Like the proverbial dog that catches the car, marketers and business users with access to a customer Golden Record may find themselves wondering what to do with it. After all, it is no small feat to finally have a unified view of a customer, household or another entity across multiple systems and customer accounts that merge each instance of a customer together.
We’ve previously covered how to construct a Golden Record and how the various components help marketers deliver a consistently relevant personalized customer experience. Here, we will cover a few ways that a Golden Record can be used to create business value.
A Golden Record: More than a Single Customer View
To quickly recap, a true Golden Record is more than what some vendors tout as a single customer view. Because a Golden Record continuously applies data quality and advanced identity resolution processes as data is being ingested, marketers are assured that the resulting profile is an accurate representation of the customer they intend to interact with. Moreover, they are assured that the accessible Golden Record is representative of a customer at the precise moment in a customer journey that a marketer engages, irrespective of channel or whether it is an inbound or outbound communication.
With this understanding, one way to use a Golden Record to create business value is through a person-to-person engagement. Think of a customer dialing into the call center, or a curbside pickup scenario where the store associate represents the last mile to the consumer. A call center agent, or the associate bringing items to the customer’s vehicle will have a contextual understanding that they can leverage at the point of contact to enhance the customer’s experience. A call center agent, for example, will have a customer’s full history across multiple email addresses, phone numbers, devices, loyalty accounts and every other potential identifier, and have this information in one place. Depending on the purpose of the call, the agent may choose to view spend by category, by time dimension or another grouping that the agent can leverage to best achieve the optimal outcome, be it retention, increase lifetime value, conversion or another metric relevant to the individual customer’s journey.
Likewise, the in-store associate arriving at the customer’s vehicle might be ready with an upsell offer based on a customer’s browsing history between placing an order and arriving at the store the next day. In any person-to-person encounter, access to a Golden Record provides a business user with a distinct advantage in creating a hyper-relevant experience because the user has a real-time, contextual understanding of the individual customer journey at the point of contact.
A Golden Record and a Contextual Understanding
The Golden Record also drives value from a business operations standpoint. Understanding, for example, sales forecasting, merchandising, inventory and other common reporting metrics by aggregating unified profiles provides a far deeper context than analyzing individual sales events. A deeper understanding of who is buying what in the context of multiple customer journeys can help users identify patterns as they relate to not just individuals but wider purchasing groups and households.
A user might know, for example, the reason why one product moved off the shelf while another did not. Was there a weather incident in one sales region? Was there a higher level of fraud or coupon abuse? By layering context into purchase patterns, Golden Records provide users with more nuanced reporting, which can be used to drive more intelligent, profitable business decisions.
Another way to use a Golden Record to drive value beyond a messaging standpoint is through the management of engagement patterns such as a customer’s channel and frequency preferences. By knowing which channels a customer prefers to engage with a brand, and how often, a brand can optimize engagement on those dimensions, maximizing spend efficiency. Because the Golden Record provides a complete view of those preferences across multiple user accounts, users can leverage that integrated picture to manage an entirety of communications across email, direct mail, SMS and other channels.
Next-Best Actions Tied to an Individual, or Account
Another way to use the Golden Record to create business value is through the automation of next-best actions. Real-time website personalization is a perfect example. A customer browsing a brand’s website might see a different image, offer or content than another based not only on the customer’s preferences or interests, but based on how each customer is navigating the website in real time. That’s because a Golden Record applies data quality and identity resolution steps as data is being ingested, which includes data from the online session in progress.
In this example, a Golden Record is the difference between displaying static content based on, say, a device ID where the user may not know who it belongs to (an individual, or a member of the household). But because identity resolution is a key component of a Golden Record that resolves identity at an individual level, machine learning models can form an understanding of a browsing event in relation to one person.
In a similar vein, because a Golden Record provides a complete view of a customer even when a customer has multiple accounts or multiple identifiers, a next-best action – automated or through an in-person engagement – discerns the optimal action based on how the customer is engaging.
If, for example, an individual has two loyalty cards, is the recommendation or offer based on purchase data from both cards, or just one of the cards? Or if a customer has multiple travel profiles with an airline, are recommendations triggered based on whether the customer is logged in through a work email vs. a personal email address?
In other words, because a Golden Record provides a marketer or business user with everything there is to know about a customer, business value is derived from being able to unify even seemingly disconnected events or disconnected behaviors into a unified profile to support better decisions. In the case of an individual with multiple loyalty cards, this might mean sending only one coupon or reward offer even if you have an email address on file for each of the loyalty accounts.
For more on how to drive business value using the Redpoint Golden Record, click here.
Related Redpoint Orchard Blogs
A Bountiful Harvest: Continual Identity Resolution and a Pristine, Profitable Golden Record
Retention Marketing for the Digital-First Customer: Make an Impression with a Golden Record
Banking on Change: Why a Golden Record Satisfies Customer Expectations for a Holistic Experience
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