Customer 360 FD Informatica Special Edition

These materials are © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.

Customer 360
Informatica Special Edition
by Stephanie Diamond
These materials are © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
Customer 360 For Dummies®, Informatica Special Edition
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION................................................................................................ 1
About This Book.................................................................................... 1
Icons Used in This Book........................................................................ 2
Beyond the Book................................................................................... 2
CHAPTER 1: Introducing a Great Customer Experience.............. 5

Creating a Great Customer Experience.............................................. 6
Recognizing changes that impact the customer experience...... 6
Reaping the benefits of a great customer experience................ 8
Looking at the elements of a great customer experience.......... 9
Recognizing why you need it........................................................ 11
Impacting the Customer Experience with Great Data.................... 11
CHAPTER 2: Rethinking Your Customer Data.................................... 15

Creating a Data Strategy to Support Your Marketing
Strategy................................................................................................. 16
Bad data is killing your marketing results................................... 16
Facing data challenges.................................................................. 17
Dodging Data Strategy Mistakes....................................................... 19
An Intelligent 360 View Is Possible.................................................... 21
CHAPTER 3: Looking at Successful Marketers................................... 23

Using Great Data to Transform with the Digital Economy............. 24
Powering Digital Transformation with Intelligent Data.................. 25
Using Big Data Analytics for Better Marketing Campaigns............ 25
Streamlining a 360-Degree View across Lines of Business............ 26
Using a Data Lake to Gain Predictive Insights................................. 27
CHAPTER 4: Creating an Intelligent Customer 360 View.......... 31

Recognizing the Value of an Intelligent Customer 360 View.......... 31
Managing Your Data for Success....................................................... 35
The Seven Elements of an Intelligent Customer 360 View............. 37
The Eight Steps of an Intelligent Customer 360 View..................... 39
Table of Contents iii
CHAPTER 5: Getting on the Road to Success...................................... 47
Building a Business Case for Your Success...................................... 47
Understanding what executives want to know.......................... 48
Aligning to the corporate vision................................................... 50
Analyzing your findings................................................................. 50
Getting Buy-In for Your Proposal...................................................... 51
Maximizing Your ROMI....................................................................... 52
CHAPTER 6: Sorting the Options for Managing Your Data...... 53

The Data Management Platform....................................................... 54
Supporting data-driven online advertising................................. 55
DMPs are designed for digital advertising.................................. 56
Looking at the CDP.............................................................................. 57
The marketing agility of a CDP..................................................... 60
Introducing a Next-Generation CDP................................................. 61
The Marketing Data Lake (MDL)........................................................ 64
Managing the data in your MDL................................................... 64
Looking at the benefits of an MDL for Marketing...................... 68
CHAPTER 7: Ten Principles for an Intelligent Customer

360 View............................................................................................. 69
Manage Your Data as a Strategic Asset............................................ 69
Put Together Your Strongest Data and Operations Team............. 70
Bring Your Data Together in One Place............................................ 70
Connect the Dots So Your Data Is Trusted....................................... 70
Focus on Your Operational Levers.................................................... 71
Test, Measure, Optimize..................................................................... 71
Build an Environment Based on Growth and Speed...................... 71
Create a Data Culture......................................................................... 72
Include Self-Service Capabilities........................................................ 72
Partner with Your CIO and CDO........................................................ 72
iv Customer 360 For Dummies, Informatica Special Edition
Introduction
D
id you know that approximately 300 billion emails are sent
every day and that about half of all email traffic is consid-
ered spam? Sending your customers information that they
don’t want or can’t use isn’t the way to build a meaningful rela-
tionship. Customers won’t waste their time with companies that
don’t know them or what products they own, or that don’t under-
stand their preferences.
It takes a series of great customer experiences, both online and

offline, to build meaningful relationships with your customers,
but it isn’t easy to create great customer experiences.
Marketers need data to understand their customers fully, but

often, they can’t access the right data when they need it to drive
a campaign or to engage with customers across the touch points
that make up the end-to-end customer journey. That’s why cus-
tomers get messages like this daily:
»» An offer for an item that was purchased from that same

company the day or week before
»» An offer that has no relevance to who they are, their needs,
or their interests
»» Duplicate offers with their names slightly misspelled
»» “You’ve earned it” messages for items they didn’t buy or
rewards they haven’t earned
To avoid these missteps, step up your game. Offer your custom-

ers a great customer experience to stand out, and great customer
experiences start with great data. But great data doesn’t happen
by accident. Now, more than ever, marketers need to strategically
manage their data.
About This Book

Welcome to Customer 360 For Dummies, Informatica Special
Edition. This book explains the concepts marketers need to know
to manage and use data as the strategic asset it is.
Introduction 1
With data that’s clean, trusted, and enriched, you can create the
right offers at the right time for the right customers. If you’re
dealing with data that you can’t trust, that can’t deliver a defini-
tive customer profile — data that’s incomplete, inaccurate, rife
with duplicates, and includes outdated information — this book
helps you get on the road to create data that leads to successful,
intelligent engagement.
Icons Used in This Book

Throughout this book are special icons that alert you to important
information. Here’s what to expect:
This icon highlights information that’s important to know. Tip

information can help you do things quicker or easier.
This icon calls out information that’s helpful to remember.
Information contained here points out struggles you want to

avoid in creating great customer experiences.
If you like to know the technical details, watch out for this icon. It
provides you with specialized technical knowledge.
Beyond the Book

Discover more information on customer 360 and delivering a
great customer experience with these resources:
»» “Seven Steps Closer to Intelligent Customer

Engagement”: Data management strategies for authentic
customer experiences at www.informatica.com/CXebook
»» “Workbook: The Cost of Bad Contact Data”: Practical
exercises to help you build your business case for contact
data verification at https://infa.media/WBCBCD.
2 Customer 360 For Dummies, Informatica Special Edition
»» “The Ultimate Guide for Customer Data Management”:
A practical guide to mapping out the foundations for a
customer 360 view at www.informatica.com/CXworkbook
»» “Intelligent Disruptors”: Meeting experts behind customer
360 initiatives that transform how their companies engage
with customers at www.informatica.com/CXdisruptors
»» “A CDO’s Guide to Customer Intelligence”: Learning how
CDOs can position customer intelligence initiatives for
success at https://infa.media/HVA3662LP
Introduction 3
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Understanding the elements of a great
customer experience
»» Using great data to impact the customer

experience
Chapter 1
Introducing a Great
Customer Experience
T
he battle cry, “We need a great customer experience,” is on
the lips of the savviest marketers. If you don’t deliver a
great customer experience, you may lose the war for loyal
customers. Your customers have raised their expectations. With
every interaction, they form an opinion that dictates how, when,
and if they do business with you again. And their opinions can
shape the buying decisions of people they know and don’t know.
Like it or not, the nearest competitor is as close as a Google search.
That makes delivering a great customer experience imperative.
To deliver great customer experiences that inspire return visits

and positive reviews, you need to use all the valuable customer
data you have to create personal, relevant, and seamless inter-
actions across the end-to-end customer journey. But if your
customer data is stuck in isolated applications, spreadsheets, or
other silos that are line-of-business-, department-, or region-
specific, you may never be able to use it to achieve your goals. In
this chapter, you look at what it means to develop your own great
customer experiences so you can be at the forefront of leading the
customer experience charge within your business.
CHAPTER 1 Introducing a Great Customer Experience 5
Creating a Great Customer
Experience
Welcome to the new world. It’s digital, mobile, and social. It
continues to change and disrupt the way people do business and
impact their expectations about things like marketing, sales, and
customer service. As a marketer, you need to be able to satisfy your
customers by using your data to understand them better and to
engage with them more authentically. You need to identify whom
to market to, when to send an offer, and what the most relevant
content would be for your audience. The principles of marketing
haven’t changed. What has changed is the increased complexity
you have to deal with and the laser-like precision you need to
market effectively. In fact, experts often tout that for many com-
panies and industries the main market differentiator is customer
experience instead of brand or price.
Recognizing changes that impact

the customer experience
Digital, mobile, and social trends have impacted the customer
experience. These trends include the following:
»» Always-connected consumers: Consumers have come to

expect a personal, relevant, and seamless experience across
the end-to-end customer journey. They want to engage with
you on any device, anywhere, and at any time. They want to
switch channels easily and have a consistent and continuous
experience when talking to a person in your call center, web
chat, or during a face-to-face interaction. They expect to be
consistently recognized as individuals and rewarded for their
patronage.
Companies such as Uber and Amazon have raised the bar
for customer experience. For example, Uber has made it
super easy to get from point A to point B. You use its mobile
app to hail a car that arrives within minutes, hop in the car at
the exact location you choose, and hop out without spending
time on the payment process. Uber offers a convenient,
frictionless, and seamless experience.
Amazon makes accurate recommendations about products
customers might enjoy. It does this based on deep knowl-
edge of your browsing habits and the choices of similar
customers. Then with one click, you can have that product
delivered to your door within 24 hours. Amazon offers a
convenient, frictionless, and seamless experience.
These superior levels of service are only possible because
these companies rely on data they trust to deliver a great
customer experience. Your customers now expect you to
do the same. But without accurate, current, and complete
customer data, you’ll continue to struggle.
»» More and more channels and devices: With the onslaught
of more channels and devices, your world and the data that
drives it just became more complex. Customers want to do
business with your company from whatever channel or
device is most convenient to them at the time. You may think
that you’re providing customers an omnichannel experience
(a seamless experience no matter which channel they’re on),
when in reality you’re providing a multi-channel experience
(a different experience based on the channel they’re on).
What’s the difference between omnichannel and multi-
channel? Think about it. Customers jump from one channel
to another, from different locations, and on different
devices. They expect their experiences to be connected ones.
They don’t care how complicated it might be for you to
coordinate across your marketing, sales, and customer
service teams. If you present different messages on your
website, on your mobile app, in an email, and during a
discussion with your call center or salesperson, you aren’t
providing a unified experience. Managing content and
messaging across these channel silos is complex. You need
to make sure your customers have a personal, relevant, and
seamless experience that ties all their activities together. You
may view channels and devices as independent interaction
points, but customers expect a seamless experience
delivered by a single company. Everything must be inte-
grated. Everything must be connected.
»» More and more applications: As you well know, there’s no
shortage of operational and analytical applications promis-
ing to solve your marketing problems. These apps include
customer relationship management (CRM) systems,
advanced analytics, marketing automation and applications,
campaign management software, and data management
platforms (DMPs). Each one sounds like the right answer. But
is it? Do they work together to help you reach your market-
ing goals? Can these applications provide you with the rich,
contextual data you need from across your company? Do
you trust the data to help you market more effectively,
maximize returns on your marketing investments (ROMI),
and boost customer experience metrics, such as Net
Promoter Score (NPS), Lifetime Value (LTV), or Customer
Satisfaction (CSAT)? Are you leaving the responsibility of your
data to your agency? These are important questions. The
more applications a marketer uses, the more important it is
to automate managing your data so you’re not wasting time
and money manually merging, managing, and cleaning your
data within each system.
»» More and more data: The good news is that the data you
need to deliver a great customer experience is available to
you. The bad news is that the amount and complexity of
data grow every single day. Not only are you collecting data
about what your customers share on social media channels,
but also you’re collecting data from sensors in equipment
and wearables. All this data helps you get richer insights into
customer behavior and preferences. To reach your goals,
you need to harness data from each of these valuable data
sources and connect them to your trusted customer profile.
Only then can you gain a clearer understanding of your
customers, their needs, and how you can serve them better.
Reaping the benefits of a great

