Developing use cases for a customer data platform

How can developing use cases for a customer data platform deliver what your business needs? Here we discuss how use cases came about and introduce key stages to successfully implement valuable marketing technology.

jigsaw puzzle

In praise of use cases… or ‘anvandningsfall’ as they were originally termed

Back in 1987 a Swede called Ivar Jacobson presented the first known article on use cases as a means for capturing and specifying requirements for computer systems. He didn’t much like their original long Swedish name and eventually settled on ‘use case’ which has since been universally adopted.

So why are we singing their praises?

Developing use cases for a customer data platform does not require technical knowledge, they allow your teams to collaborate on the desired business outcomes and uncover gaps. One of the key things with a use case is it ensures your stakeholders have defined the business need and, how the activity will be measured.

Developing use cases for a customer data platform

An example of a marketing use case is “Use data to deliver relevant, personalised omni-channel campaigns in order to increase revenue and reduce marketing costs”. The use case is pretty straight forward. The brand wants to communicate with their customers across multiple channels in order to generate revenue and potentially reduce wasted marketing spend.

Many businesses fail to develop core use cases to solve a problem or deliver on a strategy. By developing core use cases, which are prioritised based on the business goals and can be measured, it will give you the north star to focus on and deliver against your goals.

We see at least three stages in the process of successfully introducing marketing technology where they are of crucial importance.

Articulate and Document Use Cases

First by going through the discipline of articulating and documenting use cases a business can clarify exactly what they want this nebulous item, a marketing system, to actually do.

It provides a non-techy way for the requirements to be mapped out so that the user community can articulate step by step what both it and the system are expected to do, and what the outputs should look like.

It also allows for consideration of time. When and how quickly should processing happen including volume. Thus, allowing the system providers to get a handle on whether for instance they are dealing with ten thousand or a million customers.

Given that nowadays almost all martech is purchased off-the-shelf rather than being built inhouse, the combined use cases can help start the process of vendor selection. Rather than being told a long list of the glossy features that can be delivered by the martech salesperson, most of which you don’t want in the first place, the company can factually check whether the system being proposed can actually do what you require.

Develop the Business Case

Next, the use cases can feed directly into developing the business case. If for instance you are going to be able to do A that you couldn’t do before, how much customer value are you going to be able to generate compared to where you are now. Or alternatively how much staff time will be saved using the new tool to deliver B more quickly?

We find that business cases for martech generally span across four key areas:
1 The incremental revenue generated by being able to do something that was not possible before.
2 The cost of time saved by using a better tool to deliver something more quickly.
3 Reduction in technical debt by streamlining and unifying data and platforms.
4 Reducing reputational risk by having clear GDPR measures in place

Once past the business casing stage, many organisations will want to start with a live proof of concept or POC. If you select a few areas where the new technology should add value, and where it can be set up and configured quickly (please note I am not writing LHF!) then a POC can be put in place.

There is no better way to finally confirm that everything works from the technology to the customers responding to it. In addition, a live POC that works, gets quick buy in from all levels in an organisation. The POC will also pick up on what is not working and enable you to put it right.

Set Up, Configure and Deliver with the Use Case Specification

And finally, when the full martech needs to be set up and configured, the developers can take the use cases as the specification against which they are going to have to deliver. The company can sign off the configuration as done when the use cases work.

At UniFida we like to help our clients with developing their use cases at the start of the process of introducing a customer data platform. We do this for all the reasons articulated above, and incidentally it helps us understand quickly whether we can in reality deliver what you need.  Having developed several client use cases, we can help stimulate your thinking around what they might provide.

Our offer! We have made a decision not to charge for this kind of consultancy as it helps you understand what you need the technology to do, and for us to understand what we may be called on to deliver.

Please do get in touch if help with developing use cases for a customer data platform is what you are looking for.

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.

53% of marketers don’t have a cohesive strategy for Martech

A study conducted by technology-focused marketing consultancy, Demand Lab, reveals that 53% of marketers don’t have a cohesive Martech strategy, and if they do, then only 20% are implementing one!

It may be an exaggeration, but there is some truth here. Many B to C marketers have made their decisions about purchasing Martech in a very piecemeal way, and ended up with an extensive but uncoordinated marketing toolkit.

Each technology item has been purchased on its own, to do a specific job, without adhering to an overall strategy.

And their difficulties are compounded by the way that the Martech vendors usually present themselves:

– Confusing websites that don’t explain fully what the technology does
– Opaque pricing arrangements
– Features, not solutions focused descriptions
– Little explanation about how the systems are to be configured
– Or what level of internal IT support you need to make them work

We believe that the overall Martech strategy for most medium sized companies does not need to be over complicated.

There are some core components that should be the foundation of any Martech strategy, such as these:

components of a cohesive strategy for martech

We have marked some of these boxes yellow because most marketers have these already; the problem often is that they don’t naturally join together.

The email service provider may not know what is going on in the website. The call centre doesn’t know what the mailing house has sent out to Mrs Smith when she calls in. The retailers don’t know what kind of customers they are dealing with.

This explains why we decided to go into the customer data platform (CDP) business. To integrate all this customer information and build a comprehensive picture of every customer you are in contact with.

A CDP works best when it’s set up in conjunction with, or has built in, personalisation technology that automates individual messaging via your website and your email service provider.

The personalisation has much more meaning when it is based on knowing what type of customer you have been in the past. Not just on what you have looked at on the website in the last few seconds.

The CDP can then also segment the customer base so that the offline mailing house or call centre send out relevant targeted messages.

But the CDP does much more as well. Having all your customer data in one place, you can measure the effectiveness of every marketing activity as well as track how your customers are performing in terms of value and loyalty over time.

It can inform your recruitment strategy by showing you how different channels bring different types of customer. Show you how they are working in combination. That way you can escape from last click order attribution and attribute the correct value to the role each channel performs.

Every company is at a different point in their journey to getting the Martech that is right for them.  If you would like to chat to us about where on your journey you are now, and where you need to go, we are here to help at no cost to you.

 

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.

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:

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.

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 having a digital identity crisis?

Back in the ‘70s, it was de rigour for cool people to be undergoing an identity crisis, and this involved trying to fathom out who the hell one was, why one had been put on the planet in the first place, and what other people would make of one’s extraordinary persona. Roll forward to today and you are more likely to have a digital identity crisis which involves losing one’s user names and passwords, or worse still having someone else steal them.

The very concept of identity has mutated into a set of letters, numbers, and codes by which organisations can recognise us as unique individuals; so much for the soul searching of previous generations.

The recently enacted GDPR tacitly assumes that identity crises have been banished, that organisations and individuals can immediately recognise each other, and that there is never a problem in tying together all the personal information that lies behind different doors, accessed by recognising identifiers like email address, cookie ID, mobile phone number etc.

This clearly is not the case, and for it to change, organisations are going to have to put in place a much more sophisticated process for identity recognition; something that we call a digital passport.

As we frequently change many of our identifiers e.g. get a new mobile phone number, different email, new tablet etc. an organisation needs to maintain a historic record of all means by which we have previously communicated our persona to it. This historic set of identifiers can then give us the best chance of recognising an individual when they appear through one of our many communications channels.

Developing this kind of digital passport is something that we have made a key component in the design of UniFida, our cloud-based single customer view technology.

Are you having a digital identity crisis? Contact us if you’d like to find out more about how we can help your organisation.

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.