Blog Series
Data: The Defining Difference
Great data isn’t just important, it’s the foundation of exceptional customer experiences and smarter business decisions. The difference between a seamless, hyper-personalized interaction and a frustratingly irrelevant one? Data that’s clean, accurate, and ready for business use the moment it’s needed. Whether it’s understanding a customer, a household, a business, or another key asset – like a product, service, or financial instrument – data readiness is what enables organizations to act with precision and confidence. When data quality falls short, even the most sophisticated engagement strategies and operational decisions fail to deliver. And in today’s competitive landscape, one misstep can send customers (and revenue) elsewhere.
John Nash
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In Data: The Defining Difference, Redpoint explores why high-quality data is the key to unlocking the deep understanding that businesses need to achieve CX and broader business success. This blog series will dive into the critical aspects of data readiness and customer data technology, examining what businesses get right, where they struggle, and why traditional roadblocks to CX and operational excellence remain so persistent.
Whether you’re in marketing, IT, or another data-driven function, customer data technology should make your job easier, not harder. Yet too often there are conflicting viewpoints – on everything from infrastructure to activation – that get in the way of extracting real value from data. And when data isn’t fully liberated across the enterprise, the customer experience and business outcomes suffer.
So, is your data ready? Ready to build unified profiles? Ready for segmentation, AI, and paid media? Ready to drive operational decisions with confidence? This series will showcase real-world examples of companies using customer engagement technology to deliver tangible results – results that start with data that’s truly ready for business. By the end of this series, you’ll have a clearer roadmap for leveraging your data to create exceptional experiences and drive lasting growth.
Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
Part 1: Customer Data Technology – the Root of all Value (Introduction)
Even with countless investments in customer engagement technology, brands still have a difficult time developing enough of a customer understanding to deliver relevant messages, offers and content at every stage of the customer journey. The reason? Technology that – for various reasons – often fails to give data quality its due.
Part 2: Customer Centricity Begins with the Data
There is work to be done to close the customer experience gap, which measures the CX that customers expect vs. the personalization that brands deliver. Much of the reason for the disconnect stems from data, process and team siloes that are set up operationally around a product, service, or channel. A focus on data quality puts brands at the starting blocks for liberating their data across the enterprise.
Part 3: The Evolution of Customer Data Technology
There have been many attempts to use technology to replicate the famed “corner store” experience of yesteryear, only at scale and across digital-first journeys. Overpromising and underdelivering is a common occurrence, mainly because moving data from A to B or performing a basic match fail to develop the depth of customer understanding that’s needed for real-time relevance.
Part 4: The Cost vs. Control Trade-Off in Liberating Your Customer Data
Most brands intent on competing on CX understand the value (and necessity!) of a single customer view. There are different viewpoints for how to go about this, with the cost vs. control calculation playing an outsized role in how to prioritize bringing data together faster, better, and easier. The traditional school of thought in weighing cost vs. control may be changing, helping to put brands on a glide path to personalization excellence.
Part 5: The Heart of Customer Data Technology: Minding the Data
Enterprise-grade customer data technology that makes customer data ready for business use – a solution that puts the “D” in customer data platforms (CDP’s) or any other related application – makes the collection of customer data and creation of a unified profile a competitive differentiator. A differentiated customer experience is about data readiness, fully preparing customer data for any CX or business use case.
Part 6: A New Approach to Choosing Customer Data Technology
What does all customer data technology have in common? In one way or another, it has all been developed to solve a data problem. The issue companies run into is that the traditional methods of solving the problem have mostly fallen short. IT as overseer leaves some important gaps, and even CDPs have a few shortcomings having to do with refining raw data into meaningful, accurate, up-to-date and detailed customer experience data.
Part 7: A Practical Guide to Choosing Customer Data Technology (Filling the Gaps)
A data refinery helps fill in the data quality gaps that creep in when IT and marketing each have different ideas about how best to not only improve data quality, but how to make sure that it is ready to improve CX. A data refinery addresses data readiness, which is what a marketer cares about. And it addresses what IT cares about; tying together master data management with the customer signal infrastructure; i.e., the functionality around behavioral, transactional and predictive behaviors – what customers are doing in the real world.
Part 8: Real-World Examples of how Data Readiness Delivers Impact
A 20 percent lift in market basket size from a personalized buy online, pick-up in-store initiative. An 80 percent reduction time to build new segments, with a 4X productivity gain by activating those segments across omnichannel journeys. Real time data activation producing a 79 percent lift for multi-stage campaigns. From simple to complex use cases, the state of data readiness eliminates the traditional bottlenecks that result from a lack of central ownership of data quality.
Part 9: Advance on the Personalization Maturity Curve
The liberation of customer data unlocks true data-driven personalization. But data readiness is not a cookie cutter exercise; a business’s use cases will determine the depth of understanding and the capabilities needed from a customer data technology standpoint. Wherever you are on your personalization journey, incremental steps of improvement are possible with the right customer data technology in place.
Part 10: Liberated Data and the Art of the Possible
What’s next? In a concluding chapter to the series, we will focus on the art of the possible when data readiness becomes the reality. Data readiness for AI, data readiness for paid media, data readiness for a retail media network. Whatever it is your business wants to accomplish, everything becomes possible when your data is accurate, timely, complete and actionable to be able to engage is active, dynamic conversation with customers, members and other stakeholders about any use case – and through any channel.