customer experience
Providing a great customer experience rewards companies with
happier customers and the following meaningful benefits:
»» Customer loyalty and trust: Every company strives to gain

its customers’ trust because that often results in more
revenue. But with new brands constantly popping up online,
earning brand loyalty becomes extremely important — and
difficult. When loyal customers plan to make a purchase,
you’re the first brand they consider, and maybe the only one.
A loyal customer may become a brand advocate, which is the
best salesperson a company can have. A loyal customer
shares her opinions about the brand with friends and
followers and can influence brand perception far beyond the
boundaries of her own circle. Using your data to demon-
strate that you understand your customers’ needs and can
serve them is the key to building customer loyalty.
»» Less customer churn: It’s long been accepted that it costs
more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing
one. Customer churn refers to the loss of customers who join
a service and then leave. Churn typically happens because
the customer had a disappointing experience, or a new
competitor enticed the customer to switch, or the customer’s
needs were no longer met. Using your data to detect the
signals of a potential churn candidate is the key to reducing
customer churn, which can have a significant impact on a
company’s bottom line.
»» Increased Share of Wallet (SOW): Customers vote with
their wallets. SOW is the amount of money a customer
spends with a specific brand in a given category. To help you
grow SOW, use your data to get visibility into which products
your customers currently own, to understand their needs,
and to make the next best offer or the next best experience.
According to Forbes Insights, data-driven marketers are six times

more likely to obtain higher profits than those marketers who use
more traditional methods.
Looking at the elements of a great

customer experience
So what goes into the making of a great customer experience?
Customers’ expectations are exceedingly high. They expect com-
panies to deliver exactly what they want in a way that delights
them. They expect a personal, relevant, and seamless experience.
If they’re misunderstood, inconvenienced, or treated generically,
they’re gone.
To avoid driving your customers away, you truly need to know

their wants, needs, desires, and intents. You need to dig deep into
your data to expose the relationships your customers have with
the people, places, and things that matter most to your business.
Only then will you be able to make predictions about how best to
serve them.
Take a step back for a moment and look at the average customer
experience. Most company employees want to provide the best
customer experience they can. But their performance is only as
good as the data available to guide the next best action. Messy,
incomplete, siloed data holds them back from delivering the best
experience possible.
Think about how you feel when someone in a call center can’t
locate your customer profile, determine your last purchase, or
find the status of your order. Chances are the customer service
rep doesn’t have all the information he needs in one place. The
rep jumps from system to system trying to piece together the
information he needs. The information in these siloed systems
isn’t always consistent, which makes it harder for the rep to do
his job. The company missed the opportunity to transform your
interaction into a great experience because the person you were
working with didn’t have access to the data he needed to do his
job effectively.
Why is this a common problem? Tactical or isolated attempts to

improve the quality of data just don’t work. One of the methods
people use to try to solve their data problem is to add more appli-
cations. These applications are designed to automate a process.
They aren’t designed to strategically manage and fix poor quality
data. Instead, more applications fragment your data even further.
They don’t connect the dots for you. They don’t give you the vis-
ibility you need into the end-to-end customer journey.
Another method is to try to fix the data manually. Marketing

teams often rely on spreadsheets to pull together the data they
need, and then they spend a ton of time trying to correct it. This
inefficient approach drains the productivity and morale of your
team. It’s also not a permanent solution. When they need the data
again, they have to start from scratch and fix it all over again.
A third method is to correct the data once a year, spending money

annually to update, fill in missing information, and correct the
data with an outside party. I’m sure you see the problem with
that. Data is ever-changing, so there’s no way a one-time fix
would solve any data problem.
The true solution involves automating the process of finding,
fixing, managing, and improving the quality of your data on an
ongoing basis and then delivering it to the right applications and
analytics to ensure a great customer experience.
Do you understand your buyer’s end-to-end journey? When you

know the roads your customers travel to learn about and buy your
products, you can supply them with the best product information
and offers along that path. You can’t do this effectively if you have
poor quality customer or product data. With all the advantages
that great data brings with it, it’s short-sighted not to get serious
about making your data the best it can be.
Recognizing why you need it

Some marketers overlook the importance of great data when
transforming the customer experience. When they think about
the customer experience, they think of things like easy website
navigation or first call resolution. They don’t think about how
clean, protected, consistent, and actionable data can improve all
customer interactions.
In order to display easy website navigation, you have to know

what the customer is looking for to ensure that the first click
takes him to the information he really wants. Likewise, first call
resolution is only possible when the support tech can quickly see
the customer profile and history from a central location rather
than having to look across five or more different applications to
help the customer. And think about the times when Marketing
shouldn’t send an offer: if that customer already has that prod-
uct, has unpaid bills, or is in heated discussions with Customer
Service.
Impacting the Customer Experience

with Great Data
Informatica believes that great customer experiences start with
great customer data. Table 1-1 shows you how managing your
data effectively leads to great customer experiences.
TABLE 1-1 How Great Data Impacts the Customer
Experience
Great Data Great Customer Experience
Segmentation Identify opportunities to cross-sell, upsell, or acquire a

customer, based on his prior history, interactions,
relationships, and inferred characteristics.
A trusted customer profile enriched with demographics,

psychographics, buying behavior, preferences, and other
insights empowers you to group similar customers into
actionable segments. For instance, knowing which
customers are homeowners versus renters helps with
sending the right offer.
Personalization Increase lead conversions by personalizing your

marketing offers.
When your trusted customer profile is combined with

accurate, rich, and easily searchable product information,
you can deliver the exact right offer at the right time at an
individual level. If you’re selling shirts and know I like floral
patterns, perhaps you can show me a picture of a shirt
with flowers in my emails or embedded ads, instead of a
solid colored one.
Relationships Improve your marketing results by bringing your

customers’ relationships to light.
After you have a trusted customer profile, you can link

the relationships between people and people, people
and places, and people and things. Maybe you want to
know which customers have kids or pets, the store
locations where they shop, or the make or model of
cars they drive.
Marketing analytics Maximize your ROMI by understanding why customers

buy and the marketing activities that influenced their
buying decisions.
A trusted customer profile that’s connected to the

marketing activities and offers that lead to a purchase
empowers you to replicate your success across similar
customer segments. Let’s say you want to identify what
distinguishes your best customers and then find prospects
fitting the same profile.
NEXT BEST EXPERIENCE POWERED
BY GREAT DATA
Great data also helps you better understand and predict your cus-
tomer’s behavior and in turn identify the next best offer, action, or
interaction. A June 2018 Forbes article, “Customer Experience is the
New Brand,” pointed out that 89 percent of companies compete pri-
marily on the basis of customer experience — a significant increase
from 2010, when just 36 percent of companies were focused on it.
Executives who invest in a strong data foundation to power customer
analytics and predictive insights can
• Create micro-segments of customers for highly targeted

campaigns
• Deliver more relevant cross-sell/upsell offers
• Identify and resolve friction points in the customer journey
• Personalize every interaction and create consistency across
multiple channels
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Designing a data strategy for your
business
»» Sidestepping data strategy missteps
»» Expanding your view of the customer
Chapter 2
Rethinking Your
Customer Data
P
lain and simple — everywhere you turn, you see a survey
about how marketers are becoming more data-driven. The
CMO’s technology budget is now the single largest area of
investment when it comes to marketing resources and programs.
Marketers are adding applications, applying scientific techniques,
and gaining more insights into their customers through
technology.
But the approach to managing marketing data is still siloed across

agencies, applications, and analytics. None of these practices are
effective for driving a great customer experience. There’s no way
you can ignore your data and be successful. With the growing
mountains of data from every interaction, you need to start pay-
ing more attention to your data sooner rather than later.
In this chapter, you look at data strategy missteps that explain

why a customer 360 view seems impossible and what you can do
to rethink your customer data.
CHAPTER 2 Rethinking Your Customer Data 15
Creating a Data Strategy to Support
Your Marketing Strategy
The key to getting comfortable with your data is to realize that it
reflects all the things your customers are telling you. That’s defi-
nitely something you should be interested in. More importantly,
your data can tell you things such as who’s likely to buy after
reading your content. That’s powerful.
Bad data is killing your

marketing results
If you want to use great customer data, you need to rethink how
you’re currently managing your data. You may not even realize
how bad your data really is. Ask yourself the following questions:
»» What does great data look like for our marketing strategy?
• Do we have all the customer and product data we need
to be effective? If not, what’s missing?
• What kind of revenue impact could we have if we had

access to this data?
• Which internal and external sources might contain the

data we need?
»» What is the current state of our data?
• How accurate is our customer and product data?
• What percentage of the fields in our customer and
product profiles are incomplete?
• What percentage of our profiles are duplicates?

• What percentage of our phone numbers, emails, and
mailing addresses are invalid?
• How consistent is our customer and product data across

systems?
»» How are we currently managing our data?
• How many people are reconciling data in spreadsheets?

