By Nancy Marzouk – CEO and Founder MediaWallah
A major lender gets consumer data from a credit union partner to determine the rate on a loan. An auto company gets loan information to negotiate a sale with a potential customer. A healthcare company gets insurance information about a patient to determine what care to provide.
All of these examples show just how often data about a consumer is shared between two companies – outside of marketing. Yet in many organizations, these processes are one-off, without any connection to the largest customer picture. The only place customer data has historically been unified and actively managed is in the marketing department. Known as the “universal customer profile,” marketers and advertisers have layers of technology and integrations that help manage a customer’s identity and keep it up to date to be used for coordinated outreach.
Now, marketers are embracing new technology to unlock even more value from their customer data as they shift their focus from third party cookies to first party identity. What does this mean for the rest of the organization? A lot. With new technologies like data clean rooms and identity management software that can manage data at scale – and securely – other parts of the business can upgrade the customer information that they use to be more accurate, more scalable and more effective.
Customer Data Is Getting Bigger
Marketers’ approach to data is evolving and it’s opening a huge window of opportunity for other parts of the business. While marketers once used the universal customer profile (UCP) within a relatively contained set of technologies (think email marketing and website personalization), they’re now evolving to have this first party customer data at the core of everything they do.
The catalyst for this change is the move away from third party cookies. Marketers are relying less on third party data, and are investing in a more active approach to first party customer data management to get even more value out of this growing asset. New technologies like data clean rooms and identity graphs are emerging to help companies combine, use and analyze first party data at scale and with a lot more flexibility. Marketers plan to use their UCP for cross-channel advertising, personalized shopping experiences and informed customer service conversations. They can share data safely with partners and add new data to their records.
What’s missing in this UCP revolution is the rest of the business. Outside of marketing, many businesses contend with old data that’s hard to access and manage. It’s time the concept of the UCP spread to the entire organization.
How the Universal Customer Profile Is Made
So what is a universal customer profile at its core? It’s a single record of an individual. This can include their contact information, demographics, site history, purchase history, credit score, health records, and whatever else is relevant for creating an accurate picture of that individual. The record is secure, encrypted and managed using software that follows privacy regulations and requirements.
It sounds simple, but it rarely is. About half the US population has three or more email addresses. Most people don’t live alone, but in a household with shared devices. In fact, the average household has twenty-two devices including computers, cellphones, connected TV’s, gaming consoles and tablets. People also pay with different credit cards for different things, live at multiple addresses and use different browsers even on one computer.
The technology that can take all of this data and reconcile it so that it is possible to create a unique identity for an individual is also secure enough to be used by financial services companies, healthcare companies to transact daily business. Companies can expand the scope of their use of these technologies to include core business processes like sales, customer service, processing, customer care, and much more.
Let’s take the example of a financial institution looking to develop more robust fraud detection. The institution wants to be able to alert the customer to any suspicious activity – but doesn’t want to flood the customer with false alarms either. Doing this right takes a full picture of what devices, IP addresses and locations a customer might log on from, the logins they might use, and the types of activity that are “normal” for that particular customer. It’s possible that the institution has a lot of that information already – but it might be stored separately across outlets like mobile apps, desktop log-ins, customer support call reports, and even transaction histories with integrated products. To unify all that information, the institution needs a single, global record of the customer.
Activating The Entire Organization
The best approach to getting started is to start talking. People across other parts of the organization should ask marketers questions about how their technology works, and how they are using the data.
Many companies with highly secure data processes are going to be resistant to major sudden changes. Storing and using sensitive data is subject to a lot of rules and regulations. Marketing has contended with much of that (From the GDPR to HIPPA to COPPA), and the technology is built to contend with more, but the transition will take time to bring everyone along. A good approach is to start developing scenarios that can be stress tested.
By starting with very specific initiatives, such as “improving the patient onboarding experience” or “understanding someone’s value to the company for customer prioritization purposes,” then a company can be purposeful in how they expand their use of first party data. Determine what data is available, how it would need to be securely stored, and effectively accessed.
Multibillion dollar data and technology companies like Snowflake, Amazon AWS and Experian are investing heavily in first party data management, much of it to serve marketing and advertising. By getting involved now, companies can shape these advancements to benefit their entire business.
