Tealium and Databricks: Providing Real-Time Insights and AI-Driven Customer Experiences

This article was originally published on November 26th, 2024 by Databricks. Find the original article here.

In today’s rapidly changing digital world, consumer data protection and privacy regulations are reshaping how businesses interact with their customers. These changes can create hurdles for brands that want to leverage real-time intelligence for personalized customer experiences.

Tealium’s real-time streaming Customer Data Platform (CDP) is designed to collect, enrich, and activate customer data across both digital and offline channels. By capturing interactions from websites, apps, IoT devices, and more, Tealium unifies this data into a comprehensive customer profile, ensuring that each interaction is personalized and impactful. 

Tealium’s agnostic data collection and real-time enrichment give clients access to comprehensive customer insights. Thanks to integrated AI models, Tealium can deliver personalized marketing and customer engagement in real-time, so brands can better predict customer needs and refine interactions with precision.

Databricks provides an open, end-to-end collaborative environment where engineers, analysts, and data scientists can process vast volumes of data, perform deep analyses, and easily build sophisticated models that scale efficiently. Tealium uses the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to power elements of their CDP- delivering centralized security, ensuring data privacy is uniformly enforced, and facilitating data access and democratization. The Databricks Platform delivers multiple benefits including: 

• TCO: Reduce the need for multiple data warehouses, eliminating data silos and resources managing environments, resulting in efficient data and AI implementations.
• Simplicity:  A single end-to-end platform based on open source, allowing for seamlessly integrating real-time data collection with advanced analytics and machine learning.
• Performance: Complex data processing and AI model-building tasks with ease, facilitating immediate, personalized interactions.
• Scalability: Databricks Apache Spark’s unified analytics engine manages large data volumes and ensures seamless scalability for future data and AI needs.
• Compliance and Trust: Databricks Unity Catalog supports Tealium’s privacy-first approach and helps maintain data security and regulatory compliance.

“Databricks provides Tealium with a robust, scalable, reliable and comprehensive data platform that is ideal for our data engineering, analytics and AI/ML needs. Leveraging Databricks allows Tealium to accelerate the development of innovative solutions that are suited for the needs of our customer base.” – Frank Federici, VP of Technology, Tealium

For brands that want to enable a real-time customer engagement workflow leveraging Tealium and Databricks, the following is a useful overview of best practices:

1. Develop a Data Collection Plan. Craft a strategy to capture and manage data across all customer touchpoints. Prioritize privacy by ensuring consent-based data collection and real-time identity resolution.
2. Optimize Data Quality. Use Tealium to cleanse, standardize, and enrich real-time data, ensuring high-quality and consistent datasets for effective downstream processing.
3. Unify Data Assets. Utilize Databricks Unity Catalog for a unified view of data assets, enhancing secure data sharing, lineage, governance, and analysis.
4. Enhance Customer Profiles. Create enriched, unified customer profiles with Tealium by integrating diverse data points like demographics and behavior.
5. Empower AI/ML Initiatives. Tealium for AI makes sure that first-party customer data is collected with consent, then organized, labeled, transformed, enriched, and made AI-ready for integration with Databricks Mosaic AI.
6. Activate Real-Time AI Insights. Once data is ready, deploy AI models via Databricks and use Tealium for real-time data activation, ensuring personalized customer interactions. Tealium makes it easy to enhance customer experiences while providing an auditable and governed data trail

As a leader in the CDP space, Tealium continues to expand their AI initiatives with Databricks Mosaic AI which provides unified tooling to build, deploy, evaluate and govern AI and ML solutions — from building predictive ML models to deploying the latest GenAI apps. Tealium’s Chief Product Officer – Bob Page stated that, “Many AI initiatives are moving slowly because teams cannot access consented and accurate data for model training. Our new solutions start with consented data to deliver in-the-moment experiences and inform AI and machine learning models – so it can be acted on.” 

Tealium’s new compliance-backed solutions provide a single platform to manage customer data processes at scale with safeguards. The new features include Tealium for AI which equips teams with consented, filtered, and enriched data in real-time for AI models and data activation. Additionally, Tealium Moments is a combination of features that collect, process, and activate customer data in real-time and leverage zero-party and first-party data to own the moments that matter. 

Together, Tealium and Databricks offer a transformative solution for brands seeking to deliver exceptional, real-time customer experiences while prioritizing security and privacy. By leveraging these platforms, brands can unlock the full potential of their data, driving growth and customer satisfaction in an ever-evolving digital landscape.