• Are we cleaning our data manually? How often do we
do this?
• Are we verifying contact information? Are our bounce

rates and returned mail costs high?
»» Are we enriching customer data to get better segmentation,
personalization, and recommendations?
»» Are we protecting customer data to comply with privacy
regulations?
»» Do we understand our customers’ preferences and consents
and linking those to how their data is used?
»» How are we measuring risk?
»» Who in our organization may be able to help solve our data
challenges (data management, information management, or
Chief Data Officer [CDO], for example)?
• What new data sources would we like to use in the

future?
• How much is bad data costing our business?
Facing data challenges

Most companies face major data issues. This section gives you
some specific challenges that the average marketer faces. See if
your challenges are listed here:
»» Working with inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent

customer profiles or product information
»» Integrating data that’s fragmented across your own depart-
ment in dozens of marketing apps and systems
»» Integrating transaction data from other departments or
channels that’s locked up in systems and legacy data silos
»» Integrating interaction data from other departments or
channels, including third parties and agencies
»» Lacking data standards and dealing with multiple data
formats that must be made usable
»» Interpreting or gaining meaning from all data for next best
action recommendations based on sentiment or behavior
»» Integrating new data types, such as data from social
channels, web chats, or Internet of Things (IoT) data from
sensors or wearables
This list is quite full, and it doesn’t end here. In the “Data-
Driven Marketing Trends Survey Summary Report” conducted by
Ascend2 and its research partners, Informatica and Dun & Brad-
street, 57 percent of respondents called “improving data quality”
their most challenging obstacle to success. In Figure 2-1, you see
the other obstacles they cited.
FIGURE 2-1: The most challenging obstacles to data-driven marketing success.
You may agree that the quality of your data needs to be improved.
If you can’t trust your data, how can you expect it to fuel your
actions and analytics? Unless you’ve mounted a strategic data
management effort, you know that tactical, short-term, manual
efforts won’t produce lasting results.
The best way for you to solve these data problems is to pin down
what great data looks like for you. Then use the right process and
technology to create clean, protected, consistent, and actionable
data:
»» Clean: Clean data means you don’t have duplicate customer

profiles, bad addresses, and a host of other problems like
misspellings, incomplete fields, errors, and inaccuracies. For
instance, do you list a customer as Coke or Coca Cola
Company — or both?
»» Protected: Protected data means that you don’t expose
personally identifiable and sensitive information. For example,
you don’t want everyone in your company to see a customer’s
credit card information or social security number.
»» Consistent: Consistent data is created when you take
the data currently scattered across your applications and
automate the process of identifying and resolving duplicates
and other errors on an ongoing basis. This process ensures
that your most important data remains trusted and keeps
your customer and product data in sync across your teams,
analytics, and applications.
»» Actionable: Data that’s locked up in a system is of little use.
Actionable data pulls from all the data sources you need to
create and uses great customer and product data to fuel
your processes, business decisions, and next best action.
When your data is clean, protected, consistent, and actionable

across the organization, you can deliver great customer experi-
ences. Get the basics right and you begin to understand the power
of your data. A very wise CDO once said, “You can make a lot of
conclusive judgments as a data scientist. You can tell anything
about a customer. But if you can’t spell the customer’s name
right, you’ll never be able to win that customer.”
Dodging Data Strategy Mistakes

When planning your customer data strategy, be aware of some of
the common mistakes that people have made. Here is a checklist
of the mistakes to avoid:
»» Focus on the applications: Some people mistakenly make

applications the centerpiece of their data strategy. This can’t
work because there are too many applications. Instead of
creating a cohesive view of your customer, this approach
makes it even more fragmented. Focus on your data first.
Make your data clean, protected, consistent, and actionable
and then share it across your applications.
»» Take a tactical approach: A tactical data management
approach results in a customer profile that’s never updated
or complete — or worse, it’s inconsistently multiplied across
the organization. You should manage your data like the
strategic asset it is.
»» Rely on manual processes: People often rely on time-
consuming, labor-intensive, manual efforts to manage data
in spreadsheets. You can’t create a great customer experi-
ence if you rely on an inefficient and unproductive process.
You need to automate your data management.
»» Overlook the importance of product data: Your product
data should also be treated as a corporate asset. Think
about it. Getting to the top of search is a huge data chal-
lenge. If your product data is bad, you can’t effectively sell
to your customers when they’re searching for a product like
yours on Google or Amazon. Your product data should be
accurate, rich, and highly searchable so your customers can
find what they want, when they want it.
»» Ignore the future: By focusing only on today’s needs, you
put your future needs at risk. You prepare for tomorrow by
strategically managing your data today. Then you can
capitalize on new types of data and marketing innovations
that will help you become even more effective.
Poorly managed customer data can frustrate your customers,

prolong the time to resolve a customer issue, lead to duplicate
billings or invoices being sent, result in multiple or conflicting
offers and messages, create gaps in reporting, direct leads to the
wrong salesperson, and base predictive insights on suboptimal
algorithms. Or worse yet, you may lose your relevance as a com-
pany. Take a look at how your customer data management prac-
tices are impacting your customer across Marketing, Sales, and
Customer Service.
As odd as it probably sounds, you most likely don’t have a stan-

dard definition of a customer across your company. A customer
who’s purchased a product from one line of business may be a
prospect in another line of business. A customer whose most
recent purchase was five years ago may no longer be a customer.
How you identify and define a customer will be unique to your
situation.
Make sure your team agrees on the definitions as you work

through the attributes you manage about your customer. Your
business goals will help you decide what to include. Some compa-
nies collect as few as 20 attributes or as many as 200. Your com-
mon definition of “customer” will help you determine the most
important information you’ll want to manage.
An Intelligent 360 View Is Possible
At the heart of every great customer relationship is clean, pro-
tected, consistent, and actionable data that makes an intelligent
customer 360 view possible. You can’t fully understand your
customers without learning about their needs and offering them
exactly what they want when they want it. They need to believe
that they’re getting the attention they deserve. This means that
you need to know about all their purchases across channels. You
also need to know about their preferences, attitudes, behaviors,
influencers, customer service interactions, marketing responses,
goals, and demographics. In short, you need a full view of your
customer. In Figure 2-2, you see that great customer data is at the
heart of an intelligent customer 360 view. You learn how to build
an intelligent customer 360 view in Chapter 4.
FIGURE 2-2: An intelligent customer 360 view is comprehensive and

actionable.
The outer ring of the diagram represents the types of data that
should be gathered and connected to get a full view of the cus-
tomer. You see there are internal data sources like products and
services purchased and external sources of data like enriched cus-
tomer data (data provided by data brokers or that can be obtained
through social media). There are also advanced data elements
such as attitudes, relationships, experiences, and events.
In the middle ring, you see the data characteristics that create
a trusted customer profile — data that’s clean, consistent, and
actionable — governed by holistic company rules, linked to pri-
vacy and protection policies, and paired with valuable product
data.
Think of an intelligent customer 360 view as a complete picture of

each customer — a view of everything customers believe compa-
nies should know about them, regardless of where an interaction
happens. An intelligent customer 360 view incorporates all data
about a customer, prospect, or business partner to give users the
perspective they need to engage with contextual relevance, create
offers and new products, build a strategy, and inform next best
action.
A recent Experian survey found that 81 percent of marketers find

building a single customer view a major challenge. Variability is
a big reason for this. Consider this: Customer data changes at
a rate of 25 percent per year; corporate structures change (an
acquisition, merger, or reorganization means reexamining how
customer data is managed); and applications change (they’re typ-
ically designed for specific functions, not for ensuring the cus-
tomer data is of high quality).
Unless you have a customer 360 view that provides consistent,

synchronized insights about relationships, preferences, and other
activities — one that’s shared across your technology pillars and
with the parts of your organization that need it — you don’t have
a 360-degree view of your customers. At best, you have a full view
of your customer as it exists within that application.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Boosting lead conversion rates with
great data
»» Improving marketing campaign

effectiveness with big data analytics
»» Achieving a 360-degree customer view

following a merger
»» Choosing a marketing data lake to gain

predictive insights
Chapter 3
Looking at Successful
Marketers
I
f you’ve been reading this book up to this point, you’re realizing
the importance of great data to power a great customer experi-
ence. In this chapter, you learn about companies using
Informatica technology to manage their data strategically. You
look at several different kinds of companies, including a telecom-
munications company, an electronics manufacturer, an insurance
company, a travel company, a casino, and a high-tech company.
With accurate, current, and complete data to uniquely empower

their marketing, sales, and services teams, they’re delivering
personal, relevant, and seamless experiences across the end-
to-end customer journey. As you review the stories, think about
how each scenario may apply to your company’s data manage-
ment challenges.
CHAPTER 3 Looking at Successful Marketers 23
Using Great Data to Transform
with the Digital Economy
KPN provides fixed and mobile telephony, Internet, and TV ser-
vices; it serves over 4.5 million customers and has been involved
in data transformation based on defining data management as a
strategic topic. This involvement supports the telecommunication
company’s corporate strategy:
»» Build the best converged smart infrastructure

»» Focus on the best customer experience
»» Ensure profitable converged services
»» Accelerate simplification and digitalization within the
company
With a strong strategy in place, KPN wanted to raise the bar to

solve a disconnected and fragmented customer view. This lack
of unification undermined the company’s ability to deliver fast,
rewarding customer service, and as a result, it missed opportuni-
ties for cross- and up-selling, and marketing campaigns weren’t
as successful, which resulted in higher operational costs.
KPN needed to provide sales and service representatives with a

single view of the customer; migrate data from 50 legacy systems;
and optimize customer data quality. The company sought help
from Informatica’s powerful solutions: Informatica PowerCenter,
Data Quality, Data Explorer, and Master Data Management.
Through the 360-degree view of customers and by providing

clean, trusted data in near real-time, Informatica helped KPN
excel in customer satisfaction, targeting customers with compel-
ling cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and reduced marketing
and sales time to market. Additional achievements included
»» Increased projected average revenue per user by 5 percent

