Is Power BI the answer to data overload?

Is Power BI the answer to data overload

So is Microsoft Power BI the answer to data overload? Microsoft Power BI is a tool that lets users build interactive dashboards and visualisations. It sits in the Business Intelligence category and competes against Tableau (part of Salesforce) as well as some others.

With any tool that promises the world, it’s good to understand why you might choose to use it (over other tools). What are the (hidden) costs and how do you get the best out of it?

What’s to like about it?

The benefits –

Microsoft power BI features and benefits
Microsoft power BI features and benefits

The Short comings –

Microsoft power BI features and disadvantages
Microsoft power BI features and disadvantages

Intelligence, but not understanding

As you can see above, a tool like Power BI can give you everything at your fingertips. But it still doesn’t address a fundamental problem that data is complex. Especially from multiple sources, so you need to decide what you want from it and the most effective way to structure it.

We’ve worked with many, many clients that have the software but not the expertise in designing data models that deliver not only intelligence, but understanding.

The solution?

Dealing with multiple data sources and messy data is our bread and butter. It’s what we do every day and we simplify as much as possible throughout the process.

What you need really depends on the sophistication and/or availability of resource in your company. If you have a team of data analysts/engineers/scientists then they will no doubt have the expertise to build the solution from scratch. We’ve seen some great examples using Snowflake as this layer.

How mature is your data analysis capability?

How mature is your data analysis capability?
How mature are is your data analysis capability?

If the team of analysts isn’t there or they’re just too tied up with BAU, then an automated central data repository can be the solution. More and more we’ve seen a Customer Data Platform becoming the answer.

UniFida is the fully featured customer data platform for insights driven marketers. Hosted in the cloud, it ingests and unifies data from all online and offline customer behaviour, including web browsing, ecommerce transactions, customer order systems, email service providers, SMS, direct mail, call centres and even retail. It then uses personal identifiers to build a single customer view.

So is Microsoft Power BI the answer to data overload? Microsoft Power BI is fully integrated into UniFida, giving marketers faster access to meaningful insights.

For a chat, a demo, help supporting a business case or all three get in touch today.

How does the UniFida customer data platform work?

UniFida logo

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. 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.

How does a customer data platform work?

how does a customer data platform work?

How exactly does a customer data platform work, and help marketers leverage data to gain a better, more accurate understanding of customer behaviour?

Ingesting and integrating data

The first element in understanding this is ingesting data. CDP’s ingest customer data from multiple sources. Typically, these will include website data, paid digital, transactional, direct mail, retail, email, and call centre. All data received by a CDP will relate in some shape or form to a customer. The data is usually sent to a CDP using an API or via an SFTP site.

Customers have multiple identifiers and these change over time, such as mobile phone number, email address, cookie ID, postal address, customer reference or landline number. This data is collected, and these identifiers are used to generate a single customer view also known as ‘Identify Resolution’. For example: if someone logs into your website with their current email, but with a different cookie ID, then the new cookie ID is added to that particular customer record on the assumption that they are using a new device. Equally, if a new transaction record is received with the same customer reference, but a new address, then a new address is added on the basis they have either moved or added an extra residence.

As new data is ingested, each record goes through what is called the ‘purning’ process. This is the stage at which the record’s personal identifier(s) are matched against all other customer records that are held in the CDP until a match is or is not found. At this point the data may be matched into an existing single customer view or a new one created. Each recognised customer is given a permanent unique record number or ‘purn’.

Identity resolution

Is at the heart of a CDP and is central to all the rest of its functionality. A good CDPs’ functionality is rooted in the knowledge that people have multiple identifiers, and that these identifiers can all change. Over time many or all of these identifiers are likely to change for an individual. The CDP should keep a history for every one of every version of these, although regarding the latest versions as most likely to be current. This collection of identifiers is what it calls on to build the single customer view.

The data in a CDP is held in what is called a schema. This is the way in which the data is organised. Every organisation using a CDP will need their own schema although within an industry, schemas will have a lot of similarities.

Engineering derived data

Engineered data is important for the value it provides for selecting specific customer groups for communications or developing customer insight. It can comprise any variable that can be calculated using an algorithm or other means from the raw data in the customer data platform.

Data engineering can take many forms, from simple examples like banding variables such as age, to more complex ones like keeping a counter on customer’s total historic value. A major use of engineered data is in developing and recording scores derived from algorithms such as propensity models.

