Data activation drives customer experience

By
Matthias Bettag
,
Sr. Data Strategist
October 31, 2022
5 min read
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More tools and more data are available than ever. Yet, data activation is still an issue. A big one.  It is a popular buzzword and supposed to be in practice for modern marketers. But is it really? And what does data activation exactly mean?

Effective use of data points in real time

Following Forbes, ...

Data activation is having customer experiences that are informed by the fullness of customer data. It means every customer interaction is influenced by all available data.

By the way, when considering that users are unknown customers, or that users can become customers, then the user experience is equally important. Forbes goes on:

… including prior transactions, onsite and offline behaviors, campaign engagement, product interactions, real-time behaviors and other customer attributes gathered across channels and devices.

Customer data is partly static data (e.g. CRM data like purchase history and home address) and partly behavioral data (e.g. session data like campaign measures and web analytics). Usually, static and session data are siloed in different places and not analyzed across all existing data points and in comparison to each other. Siloed data comes with the high risk of not identifying the enclosed knowledge. So, analyzing static and behavioral data altogether and in real time is obligatory if a sound data-driven strategy is to be pursued. Yet, analyzing data is not enough as we’re talking about data activation.

Data activation directly reacts to the shown customer behavior and at the same time guides the customer experience.

The final part of Forbes’ quote contains the hardest part to achieve:

With data activation, marketers’ data goes to work to shape customer interactions as soon as it’s collected.

Thus, if you target a holistic personalization approach to deliver a harmonized user experience for your users you need to fully activate all of your data. Let’s doublecheck: Does your data “go to work as soon as it’s collected”? No? Well, ODOSCOPE does. It analyzes all existing static and behavioral data in its lightening fast Data Lakehouse and identifies any relevant significances from statistical siblings (“users like you”).

Given this, ODOSCOPE displays the relevant content in real time to every user and based on its actual session behavior. A user does not even have to be logged in or recognized by cookies. The personalized data activation works for every user up from the very first impression. It can be enriched by every click – and, of course, once a user is logged in. Yet, ODOSCOPE starts personalization (aka: data activation) even before a log-in or user recognition happens. This allows to personalize 100% of your traffic immediately instead of only recognized users or customers.

Customer Engagement Platforms are key

The underlying technology is a Customer Engagement Platform (CEP), hosted as a managed service in a private cloud or on your infrastructure and 100% GDPR compliant. Its in-memory database is made for real-time analysis and the Data Lakehouse is designed to analyze different data silos across static and behavioral data altogether.

Other than for common Customer Data Platforms (CDP) a CEP can directly engage towards a user in real time. A CEP builds flexible data-driven segments around every user instead of having predefined rule-based segments to which users are allocated. ODOSCOPE offers way more flexibility in segmentation with its fully automated data-driven process.

Remember, “shaping customer interactions as soon as it’s collected” is what data activation is about and what makes it hard. Check out what service your business is using and if it meets the definition of data activation as quoted above.

A CEP is providing pure data activation: No bypass, no idle time, no delay between collection, analysis and displaying a personalization. And as ODOSCOPE is based on your existing data, there’s no need to ask for a new consent, no need to implement a new tracking pixel, and by this no 3rd party dependency. You’re always in control.

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