»» Reduced annual customer churn by 10 percent
»» Decreased length of customer support calls by 10 percent
»» Increased call center productivity by 5 percent
Powering Digital Transformation
with Intelligent Data
A global electronics manufacturer wanted to deliver new insights
faster within its marketing and sales teams. After several acquisi-
tions, the company ended up with disparate marketing systems
and lacked a true understanding of its customers. To support a
digital marketing transformation and a billion dollar+ business
opportunity, the manufacturer needed to unify data and insights
across all global systems — covering over 5 billion source
records.
The company chose Informatica to help move from quarterly cam-

paigns to on-demand, micro-segmented campaigns based on
deeper insights into digital interactions and actionable intelligence
on cross-sell buying patterns. Informatica matches and links more
than 5 billion customer records, including interaction and trans-
actional data for sophisticated modeling and segmentation with a
goal of 1:1 personalized marketing across all business segments.
With this rate of success, sellers can leverage information for

scalable, data-driven, personalized interactions with customers.
Sales reps have access to a visual representation of the customer
360 view directly in Salesforce, through the web, or on a mobile
device, without having to swivel between systems.
By employing AI and natural language processing (NLP), the

manufacturer created an intelligent omnichannel view of the
customer built from transactional data (orders, quotes, incidents,
assets, entitlements) and interactions (web chats, and so on).
With Google-like search capabilities against all its data — both
structured and unstructured — the manufacturer gained a con-
sistent, 360-degree view of the customer across marketing, sales,
fulfillment, finance, and corporate teams.
Using Big Data Analytics for Better

Marketing Campaigns
A major insurance company that was established nearly 100 years
ago has grown through acquisitions and now has multiple busi-
ness units, products, and channels around the globe. The firm
sought to understand the question, “Why did this customer buy?”
Its goal was to improve marketing campaigns and measure which
marketing investments were producing a real return.
With this knowledge — specifically, which channels and pro-

grams produced each individual sale — the marketing team could
improve customer segmentation and create personalized offers
sure to convert leads to opportunities.
The initial challenge focused on analyzing households to deter-

mine which ones were purchasing its products (and which were
not). That meant that the company needed to gather and centrally
combine all its in-house and third-party marketing and customer
data and then effectively analyze this massive amount of data.
The traditional data warehouse in use wasn’t able to handle the

volume of data, so the IT group teamed with Marketing to launch
a big data management initiative within three months. The efforts
produced rich data that would fuel its marketing campaigns and
create more refined customer segments and more personalized
offers. The company also met its goal of linking specific market-
ing channels to sales.
By using the right data management technology, this com-

pany was able to accomplish in hours what had previously taken
months. That’s a significant savings!
Streamlining a 360-Degree View

across Lines of Business
The Travel Corporation (TravelCorp) is a travel and leisure group
operating in more than 60 countries and serving more than 1.5
million customers annually. TravelCorp comprises 30-plus brands
in operation for 40+ years, including independently managed tour
operators, hotels, and river cruise ships. To get an accurate view
of the business, the corporate office has to leverage multiple
global sources of data.
TravelCorp’s goal was to develop a trusted view of its custom-

ers and determine accurate customer demographics and purchase
patterns. With greater customer insights, TravelCorp’s market-
ing and sales teams could deliver more customized and tailored
service offerings. But first, the company needed to see all interac-
tions with each customer across every interaction point: mobile,
social, phone, and website.
The challenges included a legacy CRM system that couldn’t be

rapidly integrated with other systems, the need for enough flex-
ibility to sustain more than 500 users, and an aggressive dead-
line for the project. TravelCorp also had to ensure that each newly
acquired business arm could onboard its data and be connected to
and receive data quickly.
TravelCorp used Informatica Cloud Customer 360 for Salesforce

and reduced the time it took to import daily data from 36 hours
to 60 minutes. The business was also able to automate many of
its existing manual CRM processes, eliminate duplicate customer
records, and maintain high-quality customer data.
One of the great outcomes of the project was reported by John

Pickles, TravelCorp’s Global Director, 360 Engagement. He said,
“Our company is made up of businesses that have been either
acquired or built up by The Travel Corporation. The time to get
a company onboard is often constrained by the ability to pull in
their data. This new capability helps with that process.”
Using a Data Lake to Gain

Predictive Insights
You may find it unusual that Informatica is included in these
examples of successful Informatica customers. But as an advo-
cate for great data, the high-tech company recognized the need
to improve its own customer account and contact data and its own
data management capabilities. Its sales, service, and marketing
teams have undergone such a transformation in using Informati-
ca’s own solutions that the journey is worth sharing here.
Informatica is a leading independent software provider focused on

delivering transformative innovation for the future of all things
data. More than 9,000 enterprises have depended on Informatica
to fully leverage their information assets regardless of where they
reside, including social networks.
To modernize their application landscape, the sales, marketing,
and customer service departments at Informatica invested in
Salesforce Sales Cloud for salesforce automation, Salesforce Ser-
vice Cloud for customer service, and Marketo for marketing auto-
mation. Informatica’s customer success strategy is the lifeblood
of its transition to a hybrid cloud data management company. But
data needed to support the investment in customer success was
scattered across more than 35 applications. What it still lacked
was a way to bring together all the data from those separate appli-
cations and connect the dots across the end-to-end customer life
cycle to give better insights into how customer success managers
can best serve customers.
To solve this data problem and gain an intelligent customer

360 view, Informatica invested in a data lake to sit alongside its
enterprise data warehouse powered by its own data management
platform. A data lake provides massive storage for data of any
kind, such as web clickstream and other transaction data. It has
enormous processing power, and the ability to handle almost lim-
itless simultaneous tasks or jobs to get the job done quickly. This
data lake enabled Informatica to collect all its important customer
data in one place.
Today, business intelligence dashboards empower Informatica’s

service team by showing them the following information:
»» The overall health of the account

»» The customer’s satisfaction and sentiment
»» Products the customer has purchased
»» How the customer is using the product
In Figure 3-1, you see how Informatica’s data management sys-
tem is structured.
Armed with this data, Informatica can now accomplish the

following:
»» Accelerate digital transformation and transition to new

business models.
»» Predict customer behavior and customer pains.
»» Initiate account-based adoption programs for key accounts.
FIGURE 3-1: The data management framework that produces actionable
insights.
As a result, Informatica has reaped these benefits:
»» Increased satisfaction and revenue through data mining for

customers most likely to buy
»» Targeted cross-selling of additional products based on
customer adoption
»» Improved adoption models that help prioritize sales and
service efforts
To support its data-first strategy, Informatica unified its mar-

keting, sales, and service data in a customer data lake where it’s
strategically managed using Informatica’s own customer data
management technology. Now, clean, protected, consistent, and
actionable data fuels its marketing, sales, and customer service
applications, the data warehouse, and the customer data lake.
Informatica has improved its analytics, streamlined operational
processes, and discovered new opportunities with this data-
centric approach.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Understanding the value of an intelligent
customer 360 view
»» Appreciating the value of a data

management process
»» Looking at the elements of an intelligent

customer 360 view
»» Building your intelligent customer 360

view
Chapter 4
Creating an Intelligent
Customer 360 View
G
reat data creates a customer experience that’s personal,
relevant, and seamless by fueling an intelligent customer
360 view for better marketing outcomes. But how do you
build a 360-degree view of your customers?
In this chapter, you see the value of using a 360-degree view of

your customers, understand the six key elements you need to
have, and find out the eight steps you can take to build an intel-
ligent customer 360 view.
Recognizing the Value of an Intelligent

Customer 360 View
Your customers know that their information is valuable to the
companies they do business with. In exchange for sharing it, they
expect you to give them a great customer experience.
CHAPTER 4 Creating an Intelligent Customer 360 View 31
To do this, you need to start with the basics:
1. Create a trusted customer profile from a single, unified

customer view.
2. Augment that trusted customer profile with an under-
standing of your customer’s valuable relationships with
the people, products, and places that matter most to
your business.
3. Link that trusted customer profile to your customer’s
transactions, interactions, and insights captured from
new data sources.
4. Establish processes to ensure the underlying data stays
great.
It sounds simple, but many marketers don’t capitalize on their

valuable data because the effort to continuously build an intel-
ligent customer 360 view seems daunting. Once you understand
the benefits, though, you’ll find that the rewards are well worth
the effort.
So what are some of the benefits of building and using an intel-

ligent customer 360 view? Here are the top ten:
»» Higher conversion and close rates and reduced customer

acquisition costs
»» Improved customer retention, customer satisfaction, loyalty,
and Net Promoter Score (NPS) scores
»» Increased number of products sold per individual, house-
hold, or improved account penetration
»» Improved brand perception and market share growth
»» Faster time-to-market
»» Improved margins (eliminating transaction errors and
reducing overall promotional costs)
»» Improved territory coverage (greater accuracy in market
sizing)
»» Improved collections/billings
»» More productive and satisfied employees
»» Reduced IT operating expenses
That’s an impressive list.
If you don’t have an intelligent customer 360 view, it’s likely that
your customer experience is sorely lacking. You could be send-
ing customers offers for products they already own or don’t
care about, wasting customers’ time during repetitive and mis-
aligned sales calls, and struggling to provide customer support
that quickly and efficiently resolves issues during the first call. In
short, you could be disappointing your customers regularly with-
out knowing it. Is your company guilty of this?
To find out, ask yourself the following questions about your last
marketing campaign to see how you’re doing. Are you
»» Segmenting your customers based on a trusted customer

profile, augmented with context, and using sentiment and
other data you need to personalize an offer?
»» Factoring in your customer’s last activity, location, and
channel preferences when making the next best offer?
»» Using accurate, rich, and relevant product information based
on the specific customer segment for your offer?
»» Creating consistent and complementary campaigns across
channels to nurture and grow customer relationships?
»» Providing the right offer to a customer during a channel visit,
preventing that customer from switching to a competitor, or
moving their transaction to another, more costly channel?
»» Confident in the data that informs your decisions and
measures your return on marketing investment (ROMI)?
If your answer to any of these questions is no, you know you

can do better. Your data is hindering you from drawing the right
insights, predicting buying behavior, and delivering the great
customer experiences your customers expect. In short, it’s affect-
ing your bottom line. Commit to strategically managing your cus-
tomer data so it helps you work smarter.
451 Research concluded that the combination of data, digital, and

intelligence separate leaders from laggards. For instance, nearly
two out of every three leaders use intelligent process automation
to reduce customer friction points and create a single view of cus-
tomers across disparate data sources, while less than half of lag-
gards have done so. This enhances their ability to innovate, invest
in intelligent personalization, and prioritize shifting applications
to the cloud.
Your customers have access to all the data they could ever want
about your company: your products, your prices, and more
importantly, your competitors. For this reason, you need to start
thinking about how you design an experience your customers
value — an experience that’s powered by great customer data.
If your customers are dissatisfied with your company and the

