Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) – The CDP market is booming, and it won’t slow down any time soon. Customers are demanding more personalised interactions with brands, and brands who fail to meet these demands will likely see customers turning to their competitors.

A Customer Data Platform collects and combines personally identifiable data on individual customers. This allows companies to generate highly personalised marketing messages that convert new customers and retain existing ones.

The global customer data platform market size is predicted to reach $20.5 billion by 2027, with a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 34% during the forecast period.

Part of this growth can be attributed to the increasing demand for personalised interactions between consumers and brands. Another reason is the exponential growth and influx of new data that stemmed from the global pandemic as more and more consumers turned online for products, services, and offerings.

Companies that are not harnessing this massive influx of data are missing out on opportunities to connect with their customers on a more personal level. Here is what you may be missing out on if you aren’t using a Customer Data Platform:

A unified view of individual customers.

Using tools like a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system or Data Management Platform can provide valuable insights into your target audience. Still, these tools have their limitations. While the data harvested, processed, and stored by these tools is valuable and can greatly benefit your marketing efforts, it only provides you with general information on your current or prospective customers.

A Customer Data Platform aggregates all the data gathered on specific customers from their very first interaction with your company. A CDP uses AI-powered identity resolution to combine multiple identities from across various touchpoints into one unified customer profile.

All your customer data is located on a centralised platform by using a CDP. That means that there are no data silos, and companies can obtain a unified view of any particular customer within moments.

Quickly locating relevant data.

Because data is stored on a centralised platform, it can quickly and easily be retrieved. The Customer Data Platform combines data that would otherwise be stored in separate locations. Having all the data relating to any particular customer in one place means that companies would be able to draw on and utilize that information quicker and more effectively.

Companies can now have a real-time 360-degree view of unique customers and tailor marketing messages directly to those customers where and when they would have the most impact.

Most notably, companies can have transactional, behavioural, and demographic data in real-time. This could be extremely valuable in creating more targeted marketing messages that may be time-sensitive.

Creating more personalized and consistent brand messaging.

Customer Data Platforms use first party personal identifying information. This information gives companies the power to generate highly personalised content. Not only is this content personalised, but it can meet customers (or potential customers) where and when these messages could be most effective.

Information is power, and this power is amplified when it can all be combined to generate marketing messages that speak directly to unique individual customers. It is even more effective when these messages can meet your customers where and when they want it.

By harnessing the information generated by a Customer Data Platform, you not only ensure that specific clients receive tailored marketing messages. You also avoid sending irrelevant information to those customers.

Improved operational efficiency and automation.

Companies that do not have a customer data platform can still personalise and automate some aspects of their marketing campaigns. However, these features are limited if you are not using a CDP. This is not necessarily because you may not have the data (although this could also be the case). It may be because you have data spread out over different platforms.

That means you need to locate, reference, analyze, and draw actionable strategies based on data that is located on different systems. This can be highly resource-intensive, potentially slowing down your operational efficiency and automation.

Taking longer to generate insightful marketing strategies that speak to individual people means that you may miss out on opportune moments to convert customers.

Using ethically sourced data.

CDPs mostly use first party data. First party data is data collected directly from consumers who have interacted with your brand. That means you are in control of how, where, and when this information is gathered.

By regulating how you collect consumer data, you can ensure that you have obtained the proper consent to collect and use your customers’ personal (and sometimes private) information.

Although the first party data collected and aggregated through your Customer Data Platform may be ethically sourced, your company is still responsible for keeping that data safe. That means you need to have robust data security, which most Customer Data Platforms provide. More than that, most Customer Data Platforms help you stay compliant with relevant data protection laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Getting the best of both worlds.

A Customer Data Platform collects and stores data specific to individual customers and aggregates data relating to anonymous customers as they move through each step of the customer journey.

This information will allow you to target specific customers and optimize your more general customer journeys and sales funnels.

The growing demand for more personalised interactions coupled with the massive influx of customer data created the ideal scenario for companies to step up and show up consistently across multiple marketing channels. Using a CDP can not only help your brand be seen by those who are most likely to engage with it, but to do it in a manner that will make them want to engage with your brand.

If you aren’t using a CDP yet, perhaps the question you should ask yourself shouldn’t be whether you should get one, but why you haven’t gotten one yet.

Marketing that lacks real-time data and client consent are referred to as Tone Deaf SPAM, and it is not only annoying but also unlawful under GDPR and POPIA regulations. I fell in love with customer data platforms (CDP) and Next Best Action software back in 2012, when I first met Dr. Shuki Idan, he lead the SAP product group called RTOM (real-time offer management). This was a SAP product that leveraged the power of HANA and was revolutionary at the time! 

