I can tell you an important fact about using your data. Even if you create a Customer 360 profile that has all of your data (which will be quite heavy), your systems aren’t going to use all of that data. You aren’t going to use all of that data to create audiences and personalize experiences, and your AI/ML models certainly aren’t going to use all of that data to make predictions. It’s time to embrace future-proof and scalable tech solutions that add value how you want and when you want it, without unnecessary risk or complexity.

Times have changed. Your customers have changed. Your business needs to follow suit. This means thinking differently about how to intelligently manage and activate your most valuable asset: your customer data. Start with Lytics Conductor.