The Single Customer View in a Customer Data Platform

3 benefits of using personalisation in eCommerce

Personalisation in retail is nothing new. Retailers and brands have been treating their customers as individuals well before the advent of online shopping, and for good reason. Personalisation works. Personalisation helps stores anticipate their customers’ needs, save them time, and provide offers that resonate with them. In fact, research from Fresh Relevance shows that almost half of shoppers (41%) would drop a retailer who sends irrelevant offers and one in four actively want to be sent offers and recommendations based on previous purchases.

But what exactly is eCommerce personalisation?

Ecommerce personalisation is when eCommerce stores deliver personalised and relevant experiences throughout their website and across email, through dynamic content and product recommendations based on shopper data, such as location and past purchases.

Fresh Relevance partners with UniFida to deepen the level of personalisation based on the UniFida Customer Data Platform. UniFida provides identity resolution to build a single view of a customer and deeper insight and targeting such as customer value, dormancy, or responsive to price reductions.

This provides real-time behaviour and insight combined with the power to act on it and enable cross-channel personalisation.

Read on to learn about three key benefits of personalisation in eCommerce.

1. Personalisation increases conversions

In today’s crowded digital landscape, competition is fierce and keeping shoppers’ attention is becoming increasingly vital. Personalisation helps eCommerce stores create seamless, tailored experiences that reduce bounce rate and friction and ultimately boost conversions.

The average Fresh Relevance client doing web personalisation sees an 8% increase in sales. What’s more, research from Epsilon shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalised experiences. In fact, 74% of consumers actively feel frustrated when website content isn’t personalised.

Here are some conversion-boosting personalisation tactics for eCommerce.

Geotargeting

A shopper’s physical location has a big influence on their interests and needs when engaging with an eCommerce store. So, it makes sense to treat customers differently based on where they are located and use geotargeting tactics to ensure that they see offers most relevant to their current context.

Try adding details of the shopper’s nearest store for click and collect options on the cart page. Or display weather-based dynamic banners on your website and in emails to showcase appropriate products.

Product recommendations based on personification

Every shopper has different tastes and preferences. So eCommerce stores should take note and treat each visitor to their site accordingly to ensure they resonate with everyone.

To convert visitors into customers, try displaying ‘people like you buy’ product recommendations. This type of recommendation looks at the shopper’s past browse or purchase history and compares it with other shoppers who have viewed those products, using a machine learning algorithm to recommend the most likely eventual purchases. It appeals to the shopper’s desire to follow the wisdom of the crowd, putting their purchase decision into the capable hands of their shopping predecessors.

Shoppers can also have different preferences when it comes to price. A tool like Fresh Relevance’s Price Affinity Predictor uses AI to predict the price level that will appeal to each new website visitor, helping you recommend the most relevantly priced products and keep visitors on your website.

Triggered emails

Triggered emails are an effective way to deliver personalised, real-time content to shoppers at the moment they are most likely to convert.

Two types of triggered emails to add to your email marketing toolkit are cart and browse abandonment emails. These messages are triggered when a shopper abandons a browsing session or their shopping basket without making a purchase. The average Fresh Relevance client doing both cart and browse abandonment emails sees a sales uplift of 16%.

Other types of triggered emails proven to boost conversions include price drop and back in stock alerts.

2. Personalisation improves customer loyalty

Consumers have come to expect a personalised experience from retailers and brands, and are more likely to return to stores that fulfil this expectation. According to Salesforce, 70% of consumers say a company’s understanding of their personal needs influences their loyalty.

With a wealth of browse and past purchase data available at the average eCommerce store’s fingertips, it has never been more possible to foster customer loyalty through personalisation.

Here are some eCommerce personalisation tactics that improve customer loyalty.

Product recommendations based on behavioural data

Ecommerce stores can start their loyalty campaigns straight after a customer has made a purchase, with post-purchase emails containing product recommendations that complement the item they’ve just bought.