The issue we had with RTOM and later SAS IMM was that it was pretty useless without data, and while it could influence customer behavior in real-time, lowering the cost of customer acquisition and increasing the profitability of each customer interaction with the next best actions, the business case was harmed by the cost and time required to set up a data warehouse. These great applications could have been deployed in weeks, but the underlying data warehouse need would take months, if not years, to fulfill. Completion did not always imply success since the business did not trust the data. 

Then… 

The door slams open, and Microsoft’s Customer Experience Platform with Dynamics Customer Insights steps in (CI). (Imagine a scene from a cowboy film…) “Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables businesses to combine all of their B2C and B2B customer data in real-time to provide AI-powered insights, resulting in a single view of the customer.” Marketers can use interactive reports to enhance their customers’ experiences, and AI-powered insights can help foresee customers ’ demands faster. “Dynamics 365 Customer Insights serves both technical and non-technical users seamlessly, whether it’s through a visual UI/drag and drop interface for marketers or advanced analytics for data scientists.”  Microsoft was recently named a leader in the IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Customer Data Platforms.

The IDC MarketScape said, “Consider Microsoft if you are looking for user-friendly AI/ML modeling capabilities that do not require marketers (and other LOB users) to be data scientists.” The report also noted, “Microsoft’s CDP segments are created through automated discovery powered by AI, API configuration, and visual UI/drag and drop interface for markets and through analytic/SQL queries for data scientists. Segments are updated based on a variety of factors such as streaming web session data, geolocation, and dynamic modeling and based on batch data updates.” 

What is it about Customer Insights that makes it so unique? 

1. The manner in which you ingest data using power query connectors and a common data model, which takes days or weeks rather than months or years. Power query connectors are predefined integration points for over 500 apps, and as you may be aware, integration takes time, which costs money.

2. How you unify data using AI-enabled MAP, MATCH, and MERGE (or M3 as we’ve labelled it) functionality.

3. The way you enrich the data through sources like Microsoft and other partners to gain insight to brand affinity and other interests.

4. How you use built-in AI and analytics to predict customer needs:

a. Predict customer lifetime value, transactional churn, and subscription churn using prebuilt AI models.

b. With product suggestions, use prebuilt AI models to swiftly uncover cross-sell and upsell possibilities.

c. Make your own audience segmentation or use AI-driven suggestions.

d. Use industry standards to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) or create your own bespoke KPIs.

e. Use Microsoft Power BI and Azure Synapse Analytics, a big-data-analytics service, to combine customer data with financial, operational, and unstructured Internet of Things (IoT) data.

5. How you use AI-powered insights to drive meaningful actions:

a. Intelligently orchestrate personalized journeys across destinations including marketing automation, advertising, and customer engagement platforms from Microsoft and other providers.

b. Surface up-to-date customer data and insights in the Microsoft apps that your employees use every day, like Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service.

c. Create smart, responsive, low-code bespoke apps from your customer data with Microsoft Power Apps.

6. How advanced CDP capabilities may help you personalize B2B interactions:

a. Shorten sales cycles by obtaining unified account profiles that provide actions and insights on an aggregated or individual basis.

b. Improve lead accuracy and quality by leveraging third-party enrichment sources to enrich account data from industry-leading data suppliers like Leadspace and Dun & Bradstreet.

c. Increase account retention by detecting at-risk accounts with prebuilt, customizable AI churn prediction models.

d. Use LinkedIn to boost your account-based marketing (ABM).

Last but not least…

7. The way you build customer trust on a consent-enabled CDP:

a. Enhance customer experiences in a cookie-less future to respect consumer consent and privacy without requiring any additional workflows or understanding where and how consent data is collected and managed.

b. Harmonize consent across business workflows. Count on a flexible customer data platform (CDP) with always up-to-date consent data refreshed automatically, using connections to the consent data mastering service.

c. Stay compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) by utilizing data governance capabilities enabled by Azure Purview Preview.

The more I wrote this article the more it felt like 10 things I love about you…

All of these capabilities are built on top of industry-specific data models, such as Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services’ Unified Customer Profile.  By enabling Dynamics Customer Insights, we’ve been able to unleash incredible returns for our customers – give us the chance to do the same for you! 

Wynand Roos- Managing Director, The CRM Team

Wynand is the co-founder and Managing Director of The CRM Team and has been an expert in CRM for the past fifteen years. While working for Microsoft, he was responsible for building the Dynamics CRM market and partner channel, from version 1.2 of the software. Today, he is used by Microsoft Corp. to train their sales team across the world and has extensive experience in creating developing CRM solutions using the Dynamics 365 platform.

