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A unified customer profile (UCP) allows marketers and organizations to aggregate real-time data across all customer journey touchpoints and channels to create a complete view of the customer. As companies measure customer insights and unify the information, a deeper understanding of the customer is built. Organizations can utilize that information to make better offers and experiences to customers.
But let’s break out of the corporate-speak, and give you an example of a unified customer profile in action.
Picture this: Spring has arrived, and you’re determined to be healthy and active as the weather warms up. As part of this initiative, you’re looking for a new fun way to get your fruits and vegetables in. So, you’ve decided to buy a blender.
The anonymous online journey in the consideration phase
You research and read reviews – should you go traditional, pitcher style, or handheld, single-serve, and portable? After a few weeks of consideration and deliberation, you decided a traditional, pitcher-style blender is worthy of countertop real estate as a daily reminder and motivator of your health goals. It’s also fast, powerful, dishwasher safe, and configurable to other attachments, so you’re not limited in your options for blending.
BEHIND THE SCENES: During your online research phase, you were unknown to the brands you were exploring, but the brand still tracked your anonymous “behavioral” data.
A CDP can collect this data and associate it to an anonymous identifier, which is the start of a unified customer profile. Companies can measure customer insights to understand how and where people enter their website, what they interact with, where they drop off, or when they abandon a cart.
When we measure customer insights we can strategically and effectively improve the online experience for customers.
The power of a unified customer profile is improved CX
You place an order directly from the brand’s website. They offer a 15% off promo for your first purchase when you share your email address. You enter your email address, promptly receive your welcome discount code, and proceed with the order process with standard shipping. Your blender is expected to arrive in a week.
The next day, you get an email notification that your blender has shipped ahead of schedule! Here’s what happens next, and how a unified customer profile can help tie together the customer journey, as well as customer loyalty:
- You open the tracking link provided, which takes you to the brand’s website.
- The site displays a notification that suggests finishing your profile by creating a password and consenting to the terms of service.
- You figure you’ll continue the registration process to make it easier to track the blender’s shipping status.
- You also sign up for text alerts for more immediate shipping updates after you’ve verified you can delete your phone number from the profile or opt-out of texts at any time.
While on the website, you begin browsing portable cups. After putting a package of cups in your online cart, you decide not to purchase any at the moment. You’ll see how you like this new blending lifestyle first.
BEHIND THE SCENES: The brand can use its CDP to associate the first-party, permission-based data with the anonymous data collected previously in the unified customer profile. In addition, the CDP can measure customer insights to empower commerce and marketing platforms with this data to personalize recommendations and tailor your engagements to what is relevant to you.
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Identified and hyper-personalized experiences of a CDP
Despite the early shipping, your blender gets delayed! You call customer service. When the service rep answers, she only asks you if you’re calling about an order in reference to the phone number you used. What a relief! You don’t need to pull up and read out your long order number. The service rep confirms it’ll be two more days until your blender arrives. The rep offers a discount code for the inconvenience.
The discount is promptly emailed. In the email, it displays the portable travel cups you were looking at and mentions they’re available at your local store for pickup but are in limited stock. You decide you’ll place an order for the cups using this new discount code.
BEHIND THE SCENES: Not all organizations can seamlessly identify you between order fulfillment, customer service, abandoned cart, and tailored offers. The CDP pulls data from each interaction across departments and attributes the data to unified customer profiles. It also fuels other customer-facing systems with the latest information to deliver a hyper-personalized experience. The outcome: impressing you enough to gain your loyalty and advocacy despite the disappointing shipping delay.
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CDPs build and manage unified customer profiles and contextual profiles that can differentiate your business, and the outcomes you can expect from this strategy. Take a closer look.
Build loyal customers through unified customer profiles
After the blender arrives, you spend a week blending everything in sight. In your delight with the purchase, you forget all about the delay. When you get an email asking for a review, you gladly share your feedback not only of the blender but also your experience with the company and how customer service was able to promptly and easily address issues. For your kind words, the company offers you another thank you discount offer. You continue to steadily build your collection of blending equipment and supplies with the brand. Being able to measure customer insights gives companies a greater capacity to stay in lockstep with customers on a mutually rewarding journey.
BEHIND THE SCENES: A reliable CDP connects every interaction you had with the brand, which helped build a customer relationship based on trust.
Unified customer profiles: The link between data and seamless experiences
In this example, the customer encountered the company’s commerce, marketing, and service departments. These experiences not only encouraged the customer to continually share more information, but they were able to gradually build trust. The brand gave the customer control over their personal data, which is a key for addressing GDPR, CCPA, and other data privacy regulations.
Thanks to the CDP, the company was able to deliver a seamless experience and proactively resolve issues. It connected all of a customer’s previous interactions and used this data to fuel customer-facing systems with the right context so they could deliver relevant meaningful engagements.