Making recommendations based on the customer’s frequently browsed and purchased product categories is another effective way to foster loyalty and resonate with existing customers. Including these types of recommendations in your email newsletters helps bring customers back to your website, and displaying them on the homepage encourages customers to keep browsing and make a purchase.

Welcome back popover

Ecommerce stores can help customers pick up where they left off when they return to the website by including a popover to remind visitors of their last viewed product. Customers will appreciate the gesture, as they do not have to waste time finding the product they searched for last time.

Replenishment emails

For customers who have purchased perishable products that will need replacing, such as medicine or cosmetics, triggered replenishment emails serve as a useful reminder that the time to reorder is approaching. This type of triggered email helps boost customer loyalty and increases the likelihood of repeat purchases.

3. Personalisation encourages customer advocacy

Personalised experiences lead to happy customers, and happy customers often feel compelled to recommend brands and retailers they love to their network. A study by Forrester found that 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalised service or experience.

Beyond customers becoming advocates without any prompting thanks to a fantastic, personalised experience, eCommerce stores can use personalised post-purchase campaigns to encourage customer advocacy.

Try adding user-generated content (UGC) to your post-purchase emails to give customers inspiration on how to use or wear their new product, and let them know how to share their own UGC by telling them which social media channel to use and the relevant hashtag.

Post-purchase emails are also an effective way to gather reviews and ratings. Frequent buyers are an ideal source for positive reviews and ratings, so be sure to encourage them to share their experience by sending review requests.

Final thoughts

The eCommerce space is becoming increasingly competitive, and shoppers can switch to another brand at the click of a button. To convert and retain today’s consumers, providing personalised experiences isn’t a nice-to-have, it is essential.

A real-time personalisation and optimisation platform like Fresh Relevance helps digital marketers and eCommerce professionals drive revenue and customer loyalty. Combined with UniFida this enables identity resolution, single customer view and enhanced insights to enable cross-channel personalisation.

Download Fresh Relevance’s free eBook to learn more about building personalised experiences for your customers with Fresh Relevance.

This guest post was written by Fresh Relevance, a personalisation and optimisation platform for digital marketers.

UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed. Our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Why we’re reselling Fresh Relevance’s personalisation capabilities

Why are we now reselling Fresh Relevance’s personalisation capabilities alongside UniFida’s customer data platform?

fresh relevance

One of the key uses of a customer data platform is to ensure that decisions made about how and what to communicate with each individual customer across any channel are based on one consistent single customer view.

UniFida’s customer data platform provides the single customer view, combining both online and offline data, and we have partnered with Fresh Relevance to use their personalisation capabilities for website and email personalisation.

So, what does this mean in practice?

Let us provide some quite simplistic examples (we are sure that you will be capable of creating some much better ones):

One of your dormant customers, Mr Smith, is browsing your website and we recognise him from his cookie ID, or because he provides an email address; Fresh Relevance has already been provided by UniFida with detailed information about Mr Smith’s past purchases, and can use that to remind him that he often prefers category ABC. And it does this in combination with a valuable offer should he decide to reactivate himself after not ordering for so many months.

Another customer Mrs Cook has filled her basket on several occasions but never gone as far as making a purchase online. UniFida knows that Mrs Cook is in reality a good customer who normally orders by phone. The website, powered by Fresh Relevance, then offers Mrs Cook the opportunity to chat to an agent, and to turn her basket into an order having discussed her potential purchase with one of your agents, who understands when chatting to her what she has liked to purchase in the past.

In a third case you decide to reward previously loyal customers who have not so far ordered this season. UniFida knows how much Mr Jones usually spends at this time of year, so Fresh Relevance can personalise an email that gives Mr Jones a discount based on his previous season’s spend. In this way the loyalty bonus is only offered to customers who have not ordered, and not wasted on those who have done already.

In reality there are thousands of different ways in which Fresh Relevance’s personalisation capabilities can work with a customer data platform like UniFida. The only limitation could be your fertile imagination’s capacity to come up with much smarter ideas.

What we like to do is to put these tools in your hands, so that you can experiment and find out what really works best for your customers. One thing we do know is that personalisation, when truly relevant to an individual customer, works wonders for your sales.

