Picture the experience of returning home to the town where you grew up. Your ritual diner has your order ready before you’ve secured a booth, and buying flowers is a breeze when the local florist keeps a log of every patron’s favorite kind. These connections develop organically from one-on-one interactions over long periods of time.
The challenge: how do you replicate those same, individualized experiences for millions of customers across myriad digital and physical touchpoints? The secret lies in fully harnessing the power of your customer data—beyond adding impersonal, trite mass identifiers like first name or job title to the start of an email, it’s about turning every interaction into an opportunity to build meaningful relationships.
Below, we’ve broken down the infrastructure needed to power personalization at scale and turn the ever-evolving digital landscape into a place “where everybody knows your name.”
Collect Data
This begins with a centralized, comprehensive dataset, including first-party data available across channels, online and offline, as well as historical records that provide valuable context. It may also integrate third-party data or insights from resellers and partners that can offer a more complete picture.
A unified customer view should encompass up-to-date profile details, transaction history, behaviors, and interactions, ensuring you have the insights needed to drive personalized and impactful engagement.
Resolve Identities
Simply put, identity resolution is the cornerstone of reliable customer intelligence. Without it, every downstream action is built on shaky ground. By unifying transactions, visits, support interactions, and engagement history under a single customer profile, businesses can ensure every insight and decision is based on a complete and accurate picture.
Otherwise, data becomes fragmented, leading to inconsistencies that weaken personalization, analytics, and customer experience.
Create Profiles
A fully unified Customer 360 profile serves as the single source of truth for your brand, fueling everything from analytics and marketing to customer support and finance. This holistic view ensures every team has access to accurate, up-to-date customer data for smarter decision making and better experiences.
As customer behaviors and business needs evolve, a flexible Customer 360 is imperative for seamless integration of new data sources and attributes. It should also support views tailored to specific roles or departments so that each team gets the insights they need to drive impact.
Insights & Predictions
Effective customer engagement relies on two critical components: the insights drawn from raw customer data and the predictive power of AI and machine learning. By analyzing behaviors on both the individual and segment level, such as brand interactions, channel preferences, product interests, and spending patterns, businesses can uncover valuable trends.
AI takes it a step further, extrapolating on historical data to anticipate actions and make recommendations. Together, they help identify opportunities to enhance campaign performance, boost engagement, and maximize customer lifetime value.
Segment Audiences
This sees organizing customer profiles into meaningful audiences—such as first-time buyers, high-value customers, at-risk churners, or loyalty program members—and making them accessible through both SQL queries and an intuitive visual interface.
A seamless segmentation approach also requires strong integrations with the brand’s other systems, like marketing clouds and data warehouses.
Orchestrate Data
Brands must seamlessly connect customer data to all downstream systems—from analytics and engagement platforms to business operations and insights tools. A truly effective orchestration strategy is vendor- and channel-agnostic, so that it’s flexible as business needs and technologies evolve. This prevents data from being locked in walled gardens, allowing brands to adopt best-of-breed solutions without limitations.
Test & Measure
In order for brands to stay agile and customer centric, their data systems must enable fast measurement, learning, and iteration. This starts with real-time ingestion of customer engagements and interactions, guaranteeing up-to-date insights into business and customer health.
With immediate access to campaign performance and behavioral trends, teams can quickly identify what’s working, refine their strategies, and optimize for better outcomes. A data-driven approach powered by real-time insights keeps brands ahead of the curve and makes for more impactful customer experiences.
Final Thoughts
To bring it all together, brands need a technology ecosystem that seamlessly integrates these seven key capabilities. Whether through a comprehensive Customer Data Cloud (CDC) or a combination of other specialized tools, the right approach depends on each brand’s unique needs.
Flexibility is essential—solutions must meet brands where they are, ensuring interoperability across systems for data collection, identity resolution, segmentation, and orchestration. Ultimately, the ability to plug into and enhance existing technologies is what empowers brands to create dynamic, data-driven experiences that evolve in lockstep with their customers.
Curious to see how this played out for Alaska Airlines? For all that and more, check out our expert guide to Personalization at Scale.