experiences you’re providing, eight out of ten of them will reject
your company and move on. Winning them back will require an
even greater effort than winning them the first time.
A trusted customer profile that’s combined with all the other types
of data you need to support your business goals should result in a
view of your customers that is unified, verified, enriched, contex-
tual, and strategic. After you have all your data working together
like this, you have an intelligent customer 360 view that helps you
deliver a great customer experience.
To create an intelligent customer 360 view, you can use the fol-
lowing different types of data:
»» Data your prospects and customers give you when they

fill out forms to launch a free trial, buy products, or
download marketing content: This includes names, email
addresses, interests, and other fields.
»» Data you can use to enrich the data you have: This
includes addresses, behavior (email opens, call center notes,
and page views), and external third-party data that com-
pletes the customer picture.
»» Data you derive: This includes characteristics and attributes
of your customers you derive by applying artificial intelli-
gence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to call
notes, web chats, email, and other digital interactions. This
helps you derive information such as their current sentiment
or life events, as well as calculated metrics, including churn
scores, lifetime value, and more.
To drive better customer experiences, you can combine the fol-

lowing types of data:
»» Traditional marketing and forms data

»» Sales and customer service system data and notes
»» Order management or enterprise resource planning (ERP)
data such as billing and shipping addresses and order details
»» Survey data including NPS
»» Third-party data such as demographics, psychographics,
credit ratings, and so on
»» Product information
»» Clickstream data from your website, web chats, call logs
from the customer service team, and social, mobile, and
location data
»» Internet of Things (IoT) data from sensors or wearables
With all these data types being produced in real time, you can see
that you really need a strategy to manage it effectively so you can
reach your marketing and customer experience goals.
Managing Your Data for Success

Your thinking about data management needs to be elevated to a
strategic level so you can take advantage of all the existing high-
value data in your organization. You do this by using technology,
including AI and machine learning (ML), to automate the data
management process and start the ball rolling on a trusted and
intelligent customer experience initiative. This process bridges
the data across your application silos so it can be managed in a
central location. This gives you the answers you need to under-
stand and serve your customers better.
With this in mind, these five important things will help success-
fully manage your data over the long term:
»» Manage your data centrally. Combine your high-value,

business-critical customer data across sources into a central-
ized hub. Start small with just a few key data sources and then
expand to include other valuable sources. Think about
including your cloud applications, legacy systems, applica-
tions, and big data sources. Consider capabilities that support
unstructured data. Be sure you have a strategy to confidently
steer the data management process across teams.
»» Have a definitive view of the data to ensure that your
customer profile is accurate. For example, you want to
know that the customer you identify as Jane Jones is also
@janiej on Twitter and JJones in your customer service
report.
»» Have a complete view of all interactions with customers.
This is important so you can link and understand the
relationship between customer interactions and transactions
across the business. For example, you gain the opportunity
to see how your content and campaigns map to sales.
»» Be aware of the influencer relationships or different roles
your customers have. If you are a business-to-business (B2B)
marketer, it’s imperative that your data identifies the buying
team in an organization. In a business-to-consumer (B2C)
world, you’d want to be able to identify the other customers
in a household or the members of a customer’s social network.
You’ll want to know when the customer is a consumer in a
B2C transaction and an influencer in a B2B one — that is, an
individual who has insurance policies as both a homeowner
and an employee at a company.
»» Uncover all the different relationships that a customer
might have with your company. In Figure 4-1, you see how
many different relationships your customer could have with
your company. It’s quite a complex picture.
FIGURE 4-1: The customer relationships and insights that fuel better

marketing decisions.
Customers can each generate data about
»» Their participation in campaigns: What offers did they

accept and on which devices?
»» What products they (or their household) own: What
should be their next offer?
»» Their locations/places: Do they bank near their homes?
Or at a different location?
»» Employees and channels: Do they see specific personal
shoppers or agents? Which channel(s) do they prefer for
customer service issues?
If you don’t understand the relationships your customers have,

you’ll struggle to produce a great customer experience.
Informatica has found that the average B2B buying team in an

organization is approximately eight people. Its goal is to identify
each member so the company can market and sell most effectively.
The Seven Elements of an Intelligent

Customer 360 View
How do you get to this intelligent customer 360 view? To create
this view, you need to connect the following components:
»» A trusted customer profile: Consolidate fragmented and

inconsistent customer information across application silos
into a customer data platform (CDP). To learn more about
what a CDP is, head to Chapter 6.
»» All customer relationships: Identify the key relationships
your customers have that matter to your business, such as
household, business, and network relationships. This
extends to other relationships, including which products
they use, whom they’ve influenced, and which employees,
partners, or agents they work with.
»» Internal and external data sources: Bolster your data with
other valuable content from other parts of the company
(such as billing and order systems) or from outside the
company.
»» Third-party data: Enrich your data with business and
consumer data from external sources that deliver deeper
insights to fuel richer interactions. Figure out what matters
most to your business. This may include knowing if they’re
homeowners or renters, the type of automobiles they drive,
their occupations, their education, and so on.
»» Privacy data: Use the permissions and consents data
provided by your customers to build trust. Demonstrate
respect for their consents by knowing that their personal
email is okay to use for marketing communications, and
their business one is okay for account updates.
»» Trusted customer profiles linked with all relevant
interactions and insights: Add key insights from
mobile, social, sensor, machine, web chats, and other
next-generation data sources.
»» An empowered team: Build a data-driven marketing team
to take direct ownership of how you access, manage, and
analyze business-critical customer data in a trusted, multi-
dimensional view.
Fitting the pieces together to create an intelligent customer

360 view requires you to connect all your disparate high-value
data with transaction and interaction data. Data that isn’t siloed
or excluded from various departments helps everyone in the
organization. Everyone can use the data to make predictions and
gain the insights he or she needs to do better.
Advancements with AI and ML make it possible to deliver different

perspectives of the data for different needs based on confidence
levels with the accuracy of the data. You may feel comfortable
using less-than-perfect data in the underlying profile in your
marketing campaigns, but Sales or Operations would want access
to a customer view with higher confidence in the data that makes
up the profile. These various views — or perspectives — of a cus-
tomer correspond to departmental needs; each of which has access
to a different set of customer attributes that are most relevant to
them.
The Eight Steps of an Intelligent
Customer 360 View
Data-driven marketers know they can make more actionable
insights and predictions if they have reliable customer data at
their fingertips. However, the data you need to get your hands on
is scattered across various applications and functions. When you
bring it together for reporting, analytics, or campaigns, the data
is often duplicated, rife with inaccuracies, full of inconsistencies,
and often incomplete. This leaves you guessing or spending a lot
of time making the data usable.
To correct this major problem and deliver a great customer expe-

rience, you can follow these seven steps of successful customer
360 initiatives:
1. Find and connect your data.