If you would like to talk more about personalisation and how to implement it for your business, please get in touch!

Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

CDP Fresh Relevance personalisation SCV Single Customer View

Why your own first party data is so important

There are many reasons why first-party data is so important, but your recognition of it may be at risk of being drowned out by the clamour of people selling recruitment media, particularly digital and programmatic media.

To us the case for first making best use of your own customer data trumps all other media purchase decisions. Here are just four reasons why first-party data is so important.

It’s free and uncontrovertibly yours (as long as it’s properly permissioned)
It allows you to develop very personalised relationships with each of your customers, and hence unlock as much value as is possible from them
It can help you understand what is really driving your new customer recruitment, particularly when multiple online and offline channels play a part in your recruitment marketing
It can support your overall business planning based on understanding the longer-term value provided by each customer segment

To allow you to obtain that customer value you need to ensure that your single customer view contains all your customers’ online and offline behaviours, linked by all the available personal identifiers.

You also need marketing technology that joins all this together, so that there is one complete version of the truth about each customer that can be used by all your marketing applications.

This is why we suggest you need to consider installing a customer data platform or CDP

To help develop an understanding of what a CDP can do for your marketing we offer three complimentary services.

Data duplication testing: Identify how many duplicate customer records you have. Understand the impact of wasted spend on marketing.
Suppressions run report: Identify and suppress individuals who have moved away or deceased.
Business casing exercise: Identify and develop use cases and financial evaluation. See the opportunities and map out the ROI prior to any commitment.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

CDP Business Casing Customer Data Platform First Party Data Single Customer View

9 stepping stones to better leverage customer data

Wondering how to better leverage your customer data? For many, the journey from being a basic user of customer data, for example just providing lists for campaigns, to being a fully customer-orientated organisation, is perceived as being full of risks and traps for the unwary. As a result, the journey is often halted before it is even started.

However, you are not in uncharted territory, and by following some clearly defined steps you should arrive at your destination without too many damaging hiccups.

1. First off you will almost certainly be asked to justify the cost

Because the benefits of using a customer data platform can come from many different areas of the business you will need to bring together multiple use cases – they can range from making existing activities such as email campaigns more effective through personalisation, to understanding how much you can afford to spend on recruitment because you know the longer term value of different types of customer. Knowing how each area of the business works now, you can estimate the percentage gains from improving effectiveness or introducing efficiencies. At this stage they have to be estimates, but you can get colleagues to help you provide well-judged ones.

2. Next, focus on building a robust first party data platform

A first party data platform should include both online and offline customer activities. Don’t leave out online browsing data, customer contact history, or email opens and clicks. The platform needs to be updated very regularly and be open to integration with other systems such as email service providers. There is a lot of detail to be covered in this stage such as the customer data schema, and GDPR requirements, but always err on the side of including all available granular customer data as long as it is structured and can be linked through personal identifiers to the customer record.

3. As part of developing the first party data asset you will want to manipulate some of the raw data material into something more usable

We suggest developing a few key customer variables that are derived from your data inputs. For instance, customer lifetime value, and customer recency, frequency and monetary value can be of enormous use when planning recruitment or making selections for campaigns. You won’t need more than a handful of these derived variables at the start, so focus on those that will make your customer marketing activities work better.

4. Jump in and start testing new ways of undertaking your marketing

It might be that you start by testing the impact of segmenting your customer base, and giving different parts different treatments, or you could decide to reactivate some of your dormant customers with a carefully designed special offer specially targeted at those most likely to be reactivated. Whatever you do, focus on building a control group to shadow every test, so that you can properly evaluate how much uplift you have managed to achieve. And for every test carefully record what offer was made with what graphics, and how the target audience was selected.

5. Never stop testing

Even in a mature state you should expect to spend at least 15% of your marketing budget on tests. You will never run out of things you want to try out. If you test too little you will quickly run out of routes to move forward. And tests should take risks; we heard recently that 3D postal packages outperform flat ones – how strange is that?