An example of an engineered data field is where we want to know what each customer has contributed to a business after the cost of acquiring them. We can then:

  • Use historic purchase data for each individual in say their first and second year since recruitment
  • Deduct the cost of acquisition which can be derived the channel they came in from
  • Deduct the cost of communications sent to them in the same period which is held in the contact history area
  • Calculate an individual customer contribution

Engineered data is updated at an individual level every time a relevant event happens; so, each new home shopping purchase, eCommerce transaction or physical retail transaction can lead to a changed score in the engineered data section. A great benefit of engineered data is that it allows you to base axis for charts or selections for campaigns on these additional variables.

Analysing customer data

A CDP is essential for gaining a full and accurate understanding of customer behaviour. For instance, without a CDP that combines web browsing history with transactions, it would not be possible to understand the relationship between the two. Again, if individual contact history is not held against a customer record then the effectiveness of campaigns that are sent to the customer, and to which the customer may respond through different channels, cannot be accurately measured.

The CDP builds the single customer view, and it is against this that customer analysis can take place. It provides the dataset that becomes the one authoritative source of information about customer behaviour for an organisation. With this in place decision makers have a firm basis on which to proceed.

There are so many aspects to the analytical tools that can be used to analyse customer data that there is little merit in trying to list them all. Some are built into the CDP and others require data to be first extracted from the CDP and then transferred to them. What matters is that they have the best possible customer data set to analyse.

So, the results from customer analysis form the basis on which key decisions about customer marketing can be made. These include such areas as:

  • Customer acquisition (targeting and channel choice)
  • Digital planning
  • Product development
  • Customer relationship management
  • Salesforce management
  • Pricing

Even corporate mergers and company valuations.

Given how important these decisions are, it makes good sense when designing a CDP to first start with a list of the kind of results that will be required from customer analysis so that for instance data is held with sufficient granularity to make these possible.

Connectivity to external systems

The CDP can support other systems in their personalisation and management of customer communications. Typical examples are:

  • Providing customer selections for email marketing systems
  • Customer segmentations for web personalisation technology
  • Names and addresses for postal marketing
  • Target audiences for social media

So just as the CDP ingests data from multiple sources it also provides selected data to external systems. These connections are usually made via an API or via transfer of data to an SFTP site.

Delivering personalised customer experiences

Within the CDP we expect to find functionality for the selection of specific customer groups either on a one-off or on a recurring basis. These groups are usually selected for output to external systems that manage the actual communications. The selections themselves can be simple based on Boolean logic rules, or they may be more complex based on propensity scores applied within the engineered data. They can also be based on triggers, such as a new customer having just been recruited.

The CDP needs to enable these different types of selection, and crucially record what contacts each individual customer has been selected for. Functionality is also required for test and control, and for including source codes with the selection.

Associated with delivering personalised customer experiences needs to be functionality for measuring the results of campaigns. This is often automated within the design of the CDP and should always include the ability to attribute results such as orders back to campaigns, even if they respond through different channels.

What are the costs for a customer data platform?

UniFida logo

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. 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.

What is a customer data platform?

So what exactly is a customer data platform?

As customers we generate massive volumes of data as we engage across multiple channels using different devices which makes it challenging to capture, integrate and activate this data effectively.

Data repositories are often siloed and not integrated with each other or allow easy transfer of data to marketing platforms. Let us now throw in some GDPR and updates from Apple with identifier for advertisers (IDFA) and the deprecation of third-party cookies by Google.

Today’s customers simply assume that your company knows and remembers who they are, what they have done, and what they want, always and across all channels. Their expectations are high, and tolerance is low. So it is not surprising to see that many marketers have made a unified customer experience their highest priority.

What’s the problem with data?

Not having a single customer view creates many challenges including:

  • Making it more tedious to activate campaigns to the right audience and report on them in a timely manner.
  • Degrades customer experiences.
  • Introduces privacy concerns.

Marketers and marketing technologists know that gathering and acting on unified customer information is not easy. In fact, only a small percentage of companies have achieved this and can truly operationalise their first party data. The rest are battling with technology, strategy, budgets, organisations, staff skills, and other obstacles to success.

Traditional methods for collecting that data into unified customer profiles, such as an enterprise data warehouse, have failed to solve the problem. Newer approaches, like “data lakes”, have collected the data but failed to organise it effectively and enable marketers to activate the data into owned and paid marketing channels.

The Customer Data Platform is an alternative approach that has had great success at pioneering companies. The process of collecting and unifying the data is known as identity resolution which is a core building block for enabling better customer experiences and optimised marketing effort. A CDP puts your marketing team in control of the data unification project, helping to ensure it is focused directly on marketing requirements.

