Company
February 15, 2024
Companies large and small spend a significant amount of time and development resources in getting integrations built. In fact, a report from the CDP Institute surveying marketing leaders found that integration with external systems (53%) tops things like ease of learning and use (51%) or breadth of features (40%) when choosing martech tools. To keep the entire journey connected, businesses need more flexibility and options from their customer data platform (CDP) to quickly build custom “just for me” integrations, automation, and transformations for their unique stack and use cases.
That’s why we were so excited to introduce the general availability of Tealium Functions last year and continue to add new, flexible capabilities. With a neutral platform like Tealium that integrates across so many technologies it’s so important to have multiple options for customization and extensibility.
To get everyone caught up, Tealium Functions is a recent feature release for our Customer Data Hub. In addition to an industry-leading integration marketplace, Tealium Functions gives developers a canvas to leverage JavaScript code in order to quickly build custom solutions and launch new use cases faster by customizing data flows on the way into Tealium or on the way out to integrated systems. This means fewer hoops to jump through for integration, quicker time to value, and ultimately a more extensible and customizable platform.
Looking to get caught up on Tealium Functions before diving into use cases? Watch the video below:
Since launching Tealium Functions we’ve seen incredible customer adoption with, on average, over tens of millions of functions being triggered each day by our customers. As we’ve seen adoption grow, we’ve also heard some incredible use cases from our customers. In this blog, we want to cover a few of the categories of use cases for Tealium Functions that we’ve seen customers have success with.
7 Use Cases for Tealium Functions You Should Know
1) Build Custom Integrations
Your stack works better when it works together. Tealium Functions gives you options to connect to custom destinations or customize integrations to help meet the unique needs of your business.
Example Use Case:
One customer, Alaska Airlines, was able to quickly get a custom integration off the ground with just a few lines of code leveraging Tealium Functions.
“At Alaska Airlines, we’re driving to create personalized travel experiences for every guest,” said Joshua Benard, Product Manager at Alaska Airlines. “In order to do that at scale, we need to supply the right customer data, to the right tools across our stack, at the right time. Tealium’s integration marketplace helped us get started in that effort, but as our use cases advanced we found more need to customize how those integrations were working for us.”
“With Tealium Functions, we’re given a canvas to work with our developers and customize existing integrations within the Tealium integration catalog with some simple JavaScript. In a day, we were able to write some code to customize our integration with a key personalization tool in our stack in order to bring in a broader set of events to inform how we’d deliver the customer experience. Tealium Functions gives us extra flexibility with our customer data infrastructure to bring new, custom ideas to life.”
2) Transform Inbound and/or Outbound Data
Data may not be in its most usable format across technologies, collection sources or to meet the needs of custom endpoints. Tealium Functions helps you apply business logic to your data to ensure that your customer data is usable across custom data environments and multiple digital channels, without the heavy coding that would otherwise be necessary
Example Use Cases:
3) Encryption or Decryption
Make sure you are obfuscating PII in applications and to downstream vendors. If sending PII to display, CRM, or other systems, ensure you are only transacting on encrypted values, not raw text value.
Example use case: Use Tealium Functions to obfuscate sensitive PII data in the platform for regulatory compliance.
4) Connect to External Data Sets
Critical data sets may live outside the Tealium Customer Data Hub that businesses need to leverage during activation. Tealium Functions can help connect to valuable external data sets (CRM, next best action engines, databases, third-party data sets, legacy systems) for the data you need rather than needing to do a file import.
Another customer, Meridian Energy, was able to enrich their first-party data sets by leveraging Tealium to query a high-value third-party data set that lived outside of their system.
“As we’ve grown into our use cases with Tealium, we’ve seen incredible opportunities to leverage more data that lives outside the CDP,” said Jeff Newell, Technology Manager at Meridian Energy. “For instance, there’s a wealth of data that lives outside of our own first-party data that could help enrich our datasets, and personalize a web experience. With Tealium Functions, we are now able to query databases through their third-party APIs to enrich our customers’ web experience. It gave our team more flexibility without added complexity, and we were able to develop, test and stand up this use case in hours rather than weeks.”
Example Use Case: Leverage a function to check an external database for better context before triggering a customer experience. For example, an online gambling website might want to reference a problem gambler database to suppress marketing to certain customers.
5) Multi-Campaign Management
Teams are looking to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks that are roadblocks to high-scale efficiency. Tealium Functions can help teams automate workflows with a few lines of code to better automate workflows (like creating a new campaign), speed time to activation, or even send events to different campaign accounts based on agency or media plan.
Example use case: Leverage a function to match campaignID to the relevant agency and send to the right Facebook campaign. Automate campaign management and power more successful results.
6) API Backfill
This use case is especially handy for the data and analytics professionals out there. Almost every website has some format of survey, customer support or messaging application running on their website. With Tealium Functions, you can write javascript to collect API data from iframe apps like chat, surveys, offers, when that data isn’t available client-side.
Example use case: Use Tealium Functions to bring in conversation data from the Drift API when there is a chat initiated in the session.
7) Manage Debug Events
Are you sick of testing events coming into your analytics? Use Tealium Functions to filter out debug events and send them to internal monitoring tools when doing testing.
Example use case: During debug mode, a custom function checks events and sends them to the debug log for inspection.
We are incredibly excited for our customers to give Tealium Functions a test and start putting their customer data to work easier and faster than ever before. Beyond these 7 uses cases for Tealium Functions, here are some additional resources if you’re ready to dive deeper!