You may have customer data tucked away in as few as 5 different
systems or as many as 70. The more complex your business, the
more complex your data environment will be. Your first step is
to identify and connect to them so you can take advantage of
everything known about your customers. The best way to do this
is to list all your applications and systems as well as any external
sources that might be valuable. A data catalog can do this for
you, and your data or information management team can help
you with this step.
What to avoid? While you want to be thorough during the
planning stage and identify all potential data sources, I don’t
recommend connecting to all data sources right away. It will
take you too long to gain any value.
Your goals should help you prioritize your efforts and create
a phased approach that delivers quick wins. Connect to a few
data sources. Evaluate how that data contributes to your
intelligent customer 360 view. Can you take action on the
new data? Learn as you go. Some sources may be better or
more complete than others.
2. Clean your data.
Did you know that 25 percent of a marketing database will be
out of date within a year? For this reason, you may be
unaware of the quality and status of your data.
Clean data is a must. By clean data, I mean data that’s
continually monitored to catch and correct duplicates, wrong
email addresses, missing information, misspellings, inactive
customers, incomplete phone numbers, and bad addresses.
You need to work with your system administrators to devise
a plan to automate the process of evaluating and cleaning
your data on an ongoing basis.
What to avoid? Don’t try to accomplish this step by doing it
manually. It’s neither effective nor efficient, and your data will
remain inaccurate, fragmented, and incomplete. You need to
repeat the process each time you want to use the data. If that
hasn’t convinced you, it’s also costly.
Using clean data can result in enormous savings. One
Informatica customer saved $50 million just by reducing
duplicate and returned mailings. Another Informatica
customer gained $50 million through an increase in
year-over-year revenue from more effective cross-sell
and upsell offers.
3. Master your data.
This is a crucial step. It creates the master customer record,
otherwise known as a golden record, that helps you build a
trusted customer profile. If you don’t master your customer
data, you’ll lack a single customer view, and you’ll have
duplicate customer profiles plaguing your efforts. And that
results in bad outcomes and higher costs. Without a master
customer record, you can’t build an intelligent customer
360 view. A CDP built on master data management (MDM)
technology automates the process of finding, resolving,
matching, merging, and enriching customer records so you
don’t have to do it manually. See Chapter 6 for more about
the key role MDM plays in a CDP.
What to avoid? Skipping this step. This is how you build the
foundation for your intelligent customer 360 view. Without it,
you won’t be successful.
There may already be a master data management initiative
going on at your company in a different department. Ask
your data or information management team to see if you
can piggyback on it. If you don’t already have an initiative
underway, this may be the business driver the data team
has been waiting for to justify an investment.
4. Relate your data.
We are living in a world where everything is connected. How
can you operate in that world if you can’t see those connec-
tions? An intelligent customer 360 view helps you identify and
connect the people, places, things, and behaviors that matter
most to your business. For example, you will see if there are
multiple customers in one household, where they shop, and
what they buy. You will see the members of a buying team,
where they’re located, what web pages they visit, and what
products they’ve purchased. You will see life events and
behaviors to better understand your customer journeys.
What to avoid? Not all solutions in the market give you
visibility into the relationships between people, places, things,
and behaviors. Some just manage customers. Some just
manage products. Others just look at behaviors. Do your due
diligence. Ask for evidence that they manage more than one
subject area.
Many companies start with just one subject area, such as
customer or product. They grow the value by adding product,
location, employee, and supplier information at a later time.
They expand their knowledge with data that offers richer
insights, such as call notes or web chats. In doing so, they’re
able to gain new insights into how these are all linked — for
example, seeing which suppliers provide the materials for the
products that are most popular with your high-value
customers.
5. Enrich your data.
At this step, think about what data sources would enhance
your marketing programs and add more value to your
existing data. Would adding social media data from sources
like Twitter or Facebook improve the richness of the data?
What about business data from Dun & Bradstreet? Look at
other internal, external, and third-party sources to see what
you might add.
What to avoid? Don’t try to add additional sources of data
until you have completed all the previous steps in this list.
Many companies enrich customer data in multiple applica-
tions or in multiple departments, which increases their costs.
I recommend enriching the data once in a central location
and then sharing that data across your business.
Don’t overlook advanced AI tools, including NLP, as a way to
add context by enriching and rounding out your trusted
customer profile. These technologies deliver new insights or
sentiment inferred from social media, web chats, and other
unstructured data that resides within your business.
6. Deliver your data.
Now it’s time to reap the benefits of having great data by
sharing it with the right business and analytical applications
across your organization, such as Salesforce, Marketo,
Tableau, Adobe, a customer data platform (CDP), a data
management platform (DMP), a data warehouse, or a
marketing data lake (MDL).
What to avoid? Don’t assume other teams will need exactly
what you need. Each department has its own data needs,
structures, and uses. Get your information management
team involved so they’re aware of how each department’s
staff will use the data before you assume everyone wants
what you want. This is where defining unique perspectives
can be very useful.
Don’t forget to deliver that data to your customer portal or
ecommerce site. Your customers want a consolidated view of
the products or services they own. The renewals team can
help customers renew all their products or services at one
time. The billing team can send consolidated invoices to
customers. These three actions greatly improve the customer
experience.
7. Protect your data.
Brands of all sizes have lost customer loyalty and market
reputation value because they’ve failed to protect their
customers’ personal and sensitive information. Increasingly,
great customer experiences demonstrate a respect for your
customers’ data privacy rights, while still safely enabling new
customer insights that strengthen relationships.
What to avoid? You can’t protect all your data, nor should
you. Assess the greatest risk potential across your organiza-
tion and start there. By understanding data flow, discovering
personal data across your organization, and classifying it, you
can then determine appropriate use and protect what’s most
valuable. Often, this data is used in customer value creation
for new products and services and is also more at risk of
failing privacy compliance mandates if misused and exposed
inappropriately.
As personal and sensitive data grows higher in volume,
more complex in use, and widely distributed, so do the
challenges of privacy compliance. Evaluate where sensitive
data is accessed and used to determine level of risk. Gaining
data intelligence with a holistic view of the location, protec-
tion status, proliferation risk, and access based on identities
for sensitive data are critical factors in your success toward
handling data more responsibly. You’ll need to create a way
for operationalizing privacy controls with ongoing assess-
ment, remediation, monitoring, and audit to comply with
government and industry privacy regulations by taking
advantage of automation in order to scale.
8. Govern your data.
Being a good steward of your data is an ongoing process.
With guidelines in place, you can ensure your data is in
compliance with all relevant policy rules, privacy require-
ments, and regulations. In addition, you’ll be able to deliver
more value for your organization by having data that can be
trusted and relied on.
What to avoid? Don’t employ your data without a data
governance framework. That’s a common term for the
process that ensures your data is ready to deliver a great
customer experience and enables accurate regulatory
reporting. It’s agreeing on what high-quality data looks like.
For example, is it important for you to have consistent
country codes or not? If so, you need to agree on what the
country code for the “United States of America” should be:
USA, US, U.S., or United States. Is it important that all first
names and last names have initial upper case only to avoid
salutations such as “Hi STEPHANIE”? It also can answer
common questions like, “where is my data?” or “who owns
this data asset?” By applying this throughout your entire
organization, that’s enterprise data governance.
To be successful, you need to shift your thinking away from “data
is IT’s responsibility” to “better data is everyone’s job.” I’m a big
believer in the concept of “just enough” data governance — for
example, applying the appropriate amount of data governance best
practice to get your initiative off the ground, while also measur-
ing and evangelizing the value it’s delivering to the business. This
helps you scale your enterprise data governance program while
you showcase your success and deliver results.
Understanding business critical relationships between people,

people and things, people and places, and things and places is
important. Check out Figure 4-2. You see how effective, enter-
prise data governance underpins an intelligent customer 360.
FIGURE 4-2: Governance ensures great data.
A strong reason to build a data governance program is because

it lays the groundwork so you’re better prepared to address new
generations of data privacy regulations. If your data governance
is strong, complying with new regulations is easier. Data gov-
ernance is a key component of any successful data management
effort. Emphasizing it will let you mitigate risks and cut costs
while remaining compliant. Moreover, it enables your organi-
zation to deliver value from your governed data. If you’re in an
industry that’s highly regulated, such as banking, you have to
keep governance issues front and center.
Ask yourself the following governance-related questions about
your data:
»» Where does my data come from and where do I store it?

»» Am I aware of the quality and accuracy of my data or am I
just guessing?
»» Have I created a business glossary of key data definitions
such as “customer” to ensure that everyone is using the
terms in the same way?
»» Have I determined who my stakeholders are and who owns
the data?
After you put the time, resources, and effort into your customer
360 initiative, you want to ensure that your great data remains
great. For that to happen, don’t forget that you must align people,
processes, policies, and technology. If you miss one of these, you
won’t have the quality data you want.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Structuring the business case for your
success
»» Constructing your proposal to get buy-in
»» Getting the most out of your return on

marketing investment (ROMI)
Chapter 5
Getting on the Road
to Success
N
o matter what business you’re in, if your intent is to
deliver a great customer experience, you need the com-
mitment of your executive leadership. It’s paramount that
your leadership understands the critical role data plays delivering
a great customer experience across the end-to-end customer
journey.
In this chapter, you look at the importance of getting buy-in

from your executive team for your customer 360 initiatives. You
see how to build a business case and prepare the right executive
documents.
Building a Business Case for Your Success

Executives today deal with problems their predecessors never
faced. It’s likely they have to manage an online presence in addi-
tion to their brick-and-mortar stores or buildings, and they need
to understand the data generated from every new channel or
device. Making the case for a customer 360 initiative for market-
ing requires that you use a bit of storytelling magic, your analyti-
cal skills, and technology knowledge.
CHAPTER 5 Getting on the Road to Success 47
To build a business case, start by looking at some of the factors
that influence whether you’ll get the approval you seek. These
factors include the following:
»» Tying the customer experience to your customer

360 initiative: This is your most important factor. You need
to present your case for strategically managing your data as
a key foundational investment that will help you deliver a
great customer experience across the organization and
improve marketing effectiveness. A strong data foundation
becomes even more essential as artificial intelligence (AI)
and machine learning (ML) are introduced into marketing
processes.
»» Starting small and scaling: Don’t try to boil the ocean. No
one has the patience to wait two years to get value from an
initiative. Start with a short window. What’s possible in six
months? What would the next phase look like? One of the
lessons learned from others who’ve made a successful
business case is to have a big vision but break things into
manageable phases with quick wins at each phase.
»» Mindset of the executive sponsors: Get executive sponsor-
ship early. Without an executive sponsor, your data manage-
ment initiative will languish. Sponsor mindset is the key to
getting your project on the track to success. If your executive
sponsors are confused or don’t perceive a clear value, they
may say no. Check out the later section, “Understanding
what executives want to know” for more information on the
executive mindset.
Were you hoping to recruit a hands-off executive sponsor so you

can be in charge? Don’t hold sponsors at arms’ length. According
to the Boston Consulting Group, an engaged sponsor is the top
driver of a successful initiative.
Understanding what executives

want to know
While some companies see customer experience as a means to
competitive differentiation, not every manager is eager to mount
an effort for which she feels unprepared or worse yet, antagonis-
tic. Executives may believe customer 360 initiatives are expen-
sive and deliver no quantifiable return on investment (ROI). Some
executives may have tried something in the past that didn’t pan
out as expected. Understanding and addressing your sponsors’
apprehensions can help you win their approval.
For example, do sponsors want you to present a case for a strate-

gic effort or a tactical one? You can see how mismatched expecta-
tions here could derail the entire data initiative.
Secure agreement from your stakeholders about the scope of the

data initiative. It should focus on what your sponsors really care
about. Your stakeholders may include the Chief Marketing Officer
(CMO), Chief Customer Officer (CCO), Head of Sales, Chief Finan-
cial Officer (CFO), Chief Information Officer (CIO), or Chief Data
Officer (CDO).
When preparing to talk with your stakeholders, you should know

some possible business goals your executives might have for a
customer 360 initiative, such as the following:
»» Enhanced customer experience for a competitive edge

»» Improved customer and employee retention, acquisition,
and satisfaction metrics
»» Greater customer lifetime value
»» Better customer insights and analytics to power
relationships
»» Higher quality marketing-sourced pipeline and attribution
»» Improved segmentation, personalization, and omnichannel
coordination
»» Improved compliance with privacy and protection regulations
»» Improved cross-sell and upsell offers
Here are some possible IT goals executives may have:
»» Business involvement in data governance and creation of

data standards
»» Simpler and more flexible data management architecture for
integration, quality, and master data management
»» Reduction of manual work
»» Creating a trusted data foundation for data curation, AI, and ML
»» Better data security
»» Self-service capabilities that would reduce their workload
»» Flexibility to adapt future business needs, data types, and
technology
Aligning to the corporate vision

In addition to learning about the goals and objectives that your
stakeholders have, you want to investigate current company-
wide conditions so you can align your project goals with the over-
all vision. To do this, you need to determine the following:
»» Marketing team’s ability to use current data: You may be

a member of the marketing team, or in marketing opera-
tions, or in IT supporting marketing. Regardless of your role,
you want to get a view of what’s getting in the way of the
marketing department’s use of data now.
»» Accuracy of current customer data: Unless you have some
system for managing data, it’s likely that the data is in poor
shape. Determine if any manual efforts have been made
and, if so, the results. Benchmark your data. What is the
current state of your data? (For more info, see Chapter 4.)
»» Ability to identify which products your customer owns
company-wide: Learn if groups like Customer Support or
Sales can tell which products a customer owns across lines
of business, regions, and channels. How do they get that
information?
»» Opportunities for improvement: Ask interested staff to
share their ideas with you. This may be the only time that
someone asks them for their opinion about these things.
This will go a long way to developing future buy-in.
Analyzing your findings