CDPs apply specialised technologies and pre-built processes that are tailored precisely to meet marketing data needs. This allows a faster, more efficient solution than general purpose technologies that try to solve many problems at once.

Customer Data Platform Definition

“A Customer Data Platform is packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems”.

This definition has three critical elements:

1. “packaged software”: the CDP is a prebuilt system that is configured to meet the needs of each client. Some technical resources will be required to set up and maintain the CDP, but it does not require the level of technical skill of a typical data warehouse project. This reduces the time, cost, and risk and gives business users more control over the system, even though they may still need some technical assistance.

2. “creates a persistent, unified customer database”: the CDP creates a comprehensive view of each customer by:

  • Capturing data from multiple systems.
  • Linking information related to the same customer.
  • Storing the information to track behaviour over time.

The CDP contains personal identifiers used to target marketing messages and track individual-level marketing results.

3. “accessible to other systems”: data stored in the CDP is then made available to other marketing systems for analysis and to manage customer interactions.

What should a customer data platform do?

In essence, a customer data platform combines all your customer data from online/offline sources and unifies this into a single customer view to enable cross-channel activation and personalisation.

A CDP should integrate into existing and future marketing/advertising technology enabling you to decide which channels to communicate with your customers.

It should enable automated reporting of activity on your key marketing metrics. And of course, it should support GDPR enabling you to check customer consent, action subject access requests and the right to be forgotten.

How does a customer data platform work?

UniFida logo

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. 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.

We are told that first party data is taking centre stage!

This is according to a just published report from the Winterberry Group ‘The State of Data’; to be fair it does only cover US marketeers but trends there are often repeated in the UK.

strategies to enhance value from data
Strategies organisations have used to enhance value derived from data

The reasons behind this are not too hard to guess:

– the phasing out of the use of 3rd party cookies
– the better returns to be got from looking after existing customers compared to recruiting new ones

Respondents highlighted use cases associated with leveraging and deriving value from first party data as those that will capture their foremost attention in 2020.

use cases drawing value from first party data
Use cases associated with leveraging and deriving value from first party data

Without wanting to blow our own trumpet too loudly, the combination of UniFida customer data platform technology and data science covers all the areas inside the red box.

Please try our short survey to find out if you should be considering introducing a customer data platform, and please email us on [email protected] if you would like to arrange a Zoom chat with our founder Julian Berry to check whether we may be able to help you put first party data centre stage.

UniFida logo

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. 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.

Do you really know whether your company should install a customer data platform?

data from a customer data platform

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are taking the marketing world by storm – the Customer Data Platform Institute projects that marketers will spend $1.3 billion on them in 2020.

But the important question for your company is whether you would really benefit from having one?

So, what do CDPs really do? At a very high level they:
– ingest all available sources of online and offline customer data and build a deduplicated single customer view
– provide the capability to profile and segment customers
– enable personalised and consistent communications to take place across all channels by connecting your marketing technology
– support you in visualising customer performance

Do you really know whether your company should install a customer data platform? We have devised a simple 10-point questionnaire to help you understand whether your company could benefit from a CDP. It won’t be telling you whether should definitely should have one, as you will need a business case for that, but it will tell you whether CDPs are worth investigating.

QUESTIONNAIRE

If you want to start to find out more about what a CDP could do for your company then please order our free e-book CLICK

UniFida logo

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. 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.

Post lockdown marketing, did you grasp the moment?

You may recall our post from March where we provided suggestions on what marketers might do during the Covid lockdown. Now, as the lockdown starts to ease and we enter the new normal, we look towards marketing post lockdown.

For our part we have initiated a project concerned with multi-channel marketing mix attribution, working with a small team of graduates from University College London, and Edinburgh University.

Our mission is to find out if we can detect any patterns that hold true for more than one client that help us to understand the effects of timing and sequencing in how events prior to an order combine to contribute to the order actually happening.

So, for instance, is an email a week before an order more of a driver than a catalogue three weeks before, or a social media referral just a day before, and does it matter what order they happen in?

In a multi-channel world these are important questions, and we hope to have some definitive answers for you before too long. If you are interested to discuss this project, and how it might help your marketing post lockdown, please email us.

We have also been pushing full steam ahead with developing our UniFida customer data platform technology including:

  • Redesigning the way you can select audiences for campaigns to make the process much slicker
  • Integrating with Fresh Relevance for website and email personalisation
  • And with Microsoft Power BI for data visualisation

We very much look forward to talking, and even meeting, with you in the post lockdown period as business gets back on its hind legs again!

