After years of helping hundreds of enterprise brands use data to serve their customers – brands like Starbucks, Kroger, MGM Resorts, Alaska Airlines, and Dick’s Sporting Goods – we’ve learned a few things about what enterprises want and need.
Enterprise brands want to understand each of their customers. They want to use that knowledge to drive long-term loyalty and business growth. And they want to act with agility in the face of shifting consumer expectations, competition, and market dynamics.
But there are major hurdles they have to overcome to get there. These hurdles are bigger and harder to solve because of the scale and complexity of enterprise brands.
Enterprise brands. Enterprise problems.
The first is fractured identities. Customers engage across a host of online and offline channels, sharing diverse and inconsistent identifiers that are all but impossible to reconcile using legacy approaches, preventing an accurate, unified customer view. This results in major downstream problems: from inaccurate insights and segmentation, to poor personalization and CX. And an over-reliance on 3rd party data to fill identity gaps has proven to be inaccurate, expensive, and, increasingly, poses compliance risk no brand can afford.
The second is siloed, inactionable customer data. The customer data brands need is trapped in siloed systems (loyalty, email, online and offline transactions, digital engagement data, and more) where no one can access it. Brands have resorted to highly manual approaches to unlock this data, but they’re notoriously fragile, time-consuming, and incomplete. Combined with massive scale, high latency, and constantly changing systems and needs, enterprises are spinning their wheels in their quest to build the much-sought-after “single view of the customer”.
The third is a lack of insights connected to actions. Marketers and business users have been starved for customer insights and actionable customer data. They need tools that surface insights and shortcut decisions. They need point-and-click access to their data to build segments, activate omni-channel campaigns, and measure the true ROI of their programs at the customer-level (not the channel level).
The Promise of the CDP?
In an ongoing attempt to overcome these problems, IT, Analytics, and Marketing leaders have been cobbling together a combination of 3rd party data services, data lakes and warehouses, ETL and integration tools, marketing automation tools and more. It’s complex, expensive, and generally doesn't come close to solving their customer data problems.
In comes the Customer Data Platform (CDP). It holds the promise of finally helping brands achieve their customer-centric goals. Unfortunately, most CDPs are mid-market-focused, marketing-only point solutions optimized for one slice of the customer data workflow, not the end-to-end needs of the enterprise. Brands report CDPs choking on their complex, large-scale datasets, being stuck in implementation inferno, or recognizing only a fraction of the ROI and business impact they intended for their CDP project.
Missing Key Capabilities
Analysts and industry observers recognize that most vendors calling themselves CDPs don’t offer everything needed to turn customer data into business results. Joe Stanhope and Stephanie Liu at Forrester write, “CDPs lack crucial capabilities to solve for identity resolution, data hygiene, and cross-channel orchestration.” And according to a recent report by David Raab, founder of the CDP Institute, “Many firms offering a CDP or CDP alternative fail to build the complete, shareable customer database that is the heart of the CDP concept.” It’s not enough for a CDP to solve just one customer data problem — it needs to cover the whole range.
No Change Management
Tony Burne of Real Story Group wrote last year that “I've listened, dumbfounded, during CDP sales demos where the vendor rep pretty much tells you to make all your changes in production.” He’s referring to the fact that no CDP (spoiler alert, no CDP besides Amperity 3.0) offers a robust secondary environment for testing and updates. Having this is critical if you want to change anything about your customer data foundation – like adding new data sources or updating the data model – without shutting down everything that relies on that system. For many brands that means (at minimum!) pausing all marketing communications.
Brand Names Standing In for Functionality
Enterprises might think they can turn to new CDP products from “enterprise” vendors like Adobe and Salesforce, but analysts urge caution. Their CDPs are nascent, “1.0 releases”, according to David Raab in a recent CMSWire article. Raab goes on to say, “‘They’re not terribly mature. The buyers have to look carefully at what's really being delivered today as opposed to what's on the roadmap.’” Today’s brands can’t wait for something that might get built years down the line.
Narrow Focus on Marketers
Lastly, the prevailing definition of CDP is that it’s a marketer-managed, marketing-optimized tool. Marketing needs customer data, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s not marketing’s problem alone to understand customers, transform the business to be more customer-centric, and act systematically to grow revenue and loyalty. These must be goals shared across the entire organization.
That’s why today we’re thrilled to unveil Amperity 3.0, the world’s first truly comprehensive Customer Data Platform built to help enterprises go from having raw, siloed, unusable customer data, to using it at enterprise speed and scale to drive true customer-centric transformation and growth.
Amperity 3.0: the Comprehensive Enterprise CDP
Amperity’s Comprehensive Enterprise Customer Data Platform includes 3 distinct products. These are the culmination of 4 years of experimentation and improvement, harnessing the latest machine learning research and building a truly scalable cloud-native foundation (while earning numerous patents along the way).
AmpID
AI-Powered Customer Identity Resolution & Management: Fully Flexible, Radically Transparent.