After you’ve conducted your conversations with stakeholders, you
want to focus on analyzing the findings that will help you write
your proposal for a customer 360 initiative. These areas include
»» The potential benefits of the 360 initiative, such as opportu-

nities to upsell, cross-sell, or acquire a customer based on
prior history, interactions, and relationships
»» The potential costs of not investing in a customer 360
initiative, such as duplicate and returned mail costs, reduced
marketing campaign effectiveness, low sales effectiveness,
poor customer satisfaction scores, and productivity costs in
Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service
»» The potential costs of the customer 360 initiative and other
related costs
»» The metrics or key performance indicators for each benefit
»» The range of projected financial values for each benefit
»» The risk indicators based on the required complexity of the
project, the organizational data, and readiness
The analysis of this information prepares you to create the busi-

ness case document covered in the next section.
Getting Buy-In for Your Proposal

You have done the hard work of meeting with stakeholders and
staff and have analyzed your findings. It’s time to build the busi-
ness case for your customer 360 initiative. You need to create a
document that management can then share.
Your document must include these key sections:
»» Executive summary: Every good business case has an

executive summary that offers a succinct overview of your
proposal. This is a good place to tie the customer 360
initiative to customer experience initiatives or marketing and
sales effectiveness efforts. Make sure the executives get a
sense of the scope and time frame.
»» Major business use cases: Tell your management what
customer experience or marketing and sales effectiveness
goals you’ll be able to achieve or problem(s) you’re going to
solve.
»» Research: Bring your customer 360 initiative to life. Include
qualitative findings, anecdotes, interview quotes, and
examples of data quality issues. Stories about how bad data
or disconnected data impact your marketing goals and
results will help you build your case.
»» Business value quantification: Elaborate on the value of
the customer 360 initiative and quantify the benefits it will
bring to your bottom line in the form of revenue growth or
cost savings.
»» Benchmarking versus peers: Compare your company to
industry averages in critical areas to understand your true
strengths and weaknesses in relation to your competitors.
Don’t overlook adjacent industries that may be a future
threat to your business.
»» Proposed solution and cost: Obviously, this is a key section
and should be in line with what resources the organization is
willing to commit to the initiative. Include tradeoffs if the
proposed initiative isn’t fully funded — what will you lose?
Maximizing Your ROMI

The famous early 20th-century retailer John Wanamaker once
said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trou-
ble is I don’t know which half.” Demonstrating an ROMI is an
age-old problem. It has always been difficult to attribute specific
spending to a particular return.
While it’s easier to get metrics about the impact of a particu-

lar channel or from specific marketing applications, it’s a siloed
view. Marketers are challenged to get visibility into their impact
on the end-to-end customer journey, making it hard to tell which
investments are paying off.
Great customer data gives you the evidence to make better spend-
ing decisions. You don’t need intuition or a handful of manually
obtained statistics. You can see the end-to-end customer journey.
You can make better predictions. You can develop a high-quality
pipeline. You can increase conversions. And you can demonstrate
your impact on revenue.
Don’t leave something as important as your customer data in the

hands of your agency or your IT team. Start strategically manag-
ing your data. Automate the process of connecting your data by
cleaning, securing, reconciling, and making it consistent across
the organization. This way, you can advance beyond the limita-
tions of your current manual data management approaches that
are holding you back from delivering a great customer experience.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Understanding the uses of a data
management platform
»» Knowing what a customer data platform

can do
»» Gaining value from a marketing data

lake and avoiding data swamps
Chapter 6
Sorting the Options for
Managing Your Data
A
recent Global Data Management Benchmark Report pub-
lished by Experian stated that 89 percent of executives
believed that inaccurate data was undermining a good
customer experience. Why? Many of the technologies aimed at
delivering a view into the customer are designed for different
purposes. These three technologies seem similar:
»» Data management platform (DMP)

»» Customer data platform (CDP)
»» Marketing data lake (MDL)
They do similar things:
»» Manage customer data

»» Provide new insights
»» Help you market more effectively
They aren’t the same, though. Table 6-1 highlights the different
characteristics of these options.
CHAPTER 6 Sorting the Options for Managing Your Data 53
TABLE 6-1 The Uses, Users, and Characteristics of the
Customer 360 View Technologies
DMP CDP MDL
Focus Campaign Customer experience Marketing analytics

execution
Used by Marketing Marketing, sales, service, Marketing operations

commerce, and analysts and analysts
Primary Drive sales Interact, communicate, Explore, analyze,

purpose within digital and engage with and visualize all data
channels relevance
Benefit Audience Create a contextual Discover new

analysis 360 view of customer opportunities
data
Fine-tune targets Collect data across
Feed apps, analytics, and all channels and
Optimize digital processes with trusted sources
campaigns and data
media spend Use real-time data to
Apply AI/ML to create answer challenging
Find lookalikes actionable guidance for marketing questions
customer experiences
In this chapter, you become familiar with the differences between

these technologies and how to get the most out of them.
The Data Management Platform

Data Management Platforms (DMPs) emerged out of ad tech for
programmatic advertising. They’re very useful for helping you
engage with your customers and prospects (or audiences in DMP
terms) by sending hyper-targeted digital ads via display, search,
video, mobile, and social media at millisecond ad-tech speeds. You
can send relevant digital offers to your targeted audiences while
they’re online, at the time they’re most interested in a product. A
DMP delivers insights so you can determine which online offers
help you find new customers online, optimize media spend, and
improve campaign return on investment (ROI).
Supporting data-driven online
advertising
DMPs have many capabilities to support the claim of being the
backbone of data-driven marketing. They perform the following
functions:
»» Consolidating customer data from online activity by

using tags
»» Analyzing behavior and interactions that are bucketed into
segments or audiences
»» Identifying who should receive what message in which
channel
DMPs bring together first-, second-, and third-party customer

and prospect data for lookalike analysis so you can more precisely
identify and target your exact audience. Say your target is a soc-
cer mom with pre-teens who browsed for party supplies on her
iPhone. You’re able to deliver a very targeted offer to her while
she’s online, and that offer is optimized for her specific audience.
You need a DMP if you want to improve your results for retar-
geting, prospecting, site optimization, and audience intelligence.
DMPs are particularly helpful if you
»» Manage multiple online campaigns across different ad

networks, exchanges, and publishers
»» Buy media placement, third-party audience data, or bid on
ad exchanges regularly
»» Want to control advertising costs
DMPs are built-for-purpose. They’re designed to support online
activity, not the entire customer experience. Take a look at retar-
geting as an example. Retargeting is online advertising that’s
based on past Internet activity. It isn’t personalization, no matter
how convincing the argument. Retargeting may boost customer
engagement in digital channels, but the customer experience
extends well beyond an online digital interaction, as does many
marketing activities.
WHAT ABOUT AD BLOCKING
SOFTWARE?
Approximately half of consumers use ad-blocking software. Face the
cold hard facts: Customers block ads because they get so many that
are irrelevant, out of context, and just plain annoying. Converting
great experiences into long-term relationships with your customers
doesn’t include stalking them across the web. You can’t stop at know-
ing that Jane searched for a four-person tent. Delivering a great cus-
tomer experience requires knowing that she also purchased it. Build
trusted relationships not by trying to sell your customers something
they already have, but something they may need, like four camping
chairs. Managing the descriptions, features, and other details of your
product information and linking it to your customers and their search
activities will help you position your products in the best possible light.
DMPs are designed for

digital advertising
Marketing uses DMPs primarily for digital or display advertising —
job one for DMPs. Initially used to personalize websites by cat-
egorizing and connecting with anonymous online customers and
prospects, they’re expanding to include identifiable customer
information by incorporating a user ID or customer ID.
DMP capabilities still don’t include all you need to deliver great
customer experiences consistently across your company. Here’s a
start on why they fall short:
»» DMPs focus on digital channels and activity. This creates

a customer data silo that provides the online perspective,
but not a total view of your customers.
»» Offline data must conform to DMP structures so your
DMP can use it to categorize the audience. It’s challenging
to add data sets from other enterprise applications, such as
order or billing data, to improve your segmentation efforts.
»» DMPs don’t provide a complete customer profile. The
profile is usually incomplete and skimpy. If the purpose of a
DMP is to “put labels on people that can be used to sell them
things,” because it’s more transactional, the DMP doesn’t
need everything about those people — just what’s needed to
sell to them.
»» DMP analytics are built-for-purpose. They help marketers
identify the right media targets, create visualizations, and
produce reports focused on campaign reach and funnel.
»» Most DMPs are owned by an outside company. This
leaves the strategic management of your trusted customer
data to a third party, and never in your own hands.
A DMP isn’t designed to share data across the enterprise but don’t
overlook how a DMP can fit within your overall data strategy. It
can act as a source to enrich your trusted customer profile in
your CDP or provide the online interaction data you need in your
MDL. Your DMP can also get data from a CDP or MDL to improve
your digital advertising efforts.
Looking at the CDP