In the competitive world of business today, customers expect a lot from businesses. Not only do they demand high-quality goods and services but they want high-quality experiences to accompany them.

Customer insights are the tools forward-thinking businesses use to make sure every aspect of their business delivers on customer expectations. This spans everything from core products and services to the sales cycle, after-sales service, marketing activities and more.

What are customer insights?

At a basic level, customer insights are the ways companies use and interpret customer data, behaviours, and feedback to improve product/service development and enhance customer support.

They are crucially important because they not only help businesses serve their customers better, but they help businesses understand customer behaviour when it comes to purchasing decisions. By understanding how customers think and feel, what their goals and preferences are, and what they’re looking for in the brands they use, companies can make a genuine difference in customers’ lives and be rewarded with loyalty and growing revenue.

At a practical level, customer insights can help brands answer key business questions such as:

• How is our brand perceived by customers?
• How can we serve our customers better?
• How can we better anticipate our customers’ needs?
• How can we effectively introduce a new product or service to our customers?
• What can we do to increase the conversion rates of marketing campaigns?

Can customer insights make a difference to the bottom line?

Gallup research shows that organizations that leverage customer behavioural insights outperform peers by 85 percent in sales growth and more than 25 percent in gross margin. And according to Microsoft, “A moderate increase in customer experience generates an average revenue increase of $775 million over three years for a company with $1 billion in annual revenues.”

Benefits of using customer insights

By using customer insights to inform strategic and tactical decisions, you can develop deeper relationships with your customers, better understand the connected customer, and generate meaningful and quantifiable results. Other benefits of using customer insights include:

• Improved customer lifetime value
• Reduced customer churn. With the right data, you can identify areas where you can improve customer service to better satisfy your customers
• The ability to leverage promotions specifically targeted to your customers who are most likely to buy
• Better optimisation of your product pricing, through better market understanding
• The intelligence necessary to expand into new markets or leave underperforming markets

Tapping into Customer Insights

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, you can leverage leading technology to better understand your customers and drive your business forward.

Customer Insights allows you to:

• Measure customer behavior on your digital platforms
  • Track engagement using web analytics
  • Track engagement using mobile app analytics
  • Build custom reports for your specific business needs
  • See how customers progress through the journey

• Connect data for deep audience insights
  • Bring together all your customer data using prebuilt connectors
  • Streamline data standardization to create comprehensive profiles
  • Enrich profiles with interests and preferences
  • Augment profiles with customer feedback

• Predict customer needs using built-in AI
  • Identify high-value and at-risk customers
  • Recommend relevant products and services
  • Discover new audience segments
  • Track business performance
  • Extend and customize for advanced insights

And more.

If you’d like to find out more about how to leverage Dynamics 365 Customer Insights in your business, get in touch with us and we’ll show you how.

Data, your differentiator in Financial Services

It comes as no surprise that Covid-19 has been bad for the financial services industry in South Africa.  In March 2021 Standard Bank reported a 51% decline in profit after tax and in October 2020 Nedbank estimated that their profits would drop by 72%.

In the face of this economic reality, financial services organisations need to be extremely selective as to where budgets are allocated.  Never before has it been more important for projects to either improve operations or increase revenue.

Where is the focus for financial services for 2021 and beyond?

We would like to answer this question by looking at two research papers that can help determine the focus areas for financial services for 2021 and beyond.

Customer experience in the 2021 financial services market

The first is an analysis from Microsoft in conjunction with Future Digital Finance, CXFS and Insights titled: “Customer experience in the 2021 financial services market”.  In the research, it was found that Customer Experience is still a big focus for Financial Services organisations with 86% of organisations either maintaining their CX budget (48%) or increasing it (38%).  It was also found that for the 41% of researched organisations that the CX budget amounted to roughly 50% of the overall budget.

So where is this budget being allocated within CX?  The top three priorities were found to be: “Leveraging customer data for real-time personalization at the branch level”,“Creating a unified customer experience across physical and digital channels” and “Creating more digital self-service options for customers”.

This identified both the importance of the continued digital transformation of financial services as well as the ever-increasing value of data.

Making digital banking more human

The second piece of research that we would like to highlight is a 2020 study by Accenture titled:“Making digital banking more human”.

This research showed that the unprecedented circumstances of 2020 added to the rapid uptake of digital banking.  This is to be celebrated but it also leads to the threat of increased commoditisation and jeopardisation of trust.  Why?  It again comes down to data. On one hand, there is  the use of data to differentiate financial service engagements. On the other, customers need to trust financial services organisations with increasing amounts of their personal information.