AmpID is a complete first-party identity product – with transparency and flexibility that is radical in the identity management category. AI-powered identity resolution creates a stable, universal first-party identity graph and then flexibly tunes it with critical features such as householding, data hygiene, and standardization for full utility across every use case. This graph is the foundation for accurate insights, personalization, and measurement, delivering unmatched results while maintaining privacy compliance. AmpID is driving an average 30% savings versus legacy identity providers and up to 144% improvement in reach from resolving identity on previously siloed, unusable data. Learn more.
Amp360
The Modern Customer 360: Real-Time Access for All to Complete Customer Profiles.
Amp360 is a modern Customer 360 that gives every team across an enterprise real-time access to the customer data they need. Amp360 breaks down silos, expands audiences, and gives teams and systems direct access to holistic customer data, powering use cases from data science, analytics, and marketing, to customer success, finance, and compliance. Brands can access the data directly from the real-time query engine or make it available in every downstream system. Brands are seeing an average of 85% faster time-to-value to add and use new data sources for marketing and analytics, shaving months or even years off of legacy attempts to drive business return on a usable single customer view. Learn more.
AmpIQ
The Hub for Customer Intelligence and Activation.
AmpIQ is a brand new point-and-click marketer hub for customer intelligence and omni-channel activation that drives immediate ROI gains. It has a complete suite of tools, comprising four components: Metrics & KPIs, Customer Insights, Predictions & Segments, and Campaigns & Measurement, representing the integration of technology and expertise from Amperity’s 2019 acquisition of customer intelligence firm, Custora. AmpIQ drives an average of 3x ROI improvements on digital marketing investments. Learn more.
Powered by DataGrid
Fully Connected Customer Data Infrastructure: The Power Grid for Your Customer Data.
Supporting these products is Amperity’s multi-patented DataGrid, the core Customer Data Infrastructure on top of which Amperity products run. Amperity DataGrid is the only solution capable of ingesting, unifying, analyzing, and activating customer data with the performance and agility that enterprise brands require. DataGrid operates at enterprise scale, powering a brand’s full offline and online data sets with up-to-date, real-time signals. This end-to-end product suite of AmpID, Amp360, and AmpIQ built on DataGrid lets brands move from raw data to persistent identities, rich customer profiles, and advanced predictive analytics — making Amperity 3.0 the first and only CDP purpose-built to meet the needs of enterprise consumer brands. Learn more.
Enterprise-Grade Means Smart, Flexible & Powerful
An early customer once said, “You guys are running toward the burning building, not away from it.” From day one, we’ve embraced the complex and messy nature of customer data, and we haven’t backed down from the daunting task of managing massive, ever-changing data with the performance and agility enterprises require.
We stuck with our mission because we knew it would help our customers achieve their visions for customer-centricity, like we heard from Tony Marshall, VP of Analytics, Business Intelligence & Data Science at DICK's Sporting Goods.
“At DICK's, we strive to serve and inspire athletes and outdoor enthusiasts to achieve their best. In partnership with Amperity, we're building a stronger customer data foundation that will enable us to personalize every in-store and digital touchpoint we have with our customers. Being able to combine customer data from our millions of customers across the country, in a comprehensive and unified view, will help inform strategic business decision-making and ultimately provide them with nothing less than the best experiences.”
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Enterprise-grade flexibility: flexibility to use one product or all three, easily adding new capabilities as your needs evolve
Enterprise-scale: processing petabytes of data daily, powered by your cloud of choice, so no data goes unused
Enterprise speed: data ingestion in sub-100ms, querying it in real-time, and pushing it to real-time personalization tools so you can respond at the pace your customers demand
Enterprise-grade transparency & controls: visibility into every aspect of how your data is managed with fine tune controls, so you can customize your foundation and build durable trust in your data
Enterprise-grade identity resolution: patented machine learning and compliant, 1st party data as the foundation for truly accurate, stable identities so your entire business truly knows every customer
Enterprise self-serve change management: a safe, parallel environment to make any changes to your foundation with zero downtime, including adding new data sources or changing data structures, empowering you to keep your data foundation up to date without ever stopping business as usual
Enterprise-grade interoperability: fast, easy, comprehensive ways to get data in from anywhere and out to any system, so you’re never held hostage by a certain product or suite of tools
Enterprise-grade security: the highest standard of security at every level of the product, keeping your most valuable asset safe
Looking Ahead
Just like customer data, the needs of the enterprise change. As new systems come online, as the preferences of consumers shift, as privacy legislation grows ever stricter, enterprises will have new requirements for speed, intelligence, and transparency, and seek out new levels of power, flexibility, and control. And Amperity will be there to innovate and collaborate with you on the next generation of products to meet those demands. That’s our promise to you. Amperity is here to light the way.
If you have enterprise-scale customer data challenges and want to see a demo or learn more, write to us at hello@amperity.com. If you're a current Amperity customer and want to learn more about current or future products, reach out to your Customer Success Manager. Until then, onward.