For the retail industry, real-time customer experiences are becoming essential to ensure potential buyer’s needs are met. Companies that can deliver relevant and trusted experiences perform better, which is why many retailers are trying to level up their CX strategy. Our recent survey, 2022 State of the CDP Report, supports this sentiment. The report highlights companies are investing in Customer Data Platforms, or CDPs, to help deliver and scale Cx because they can help collect, unify, and deliver data in real-time. Three of the top four priorities respondents said became more important this past year were creating more personalized communication with customers (cited by 54%), acquiring new customers more quickly (53%), and presenting a more unified customer experience across channels (51%).
Why does data collection and activation in real-time matter?
Let’s consider this example: A customer of a major clothing retailer is a registered customer through the website with a trail of data in their wake – what they have viewed online, what they’ve purchased through the app versus the website, what they’ve purchased in store (and are those different than online purchases?), where they shop and how often, social media posts they have engaged with, and on and on. Now, if each of these data points are viewed in silos, the customer experience can become unpleasant. That’s because – while there are many ways for a customer to engage with this retailer – to the customer, all of these ways are one comprehensive experience.
Real Time Customer Experience: Not Just Supporting the Good, But Preventing the Bad CX
Using a CDP to create good customer experiences is as important as using the CDP to prevent bad customer experiences. Evident from the examples listed above, having disjointed, siloed, incomplete, or unactivated customer data will not only cause retailers to lose out on many advantages, but will also create a dissatisfied customer.
Regardless of whether your company is utilizing a CDP to enhance the customer experience, many of your competitors are, which is creating the precedent for a highly personalized interaction with retailers.
According to Emplifi’s recent report, 11 Key Things Consumers Expect From Their Brand Experiences Today, 17% of customers will always or usually abandon their shopping cart due to a bad customer experience and 39% of customers sometimes will – meaning as much as a 56% loss in revenue. On the flip side, 61% of customers said they would pay 5% more for a great customer experience. Clearly there is a great financial motivation to invest in a positive customer experience – and these days that means cross-channel, comprehensive real-time customer experiences made possible by a single view of the customer.
Real Time Customer Experience: The Perfect Union of Privacy and Personalization
The other side of a data driven and activated customer experience is the need to protect customer data and respect data privacy demands. As privacy regulations continue to expand and the customers’ expectations over data privacy expand with it, how companies go about creating that personalized CX.
For many marketers in retail, they are starting to focus on maintaining and growing performance as they face third-party cookie loss and stricter privacy regulations. This is forcing retailers to rethink how they collect, use, secure and share customer data. A CDP provides a secure, data privacy friendly method for managing customer data, since the CDP has to also build their platform to abide by these regulations. Therefore, CDP customers get the byproduct of data privacy and security, as well as more streamlined processes for removing customer data as needed. Ultimately, a company’s data privacy practices factor into the overall customer experience. In our 2022 State of the CDP Report, better protection for customer data privacy as a top priority (59%) by all respondents. And in the retail industry, specifically, retail executives also cited changes to privacy consent management regulations and the challenges of managing customer identity as selection factors to a much higher degree than their peers in other industries.
Today, where you get your data matters. First-party data will play an important role in modern data strategies. It is important to plot the right strategy to keep your data secure and your customers happy through real time customer experiences.
For more information on the role that CDPs are playing in marketing strategies, including in retail specifically, download our 2022 State of the CDP Report.