6. Leverage your customer data asset for longer term business planning

When you understand the cost of customer recruitment, the value per customer, and their rate of attrition you can start to build a business development plan based around real customer numbers. So to increase turnover by £X next year, you will have actual customer numbers to recruit, and you will know how much that will cost, and over what timescale the value comes back.

7. Keep on investing in customer analytics

You may want to be able to project forward from a first order to predicting how much a customer is going to buy, and from this how much you want to spend on him. Equally if you have several competing brands, or different product categories, you may need to be able to predict which offer is likely to get the most valuable response from each customer. Customer analytics and marketing tests go hand in hand, and if you give up on either you may find yourself moving backwards.

8. Keep your sponsors engaged and behind you

They will need to see the big picture as you move forward, explained in relatively simple terms. Each quarter you will have spent £X, and got £Y back in terms of enhanced customer value. Sometimes £Y will be less than £X because you have been investing heavily. Don’t let this put you off; as long as you can explain clearly how that investment will pay back over time your sponsors will remain on-board.

9. And finally ensure sustainability

This means building a team that can survive without any one of its members, including yourself. It also means recording everything you do, the messaging, the images, the way campaigns were structured, the selection tools you used, the routes you chose for order fulfilment etc. All too often good people leave an organisation with little recorded evidence of what they have done and thus create a knowledge chasm that can take many months to fill.

If you want to improve how you leverage customer data and are looking for support, we are here to help.

We can help you develop your business case, build a customer data platform, undertake customer analytics, and evaluate results. We offer three complimentary services to help you develop a better understanding of what a CDP can do for your marketing and business:

Data duplication testing: Identify how many duplicate customer records you have. Understand the impact of wasted spend on marketing.
Suppressions run report: Identify and suppress individuals who have moved away or deceased.
Business casing exercise: Identify and develop use cases and financial evaluation. See the opportunities and map out the ROI prior to any commitment.

benefits CDP journey customer data pilgrim

CRM identity resolution: Why it’s not really what it claims to be!

On the surface, CRM systems give the appearance of covering most things you might need when you are looking for technology to help you manage relationships with customers. But the reality is that they have been designed to only deliver the basics, so CRM identity resolution often fails to deliver a full single customer view.

To understand why let’s take a deeper look into what CRM identity resolution does and doesn’t deliver.

CRM systems manage what they call ‘contacts’ but these are usually only matched together using email addresses. Customers in fact have many different identifiers like mobile phone numbers, cookie IDs, postal addresses, account numbers etc and there are usually multiple versions of each relating to a single customer. All versions of these personal identifiers need to be stored so that customers reaching you through multiple channels can be properly identified.
Next CRM systems only include a part of your customer data. Your customers browse your website, they visit specific pages, they arrive there via different forms of on-line advertising, and all this vital information needs to be included in your single customer view.
CRM systems may report sales at a company or salesman level but they don’t look at longer term customer value, or how different channels and different customer recruitment propositions bring different types of customers with different kinds of customer needs.
CRM systems may undertake bulk email campaigns, but these are not usually synchronised with other channels such as post or SMS; also given that they don’t generate any added value customer knowledge such as probability of response or likelihood of attrition, the selections they make can only be via quite simplistic filters.
CRM systems were born out of the need to enable sales forces to record their activities and results; they were not designed to ingest data from multiple online and offline sources, and deliver a complete customer view.

Over the last five years or so a new breed of technology, Customer Data Platforms or CDPs, have been developed to allow you to properly relate to customers, and to make all aspects of your marketing accountable so that for instance an online order can now be linked back to the several online and offline contacts that preceded it.

Find out more about what a customer data platform is.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

CRM customer revruitment identifiers identity resolution

How a customer data platform uses data for decision making

The maxim ‘knowledge is power’ has held good for many years but that power also can be democratised when knowledge is shared. Shared knowledge obtained from data, leads to a common understanding of how a business is working, and from this a more effective, faster and smoother decision making process. No more meetings starting with that obstructive statement ‘I don’t recognise the numbers’.

So, how does a CDP use data to enhance, accelerate, and democratise decision making?

