The COVID-19 pandemic has played a huge role in accelerating digital transformation and spurred a rush to the cloud with an increased focus on data-driven decision-making. IDG’s 2021 Digital Business study revealed that 96% of businesses have adopted or plan to adopt a “digital-first” business strategy.
In a market that has witnessed an overwhelming change in a short time, enhancing agility is a top priority. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) have addressed this need by connecting data in real-time across different technologies, teams, and customer touchpoints. To understand how CDPs are being leveraged by businesses, Tealium surveyed over 1,000 marketing and business leaders in different industries like healthcare, media, financial space, retail, and IT in APAC, Europe, and the U.S.
Here are the major highlights of the report.
1. Customer Experience Becomes A Top Priority
Customer experience is being prioritized by most organizations. Omnichannel businesses make it easy for customers to place orders from whichever device they like and arrange for pick-up or take delivery at the location of their choice. This diversification of channels is driving broad investments in customer-facing technology across the business landscape.
Moreover, digital habits that expanded during the pandemic in many cases would be staying on for a long time. However, some of these behavioral changes can be very subtle and not show up in retail sales figures. For example, a 2020 Google analysis of search trends observed that customers are engaging in more window shopping today to reduce the time spent in stores. Also, they have become more particular about who they are buying from.
More than 60% of surveyed businesses reported that customer experience and service is their most important priority in choosing a CDP partner. The top three areas executives most want their CDP to address are customer experience, loyalty, and customer acquisition.
2. Smart Technology Becoming a Norm
From intelligent recommendation engines to chatbots that answer up to 70% of routine customer inquiries, people rely a lot on the input from AI in their customer experience. Also, marketers are welcoming the arrival of these experience-enhancing and productivity-improving technologies, which is evident by 98% of marketers listing AI capabilities as either slightly important or extremely significant to attaining their organization’s marketing goals.
AI boosts agility by reducing the time that people spend on repetitive tasks. Organizations that can get the maximum value out of data with the least investment of human time will emerge as real winners.
3. Delivering Customer Experience in Real-Time
People not only desire real-time customer experiences but also expect them. With the digital transformation continuing to accelerate our use of technology at various points in our lives, providing real-time customer experiences will only grow in significance for various organizations.
Real-time processing technology enables customer experiences to be tuned to the moment. Instant responsiveness helps marketers customize offers to site visitors based on the pages they view. Marketers can also connect to other departments in real-time and boost the credit line of a customer making multiple purchases. With the end of third-party cookies, marketers are increasingly interested in using their CDPs to combine precise segmentation with real-time decisions. This can be gauged from the fact that 20% of the marketers cited increased real-time functionality and 15% choose better ingestion of third-party data when asked for one improvement they’d like to see in their CDP.
4. Respect for Privacy
While customers are increasingly expecting the use of their data by the companies they engage with, they are also demanding greater privacy and respect for how their data is gathered, stored, and utilized. Keeping their customers’ privacy in mind, many businesses are investing in CDP. better protection of customer data also topped the list of desired outcomes in 2022, with 57% of executives mentioning it overall and 63% in retail.
Securing data is a top trend that executives expect to see across the overall business landscape in 2022. And regulatory changes in customer data is the business factor they expect to have the greatest impact on their industries in 2022.
Bottom Line
The numerous challenges faced by businesses over the last couple of years have reset the ways companies engage with their customers. The loss of third-party cookies means companies are losing access to data they have relied on for years. Also, the changing privacy regulations have forced companies to completely reimagine their data management practices.
All these factors have together fueled a collection of technical and business requirements that have brought CDPs into the mainstream. CDPs are being increasingly adopted by companies operating in a range of niches. The key decision for companies now is not whether they want to purchase a CDP, but which platform would be most suited for their organization’s needs.
To delve deeper into the findings of the report, click here.