This post is by guest author Rich Sobel, Founder and CEO, Marcato Solutions
If you ask any business, one of the most consistent challenges is merging and reconciling data to achieve a better understanding of the customer. With the growth of digital interactions there’s been an explosion in the volume and variety of data types and touchpoints. Bringing these new and often less structured data sets together, along with more traditional customer relationship and transaction data, is a challenge that will only compound as the pace of innovation accelerates.
Customer data has always been large and burdensome to consolidate, store, manage, and leverage for marketing, product development, and customer experiences. Traditionally, large-scale CRMs were able to meet most customer data management needs, and large services business were built to support the gaps and workflow challenges that the enterprise platforms struggled to address. Now, however, we are at a point in the evolution of the marketplace where those traditional approaches need to change. Consumer expectations for relevant and seamless experiences combined with the increasing complexity of data and systems necessitates a more complete, flexible, and modern solution.
As I work with marketers across categories, my consulting practice is consistently focused on helping companies upgrade their approach to managing and applying customer data. When looking to build a true view of the customer that ties together disparate customer identities, customer transactions, and the potential for engaging them, Amperity’s unique technology can play an integral role. Based on my experience, the platform’s flexible and modern approach to customer data unification and management addresses the fundamental challenge of understanding who the customer is and how best to market to them, even as systems and use cases change over time.
Recently, Forrester published their patented Total Economic Impact™ analysis featuring Amperity. The report shows that by applying Amperity’s technology to improve data management efficiencies and unification capabilities, clients are seeing some surprisingly strong results. A 993% ROI is, frankly, unusual.
As we took a closer look, however, the numbers fall into place. Customer data management is increasingly challenging. This means companies continue to lack a holistic and integrated customer view, preventing them from delivering on the experiences consumers want. Forrester’s ROI analysis may seem surprisingly high, but as you think about applying consolidated customer data for better targeting, better personalization, better acquisition, better experiences, and better product development, among other use cases, these figures are a logical conclusion. The question then is, what’s different about Amperity’s approach that makes it so effective?
Raw Ingestion, Machine Intelligence, and Cloud-Scale
Amperity provides a unique set of cutting-edge methodologies to address the challenge of building a consistently complete and unified customer view.
First, Amperity’s raw, at-scale ingestion and platform-driven data prep and manipulation make getting started extremely easy. With no necessary master schema or standard ETL obligations, Amperity can rapidly setup data integrations and flexibly adapt to new data sets with speed and dexterity. Large data sets, including historical data, are quickly processed, supported by some major investments in the platform’s scalable infrastructure. With this approach, implementation time is reduced and the effort of an internal IT organization to work on data integrations is significantly minimized. This also means little-to-no maintenance by client’s own technical teams, freeing them to focus on customer-facing technologies instead of on re-engineering ETLs.
Next, leveraging a machine-learning and AI-based approach to data assembly and stitching, Amperity blends both deterministic and probabilistic data matching techniques to accurately unify the customer record, supplying countless machine-derived matching variations. Machine learning takes the place of static business rules, increasing speed, accuracy, and flexibility in both the short and long term. The stitch process brings together all available data sources to present a truly complete view of the customer that becomes more, not less, accurate over time.
Quantifying the Value
Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™ analysis outlines benefits along two primary dimensions for companies leveraging the Amperity platform.
On the operational side, Forrester found that Amperity’s flexible ingestion and integration methods led to 85% faster integration and an 80% productivity improvement for ongoing customer data management. One client said, “With the new platform, [integrating a new source] can take around a couple of weeks. I think that’s one of the benefits of Amperity, the process brings things to life much faster.”
The marketing impact from better, more unified customer data is even more compelling. Clients saw a 5% ROAS increase, a 15% increase in revenue-per-email, and a 190% increase in loyalty registration. By putting more impactful data into the hands of marketers, these results are just the beginning of improving the ROI of marketing. One Amperity client said, “Beforehand, you had a limited number of folks who had access to use that rich data in meaningful ways because they didn’t just have the skill set, it was too hard to do.”
Ultimately, all of these numbers ladder up to a better understanding of the customer. The 993% ROI points to the power of a platform with a new and modernized approach to customer data management, designed for the speed, scale, flexibility, and completeness required for today’s marketing use cases – all in service of building a consistently comprehensive and connected view of the customer.
The results outlined in Forrester’s report are exactly the types of improvements my clients are looking to see, and with Amperity driving this scale of impact for their clients, I am expecting to see even more adoption over the next few years.
Don’t just take my word for it, please take a few minutes to read the Forrester report here.
Guest author Rich Sobel is a digital thought leader with extensive experience driving growth and business improvements by developing strategic vision and leveraging tactical execution, and is the Founder and CEO of Marcato Solutions.