Several reasons combine to contribute to the result:

1. A CDP will build peoples’ identities using data coming from many different sources.
This means that individuals may be matched on their postal address, their email, their mobile, their cookie ID and more. The identifier, we call it the permanent URN or PURN, for an individual will be fixed in the system and any new data that matches to it added to the customer record. From this we achieve a finite, and at any moment in time, fixed number of known individuals in the system. We can no longer disagree over customer volumes or the data that is attached to them.

2. All the data that arrives goes into a shared data schema.
This means that the data definitions are constant as well as the values within them. A customer data platform can have only one set of values for gender or marital status for instance.

3. The CDP does not dispose of data unless required to do so under GDPR or because it has no conceivable value.
When a CDP is being set up historic customer data is loaded into the system, and from that point on data will be augmented. This data usually includes details of on-line activity, when it can be matched, as well as transactions undertaken, and contacts made through any channel both inwards and outwards.

4. A good CDP will check the data feeds as they arrive for consistency of their layout and content.
Feeds that do not conform are rejected before they go into the customer data platform. In some cases, such as when we are dealing with names and addresses, they may need to be improved using matches to external verification files like PAF.

5. A smart CDP will go far beyond just recording the input data.
It will start to build what we call engineered data. This is data derived from the raw data that comes in to the CDP. It may be a calculation of lifetime value in the first year since acquisition, or the result of applying a customer segmentation or a propensity model. Engineered data fields are then updated each time new data arrives for an individual. It is often the case that charts and reports are built from the engineered data rather than from the raw data. For instance, to answer a question like what is our customer retention rate we need to have an engineered data field that marks whether a customer who purchased in period A also goes on to purchase in period B, the periods being linked to when the individual first appeared as a customer.

6. The CDP will allow access to all users in a company who want to see that single common view of the customer.
This may be by way of dashboards or on-line reports, or because they have the tools to extract data directly from the system. The dashboards may be tailored to each individual user or be common to a department or a whole organisation. But whatever charts or tables they contain they will all be derived from the same common but constantly updated CDP. This means that they cannot disagree because both the data they are drawn from is common, and the definitions that they use are shared.

And what types of understanding can be obtained from the CDP?

Having developed a shared, consistent, and complete customer data source, the CDP can be put to support a multitude of uses. What follows is a description of some of the more common ones, but in reality, there is no limit on the kinds of outputs that can be achieved, particularly when the CDP is aligned with a clever data visualisation tool like Tableau.

1. Supporting AI.
Underneath all the hype about AI is the need for good data to support it. If an AI tool is to learn from a flow of data being fed into it, that flow needs to be unchanging in its composition, and accurate to the point of perfection. A CDP is perfectly designed for this role.

2. Tracking the overall customer picture.
Managers looking after customer acquisition and retention will have an almost unlimited number of questions they need to have answered. Some of the most typical are:

What volumes of customers are we recruiting through which channel?
Do the different channels and media sources provide customers with different characteristics and different longer-term values?
How do the different social media channels contribute to my customer volumes?
From which geographies am I recruiting my customers?
What is my level of second orders and year on year customer retention?
What behavioural segments do my customers fall into, and what do they look like when profiled by demographics and lifestyle?
Have the characteristics of my customers altered over time?
Are there some customer groups that provide such low value that they are not worth the cost of recruitment?

3. Tracking the product picture.
Every business knows the high-level numbers on product sales but beneath this high-level view are many interesting questions, for example:

Are different types of customer changing the mix of products they buy?
Do different channels lead to different products being purchased, and to different product values being chosen?
What is our best recruitment product?
How loyal are customers that are first attracted to different products?
Given that we know the first product purchased by a customer, can we predict what a customer is most likely to buy next?
If we deduct the cost of marketing and cost of goods, how profitable are our different products?
Can we build a time series model to predict overall sales of my products based on a combination of customer information, and marketing history, combined with external factors?