 

UniFida logo

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. 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.

Are you grasping the moment?

One thing is certain; we won’t forget what we did in these very special Corona Virus quarantine days.

And although none of us know how long our confinement is going to last, we do know that it is going to end.

We are experiencing an unprecedented once in a lifetime chance to do those things we don’t normally do and to get marketing ship shape for when we are eventually let out, and the wheels start turning full speed again.

Freed from the daily commute and the office banter, we can make real progress with the infrastructure and the customer knowledge that should drive marketing, and which is so often ignored when times are busy.

By now you must have started to build a ‘must do when away from the office’ list; and we have a few suggestions of things that you might consider including:

  • finding out which of all your marketing initiatives in the last year actually made you money
  • finishing the unmentionable GDPR project
  • planning future recruitment to avoid black hole areas
  • getting customer data into a single customer view
  • asking customers what they like and don’t like about what you do
  • making sure you have the dashboards you need to steer the ship
  • getting the team to use some of the incredible arrays of free online training resources
  • achieving consensus on the five most important areas to focus once you are free
  • and so on, and on. The list can get very long very quickly

We are here to help; as well as our data science and technology arms, we have a marketing consultancy.  Its aim is simply to ensure that you have the tools and the customer knowledge to unlock the most customer value at the least marketing cost.

If you would like us to help you write or deliver on your shortlist, we are here to provide expert support.

For a quick dip into what our consultancy normally covers, then please click here to view a short PowerPoint.

Hoping that we can help you make the best use of the quarantine.

UniFida logo

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. 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.

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.

  1. It’s free and uncontrovertibly yours (as long as it’s properly permissioned)
  2. It allows you to develop very personalised relationships with each of your customers, and hence unlock as much value as is possible from them
  3. 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
  4. 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.

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

Contact us to find out how UniFida’s Customer Data Platform could add value to your business.

 

UniFida logo

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. 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.

Do you prefer working in a kitchen, or sitting in a restaurant?

As a marketer, do you prefer working in a kitchen, or sitting in a restaurant?

We have noticed that the way marketers operate is changing, and the trend is firmly towards working in the kitchen!

Looking back a decade and more, agencies liked to own most marketing functions, and that went way beyond strategy, planning and creative; they liked to manage the production as well. This would mean that they would buy media, manufacture direct mail, and even take control of data. The full lavish restaurant experience.

Marketeers have gradually woken up to the fact that eating in restaurants is both very expensive, and puts control in the hands of someone else. If campaigns flop, they have to switch agencies, and this means listening to the whole nine yards of pitches and flummery.

Now that we are firmly in the data age, we find that marketeers like to get down among the weeds, and understand what is really going on. This way they can own that precious commodity, a true understanding of the customers on whom their fortunes rely.

That does not mean that there is no role for agencies, rather that, in addition to creative work, they are increasingly providing the technology environment in which the marketers can do their own cooking.

Nor does it mean that marketers have to start learning how to write their own code; instead they want a ready-made technology environment in which they can take control of understanding customer behaviour, and make sure that they are delivering, as far as possible, the right personalised experience to each individual customer.

At UniFida we are very aware of this trend, and have chosen to go down the route of delivering the technology (kitchens) in which marketers can operate.

In practical terms this means providing a cloud-based environment in which all online and offline sources of customer data are tied together, identities are resolved, marketing metrics are provided, and personalised campaigns can be planned and executed.

We don’t expect to tell marketers what they should do; rather we like to provide the most refined possible tools to help them do it themselves.

Our toolkit is a combination of UniFida Technology and UniFida Data Science. It’s reasonably priced, fully serviced, and the result of five years of continual development.

We hope that it’s what you will want to enable you to cook things up that your customers will really appreciate!

 

UniFida logo

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. 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.

What is the biggest reason firms want to comply with GDPR?

The results from a 2018 survey by TrustArc to over 600 UK and US companies revealed that firms want to comply with GDPR to meet customer expectations, and not, as many thought, the fear of legal action. See the full July 2018 survey here.

Focussing on customer expectations, what we suspect customers actually want is a simple way to access the data that companies hold on them. Check and adjust their consents, and if necessary exercise the right to be forgotten.

If you can give customers this option by using a simple click through from your website, you will be taking the lead in this important aspect of the customer experience.

And it is with this in mind that we have built this capability into UniFida, our cloud-based customer data platform technology. So when we are connected to your website and customers have authenticated themselves, they can self-serve all the necessary GDPR functionality.

It’s not magic, it’s just technology!

UniFida logo

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. 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.