Introducing Microsoft Customer Insights

We have seen from the above research that data has become the new oil for financial services organisations.  Of course, the drive to attain a single view of the customer has been something financial services organisations have been working hard to do for decades.  In response, Microsoft has identified this as an area of importance and has introduced a solution: Microsoft Customer Insights.

Why is this product so important? 

As a technology solution, Customer Insights is state-of-the-art.  It is developed as a pure out-of-the-box Software-as-a-Service (cloud) solution, it is easily configurable and extensible, and it can be embedded directly into your CRM of choice.  With over 300 pre-built connectors, it can plug  into data sources.

From an implementation perspective Microsoft Customer Insights can be implemented in weeks – not the months and years of traditional Customer Data Platform solutions.  It is also run by business, often marketing, instead of being controlled and managed by IT.

From a financial services perspective, Microsoft Customer Insights provides the ability to personalise and tailor your products and interactions, to gain a competitive edge and optimise your engagements.  Attaining this single view of the customer will give you near real-time insight into your customer, enabling you to get more revenue from marginal customers and even more from engaged customers.

Where have The CRM Team used Microsoft Customer Insights before?

Sasfin Wealth embarked on a technology drive with a focus on client experience.  In order to provide a digital experience that added real value, they found that they needed to develop a deeper understanding of their clients’ interests, needs, wants and preferences.

Alex Elsworth, Chief Technology Officer at Sasfin Wealth, notes:

‘Our value proposition lies in the personal service and attention which we apply in managing our client portfolios. As a business philosophy, client relationships, client-orientated processes, client retention and superior client value are core to our offering.’

Both strategic and customer-focused elements were key parts of Sasfin’s CRM journey. The company wanted a central view of Wealth client information and the ability to track client interaction effortlessly. Essentially, Sasfin Wealth wanted to bring its ‘hands on’ client experience into the digital age.

‘During our research and evaluation, the Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution proved to be the platform that would best suit our needs and requirements,’ notes Tinus Verster, Wealth Technology Strategist at Sasfin. ‘Microsoft Dynamics 365 has the capability to integrate into existing backend systems. It is key to our digital strategy.’

Are you ready to start?

You know your business from the inside out. But what about from the outside in? Do you know how your customers experience your business? What they feel about your products and services? Whether your customer service works for them? Do you know how you could serve them better?

Many companies use analytics. But few use it as meaningfully as they could. An even smaller proportion use customer insights meaningfully. Yet by developing a deep understanding of how customers experience a product or service – how they feel about it, what they want, need, and desire – can make a massive difference to the present and future of every business.

Using customer insights for better business results

With the right data, companies can take their businesses from good to great – or from great to amazing.

Here are some of the was you can leverage customer insights in your business

• Market better

By understanding your customers’ wants and needs, you can reach them with messaging that they appreciate, understand and remember. If you’ve been frustrated by so-so marketing results, chances are your messaging is off. Or, you might be trying to reach the wrong people altogether. By knowing who you’re talking to, you can craft the kind of messages that matter.

• Improve the customer journey

Many businesses’ customer journeys are long and complex. Do they have to be? If the answer is no, customer insights can help businesses find new ways to simplify and streamline the customer experience. If the answer is yes, customer insights can help too – pointing out areas of frustration, drop-off and more, so companies can create the experience that works best.

• Launch new products and services intelligently

Many new products and services fail. The reason is: customers don’t know about them, don’t want them, or don’t find them valuable. For any company thinking about a new product or service launch, customer insights can help answer key questions such as: whether customers feel a need for the new product; how they could imagine the product fitting into their lives; and what core wants/needs/desires the new product can help fulfill.

Getting the most out of customer insights

To make the most of customer insights data when trying to answer key business questions, it’s important to start out with a few points in mind.

• What do you want to learn about your customers? Having a specific goal will always help guide your analysis and investigation.
• What does it look like your customers trying to tell you, through their buying decisions and interactions with your company?
• How deeply do you feel you know your customers? Could you know them better?
• Are you taking into account all available customer data in a holistic and easy-to-access way, or do you have data that’s not being used?

Why Dynamics 365 Customer Insights works so well

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights was designed to make it easy to get every piece of customer information you have to work for your business.

With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, you can:

• Conduct multichannel analysis for a complete 360-degree view
• Drive meaningful actions using AI-powered insights and measure customer behavior on your digital platforms.
• Connect all your data easily for deep audience insights using prebuilt connectors
• Identify high-value and at-risk customers
• Recommend relevant products and services
• Discover new audience segments

 And more.

To learn more about how Dynamics 365 can make a difference in your business, get in touch with us today.