4. Next up, understanding the impact of marketing.
A strong case can be made for the assertion that without a reliable CDP the value of marketing will always be an unknown. For instance, if you cannot attribute sales that come in via the internet to prior marketing communications how can you justify the cost of those communications? Or if the longer-term value of customers cannot be measured how can you justify the cost of recruiting them beyond the value of their initial purchase? Some of the many uses of the CDP for marketing have been detailed above under customer and product understanding, but there is an additional layer which comes from being able to link marketing activity in its many guises to an outcome in terms of customer value. Some examples are:

Linking expenditure on social media to actual customers recruited and the value they subsequently generate. Very few companies spending fortunes on social media take the trouble to do this, but with the right digital analytics combined with the CDP this can be quite straightforward.
Examining campaign results not just from the overall value obtained, but also investigating what types of customers they attracted, and what different longer term values they brought with them.
Providing the data to help understand a complex sales funnel where prospects drop out at different stages; in these cases, there is a need not only to understand the impact of the different processes on drop-out levels, but also what types of prospects are better at surviving the overall funnel process.
If there is a customer retention problem, then this can be evaluated in terms of lost revenue, and from that budgets provided for retention activities that can then be tracked, using control groups held in the CDP, to find out which provide the best ROI.
When a marketing budget is complex and spread over many different activities then there is a need to untangle the impact of the different marketing activities and prioritise the way budget is allocated to optimise results. This requires building an understanding of the relationship between spend in a channel and the usually diminishing results achieved as spend is increased. This is often called a saturation curve. For this kind of analytical activity the underlying data is found in the CDP, although the subsequent analysis is done outside it with different tool-sets.

To wrap it up

It would be presumptuous to claim that a CDP can solve all marketing problems, but without doubt it can ensure that knowledge is shared, and the data required for intelligent decision making made readily available. A CDP can be perhaps viewed as the necessary foundation stone for all successful marketing organisations.

Contact us if you’d like to know how we can help your organisation.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

AI CDP customer segmentation decision-making engineered data

Do customer data platforms suck?

Are CDP’s worth the investment or do customer data platforms suck?

Well, you can paint a very bad picture of them from a bean-counter’s perspective. The technology costs money, they add another item to the marketing technology stack, they have to be set up to receive data from many different sources, they then have to store all that data, and have to keep on being fed with it. Someone even has to hit a few keys for something to come out of them.

We think there is a bright side, which is not surprising to hear from people who are intrepid enough to actually build and sell CDPs.

Obviously, in themselves CDPs are worthless; the value only comes when you start to do something useful with that data. But as an enabler today’s CDPs can be something quite special.

The big picture view is that if you don’t have everything known about each customer structured and held in one place then you have no chance of meeting the customers’ expectations. And this holds true for every occasion when you are interacting with customers.

However below this Olympian vision there are a growing number of applications that are either made possible, or made to work better, when they can be powered by a customer data platform.

Here is a checklist we have made or current uses that our clients have been making of a CDP:

Outbound marketing

targeted and personalised direct mail
segmented email campaigns
triggered email campaigns
SMS push notifications

GDPR/Call center support

consent storage
privacy portal for SARs
customer recent activity search

Dashboards

customer and sales performance
linked to web browsing activity

Digital advertising

website personalisation (segmented and one-to-one)

Technical/ analytical

includes browsing history in the SCV
bespoke engineered data fields based on the SCV
SCV data exports for analysis

For those not entirely immersed in the jargon, what we now call a CDP we used to call a customer database, and after that a customer data warehouse, and then a single customer view. One of the differences between now and then is that in the now we expect data to come in from far more sources, and these include on-line browsing as much as off-line transactions.

Customer Data Platform timeline diagram — Customer Data Platform evolution timeline

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

Customer Data Platform dashboards marketing technology technology stack

Tech essentials for managing personal data post GDPR

We have tried to keep this at a very high level, but we wanted to share with you our thoughts on the minimum tech you will need:

Technology for managing personal data post GDPR (Powerpoint slides)

Please don’t hesitate to make contact if you need help, as we have an affordable, pre-packaged, cloud-hosted solution ready and waiting for you.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

GDPR managing personal data Martech

Why marketers may still need to find a ‘true’ customer data platform?

