Ulisse Sarmiento on The Secret Ingredients to CX Excellence

We were joined by Tealium's Solution Consultant Ulisse Sarmiento for a live Websesh as we explored the secret ingredients to CX Excellence. 

If you didn't get the chance to watch live, we've got a nice, neat round up of all the biggest and best points. 

Ulisse has been both behind the scenes, and in front of the camera when it comes to all things CDPs.

In the five years he's been at Tealium, he's seen customer data platforms grow in popularity and presence. 

He relates this to something that we all have. No, not a fanatical love of CDPs, not in this case at least. Something we all have is a name. 

So, referencing his own name, it shows both his Italian heritage, and German upbringing. Then, on top of this, his wife is Hungarian. So, in terms of data he has "a lot of data sources". 

This is: his heritage, the country where he was born, his wife's country and heritage. When he puts this together, and understands the countries and their cultures, and gets the best from these cultures, he needs to make some considerations. 

If he needs to talk to his relatives in Italy, he needs to speak in Italian. Germany, in German. Hungary, in (limited) Hungarian. So, this is a kind of human data orchestration, using data sources or cultures, and bringing together the facts, and using the right language in the right channel. But let's start at the beginning, and ask:

What Does the CDP Journey Look Like?

So, right now, the customers probably have multiple different profiles within your company.

So that means they have fragmented data living in various tools, data sources, with different touch points. And every one of these touch points is going to create a single customer map. 

But what is happening is you merge all the data, with a single customer view. But is this what you need? Is it the right way for you? With a single customer view, you are going to deliver the right experiences and engagement. So can you do that? 

What we see in the market, if we talk about CDP, the most important areas that need to be addressed are the three following things:

1. The data collection and privacy. How to get the right data from the different data sources, not only the online data sources, but from all data sources. How can I manage privacy, especially in Europe? 
   
   
2. Customer analytics and predictive insights. 61% of respondents said that customer analytics and predictive insights are important. 
   
   
3. Growth and customer acquisition. Only with growth and with customer acquisition can you get more and more people attracted, and get more people on your touchpoints, and more people interacting.

Lots of companies are currently putting money into customer data platforms. In fact, there has been a 371% increase in CDP employees and job roles. So, this is not just a trend. 

What is driving the need for customer data platforms?

First up: third party cookie loss. The first challenge that we have is that many marketers feel the strain of third party cookies diminishing.

That means while they will never disappear entirely, the data that is used within those cookies for targeted campaigns or doing SOE strategies is becoming really difficult and nearly impossible if you don't have the data in a third party cookie. This is leading to a first party data approach. 

So how do you meet the demands of consumers who want to have a personalised experience which requires lots of good data, but also you need to meet the demands of the privacy of their data.

In the past, what we have seen is that, the more data you collect from more sources, the bigger the risk. 

Companies have more customer data that they know what to do with. According to research from Splunk, 55% of the data an average enterprise company collects is dark data. This is data that brands are collecting but might not even know about.

All this data requires people to watch over it. However, companies don't have enough people to chase down every byte of data. You need to understand where the data is coming from, and how the data looks.

And this is why a customer data platform becomes so crucial. According to the CMO console, only 77% of the marketers in 2018 felt they could currently effectively enable delivery of real time data. Data driven marketing needs engagement of both physical and digital touch points, and it needs to be in real time. 

You need to be able to deliver this data in real time, to the right channel, in the right moment, to the right people. And this is only possible if you have a customer data platform that supports you in real time, according to Ulisse. 

"Let's fast forward into 2027..."

Ulisse wants us to skip forward five years, and ask "where are we going? Where are we heading?" 

What we believe it's going to be in five years is something that we call it a personalisation at scale.

This 'personalisation at scale' will look like customer experience driven by actions and by preferences, and will be the only way to go to market. Otherwise you will not be able to improve your retention, your average order value. You will not be able to reduce your churn, or the increase of your recommendations. You need to take care and you need to think about personalisation in every aspect.

Welcome to the interconnected world."

So one example here, Ulisse says, is in health care.

"When my healthcare provider is speaking to my policy provider, and my payment provider is speaking with the regulated leisure providers. This is personalisation, if they know it, on every stage of the single journey that you're doing. This is the interconnected world"

This is the interconnected world but how do you do that? It's all about mobile. Your mobile is on the desk beside you or in your pocket. It's always with you. 

This is so important because that gives you the opportunity not only to understand what the customer is doing, but how they're interacting. Plus, there's also the geolocation, which can give you an added value into your customer journey. Ulisse calls it "The real world third party cookie", which is nice and snappy. 

"Mobile is so important for agility. We all know that the market, especially mobile, is reacting really fast. So if you send a push notification, normally it's ready. We know website personalisation can be done. But you also need to think about personalising the mobile experiences."

Data United and Connected for Success

"So, turning the data burden into a delight - this is something that we want to do and want to help with the platform. Data needs to work to become information and to be leveraged intelligently."

The purpose of a customer data platform is to drive customer insights. This is where it starts - by unifying the data and connecting the data. So, Tealium offers a smooth way to understand customer data.

They have platforms and products such as the tech manager, where they help companies to collect data, and help enrich the customer and event data feed. They also have a customer data hub enrichments and functions. 

"With Tealium, you are able to manage the customer data, govern the data and be always compliant to privacy laws."

What Types of CDP Exists, and How Do I Find the Right Fit For my Organisation?

Tealium provided the first customer data platform in 2014, when Tealium audience stream was brought to the market in 2014.

If we just, basically, think about what a customer data platform primarily needs to do. It needs to help you to bring data from the data sources that are fragmented.

Then, it needs to help to bring that data into a central location and enrich it. This means to create a single customer view and then use the infrastructure that is already available. We call that data orchestration.

"One part of our customer data platform is to help the customers to manage their data streams and get the right data to the right to the right infrastructures. This is where Tealium is coming from"

"I think what is important for customers to select the right one is to ask 'what do I want to achieve? I already have an infrastructure that is built best of breed for example, but I need to have a technology that helps me get the data to the right channels'."

It's important to reverse engineer from your problem, and these pain points will point you in the right direction. 

What is the Difference Between a CDP, a CRM, and a DMP?

Well, according to Ulisse, the definitions of each are as follows:

• CRM. "CRM is your platform where you have your known customers. CRM is everything that manages your transactional data. You have information about your known customer, what they did, what they purchased, maybe also the amount. Maybe you have a score in your CRM, but a CRM doesn't really help you to utilise this data. It gives you the possibility to aggregate that data."
  
  
• DMP. "It's not comparable to a CRM because within a data management platform, you only have anonymized data sets. You have the potential  to use that for advertising. DMPs rely on third party data...but also on third party cookies."
  
  
• CDP. "The CDP helps you to bring that anonymized data and the known data together with this single customer view and not only helps you to aggregate this data, but also helps you to activate this data"

What is the difference between zero and first party data?

First party data is the data that you collect.

Zero party data is where you have the consent, and where you have additional information that you can handle trustfully. 

This is all about the given, versus the collected. There are cases where people want you to understand them better. Customers are willing to give up their data in order to gain a personalised experience. It's all about the value exchange. 

Why do you want my data and what I'm getting for it, and it's not always a monetary value. 

"If I give you my data, I would be so happy and if I'm seeing the right products marketed to me, instead of just the product that I bought, best example."

For example, if a company asks for the customer's date of birth, they may be reluctant. But if that company offers a free birthday gift for that day, then the customer sees the reason for that data collection.

It may be particularly valuable to the data collector to have the age insight, in order to better profile the audience, but it's remembering some of that and not just making things mandatory.