With all the power of the major CRM packages, this may sound like a stupid question; but we have had multiple clients that use CRM vendors come to us recently because they are not getting the ‘true’ customer data platform, and hence single customer view, they need.

And these clients come from very different sectors including sport, financial services, and charity.

A single customer view that isn’t ‘true’ has some unfortunate consequences.

It becomes very difficult to accurately fulfil GDPR Subject Access Requests if Mr Smith appears several times in the system. It can lead to wasteful and irritating communications such as sending two emails to the same person at the same time. It will mean that you can be treating the same person as a high value customer and as one that has become dormant. It can mean you’re submitting an existing customer to a welcome programme because they changed their email address. It makes your dashboards describing customer recruitment and attrition inaccurate, and so on and so forth.

We believe that the problem has arisen for two key reasons:

the simple one is that the CRMs may let different users set up the same individual multiple times on the system without warnings, unless the contacts provided are absolutely identical
the more complicated one is that correctly identifying individuals is in fact far from simple.

So, you may have an individual with a work email and the same individual with personal email, but they share the same mobile phone number and cookie ID.

They may use a different weekend and weekday name and address, but the same email. Or they may have several devices, hence cookie IDs, but a single email address. And so it goes on.

When we set about designing UniFida, our cloud-based customer data platform, we recognised that correctly identifying people is not only very important, but also very difficult.

So we decided to store as many different types of identifiers as we could. And most importantly to store the history of them, so that we never delete an identifier, unless of course someone is exercising their right to be forgotten.

It does mean that our system has to do a lot more work when new data arrives, because it has to look at all possible identifiers belonging to all personal records before deciding where to place new information.

And that can have interesting results. As well as bringing in new identifiers to an existing record, perhaps a new cookie ID, it can in some cases link together two people whom the system had been previously keeping separate. For instance two different email addresses can be found to have the same mobile phone number, and belong to the same person.

We call the process Purning, because we create a permanent URN, or unique reference number, for each individual, and that stays the same, even if over time all their identifiers may have changed.

As long as we can link a new identifier to an existing one, we know where to put the data that accompanies it.

Meet two of our team, Anthony and Julian, demonstrating UniFida.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

CRM packages Customer Data Platform identifiers subject access request

Do you know how much duplicate customer records are costing you?

Deduplication may not be the stuff of everyone’s dreams, but it could turn out to be more interesting than you expect. Especially if you are in the dark as to how much duplicate customer records are actually costing you?

How many duplicate customer records can you expect to find?

Our rule of thumb is that within any single customer system there will normally be between 5% and 25% duplicates.

However the more ways you have of identifying an individual, the higher the level of duplicates normally uncovered. For instance, if names and addresses can be combined with email or mobile number, many records can be brought together that otherwise would have been kept separate.

There are no rules of thumb however about the level of duplication between different customer systems held by the same organisation; but as an example, our recent work with a media company selling a range of direct to consumer services revealed that for every 100 customer records held across their systems, there were in fact a net 75 individual people.

So why does this matter?

Perhaps the most obvious reason is that deduplication will stop you sending two communications to a proportion of your customer base.

Just stop to think just how irritating it is to have to open or delete two emails from the same source with the same content.

And then, if you are using paper and post, there is a big cost implication of not getting the deduplication right.

The second reason is GDPR. How will you handle individuals’ requests to be forgotten when there are two versions of these peoples’ records? And how foolish would you feel when sending customers copies of the data you hold on them when clearly it came from two separate sources?

But probably the most interesting aspect of deduplication comes when you pull data together from across different systems and sources.

Mr Smith who buys holidays, and is on a dating site you run, has a distinct profile; so does Mrs Smith who buys wine and cooking equipment, and so probably likes entertaining at home.

So whether you have a single customer file, or customers spread across several systems, the case for deduplication is clear, but just how clear it is can only be quantified when you have matched all those duplicate customer records together.

To find out more about Unifida can help your business please contact us.

Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.

deduplication GDPR