If you’re one of the 96 percent of marketers that finds building
a customer 360 view a major challenge, you need to consider a
CDP. A CDP is purpose-built to create a 360-degree view of a cus-
tomer that’s managed on an ongoing basis, applies intelligence-
based analytics for individualized customer insights, reveals
relationships, and shares different perspectives of a customer
across the business.
If it sounds too good to be true, keep reading. A CDP is at the heart

of providing the great data needed for a great customer expe-
rience. It includes all the core customer data that can be found
across your marketing, sales, customer service, and finance
teams; across your lines of business; and across your regions, and
in both your online and offline channels. It automates, central-
izes, and provides a view of your internal, external, and third-
party customer data.
A vital element of a CDP is to bring together this data and proac-
tively manage it so that it becomes usable for analysis and cus-
tomer interactions. The CDP then allows marketers to use the
trusted customer profiles to fuel your next-generation customer
360 view. Your view expands to include demographic or firmo-
graphic, psychographic, behavioral, transaction, interaction, and
intent data.
You can share the data managed within your CDP with all your
marketing applications (marketing automation platform [MAP],
DMP, and salesforce.com), your data warehouse, a marketing data
lake, or other technologies that need clean, actionable, and pro-
tected customer data. This process requires some support from
your IT team, but it gives you all the features and functionality
you need to gain a customer 360 view that’s usable across your
teams, including Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service.
Figure 6-1 shows how the data managed by your CDP can fuel
your business processes, applications, and analytics.
FIGURE 6-1: How a CDP fits within your customer data management

ecosystem.
A master data management (MDM) solution enhances CDP capa-

bilities. When accompanied by an MDM solution that creates
a trusted customer profile, a CDP is fed by data that’s actively
managed, and the quality is continuously improved because it’s
regularly verified, validated, enriched, and reviewed. Because of
this, your customer insights are richer, your targeting is more
refined, and your offers are more personalized. Without MDM,
you won’t succeed in building a next-generation customer 360
view (described in Chapter 4).
MDM is a methodology that identifies the most important infor-
mation within an organization — and creates data that’s accu-
rate, complete, de-duplicated, and related to other valuable data
and becomes a single source of truth. MDM is designed to pro-
duce one master reference for all your business-critical data.
This includes customer, product, location, employee, supplier,
asset, partner, channel data, and so on. MDM also manages the
relationships between them. Since emerging in the marketplace
in the mid-2000s, MDM has become essential to enabling mar-
keting leaders to establish a trusted, enterprise-wide customer
360 view. (See Chapter 3 for examples of how companies are using
MDM.)
MDM provides
»» A customer 360 view: Reconcile your disparate, duplicate,

and conflicting information into an authoritative view of your
customer. For instance, you can see that Dan Jones and
Daniel Jones are the same person.
»» A 360-degree view of your relationships: Identify the
relationships that exist within your data by using business
rules to determine, for example, that Robert Barnes is the
husband of Mary Barnes, née Mary Burke. You know this
because they’re in the same household.
»» A view of interactions across teams: When you add the
interactions and transactions of your customers, products,
channel partners, or other data elements across teams, you
now gain a complete view of that customer. If Doug Smith
has recently purchased a product, maybe right now isn’t the
best time to give him a discounted offer for that product.
In a CDP, the master data is a subset of your total customer data

and includes the most important customer attributes you want
to maintain actively across the company. This may include your
customer’s first name, last name, date of birth, email address,
phone numbers, account numbers, and so on. Other attributes to
consider adding to the master record include customer prefer-
ences such as consents, channel, communication, privacy, and
products. With master data, for example, you can manage your
customers’ opt-in/opt-out preferences in one central location.
Those preferences can be shared across your marketing, sales,
and customer service applications. (I explain the types of data you
want to include in a trusted customer profile in Chapter 4.)
The marketing agility of a CDP
There is a lot of confusion — and a lot of hype — about what a
CDP is. As a relatively new technology, that’s to be expected. In
a nutshell, a CDP gives you marketing agility. But be careful; all
CDPs aren’t the same. The market today considers four types of
CDPs that have a focus on one of the following:
»» Centralizing marketing data (data pipelines)

»» Customer profiles and segments (orchestration)
»» Campaign execution and development (automation)
»» Campaign and customer analytics (measurement)
The data you collect from your customer is a torrent of disparate
data streams from a wide variety of marketing channels, sources,
and applications. A CDP pools together data in its natural state
and applies artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)
to help you derive the insights you need and expand your next-
generation customer 360 view. With more high-value data from
more sources to flesh out what you know about the complete
end-to-end journey, sentiment and behavior of customers and
prospects, your marketing activities can be more accurate, more
tailored, more relevant — and more effective.
A CDP helps you
»» See which of your prospects, customers, and segments are

engaging with your customer-facing programs
»» Track customers’ journeys across channels
»» Ascertain which segments and products are delivering
revenue and which aren’t
»» Personalize customer service interactions with added
context and reduce friction
»» Build a constructive, collaborative, and mutually accountable
relationship with Sales
»» Create an agile marketing team that responds quickly to the
needs of prospects and customers
The beauty of a CDP is that as you ask more questions in your
marketing team, there’s a way to query the data, find a clear,
simple way to visualize it with self-service analytical tools like
Tableau and Qlik, and create an interactive dashboard to create
micro-segments and explore customer trends.
Being able to see all your data without going to IT means you can
keep coming back to your CDP with new questions, new reports,
and new kinds of analysis. That’s the essence of marketing agility.
Increase the value of your CDP by not restricting its contents to

customer data alone. You can include any data you determine to
be critical to your customer experience goals. This includes prod-
uct, location, employee, supplier, asset, partner, or other data,
including web chats, email, product reviews, and more.
Unlike a DMP, a CDP is best when built on a foundation of MDM,

data governance, data quality, and data privacy. It continually
manages the 360-degree customer view to fuel your analytics,
applications, business decisions, and future strategies so you can
continue to deliver great customer experiences.
Introducing a Next-Generation CDP

Given new requirements to support analytical and operational use
cases with both marketing and enterprise data, a next generation
of CDPs is emerging with an expanded set of capabilities. A next-
generation CDP can also go by the name of a Customer Intelli-
gence Platform (CIP). Its value is strengthened and bolstered by
a strong foundation of powerful data management and govern-
ance. Next-generation CDPs utilize all forms of data — including
unstructured, transactional, and interaction data — to become an
enormously powerful tool around which to build a new kind of
customer experience.
With a next-generation CDP, marketers can truly delve into what

activity motivates a customer, capture customer behaviors and
understand their intent, and create segments of one. As with all
good ideas and technologies, it expands on the first-generation
CDP and MDM concepts and helps marketers
»» Leverage a customer 360 view to create multiple unique

perspectives: With thresholds based on your confidence in
the data and the accuracy of how records are matched, you
can create different views of the customer to be used for
different purposes. This means that Marketing, Sales,
Service, and even Finance can access the customer attributes
that are most relevant to their needs. No longer are market-
ers handcuffed by adhering to the same matching thresholds
as other areas of the company. This enables a richer
customer dataset for use in campaigns.
»» Expand the 360-degree view of relationships to under-
stand influencer networks: Understanding relationships
and networks provides significant insight to marketers. For
example, if a marketer has insight into one household
member’s recent positive experience with a product, she
may choose to target another member of the household or
social circle that may have been positively influenced and be
a good candidate for a similar offer.
»» Build a complete view of all interactions to recognizing
and anticipating customer intent: When you add insights,
such as behavior or sentiment, and map them on a timeline,
you now gain a complete view of that customer and his
intent. If Doug Smith has recently been complaining on social
media about the product he just purchased, his profile may
be flagged with an indicator of possible churn. Now you can
take the proactive steps to help win him back and build
loyalty.
»» Fine tune recommendations for the next best experi-
ence: With the amount of data that’s being generated every
day by every individual, it takes a lot of horsepower to make
sense of it all. A real-time decision engine applies AI/ML and
natural language processing (NLP) to identify the next best
experience because it can continuously synthesize, learn,
and adapt to your customer’s behavior. So, when Sue Stern
communicates through a web chat, the recommended next
best action is based on her most relevant history with your
organization, and even other customers like Sue.
The time is now to start a data-focused initiative for your cus-
tomer experience goals. AI, ML, and NLP can help you make sense
of the volumes of customer data created by digital transactions.
Consider this: Roughly half a billion tweets are posted every day,
and IDC predicts that by 2025, the average person will have nearly
5,000 digital interactions per day, up from 700 to 800 currently.
CDPs typically focus on known and unknown customer pros-

pect data and use cases surrounding departmental marketing
campaigns. A next-generation CDP or CIP takes an enterprise
approach, using algorithms to continuously synthesize, learn, and
adapt to changes in data. It can help you understand and share
rich customer information across the enterprise on an ongoing
basis so you can accomplish the following:
»» Recognize customers every time they interact with you,

across different channels, departments, and functions.
»» Develop individualized marketing campaigns, improved
customer experience, and context-driven sales offers.
»» Discover non-obvious relationships, measure sentiment, and
infer life events.
»» Derive important attributes about customers such as
occupation, product/competitor mentions, personality, and
location-based events (such as travel and other patterns).
»» Blend all interactions, transactions, and events into a
comprehensive customer journey to analyze and personalize
customer experiences.
»» Use the individual customer journeys and apply ML to
predict the next likely interaction for each customer.
»» Determine customer patterns like churn indicators and
retention.
»» Fuel advanced customer analytics and increase campaign
effectiveness with micro-segmentation, RFM (recency,
frequency, monetary) analysis, market basket analysis, and
so on.
»» Parse multiple views of a customer into the perspective
that’s most relevant to marketing, sales, finance, operations,
and other teams — so they can focus on what’s most
important to them.
The CDP plays a big role when it comes to big data, helping mar-
keters scale their customer engagement efforts and quickly find
value from new types of data, including what’s been put into a
data lake. For more information, see the section “The Marketing
Data Lake (MDL)” in this chapter.
Many companies link 360-degree customer views with customer

transactions and interactions stored within a CDP to derive new
insights into customer behavior and respond accordingly. What
does this look like? By combining big data (tweets, web chats, and
the like) with trusted customer profiles (from MDM) that include
validated contact information, customer service agents have more
context when proactively reaching out to a customer who compli-
ments or complains on Twitter.
The Marketing Data Lake (MDL)

Nine years ago, Facebook and Twitter were essentially the only
social platforms that mattered for brands. By 2019, the number of
“platforms that mattered” increased and now include Instagram,
Pinterest, LinkedIn, and others. And it’s been predicted that in
2020, the number of social platforms that call for a brand’s time
and attention will continue to grow — much the same way that
the number of devices and channels have grown.
This growth moves the frontier of customer experience to collect-

ing, preparing, and interpreting real-time data so you can glean
new insights for capturing mind- and market-share. Your team
is probably already struggling to manage and make sense of web
logs, social media, sensors connected to the Internet of Things
(IoT), location, click stream, call logs, and mobile device data.
The data points from these sources are collectively referred to
as big data. They promise more comprehensive and higher value
insights for measuring marketing performance, predicting cus-
tomer behavior, analyzing customer sentiment, optimizing pric-
ing, personalizing offers, and supporting many other activities.
Managing the data in your MDL

If you want to keep your MDL from becoming a data swamp, you
need to manage it with the same governance you apply to your
other data. For you to gain the most value, your challenge is get-
ting clean, complete, trustworthy customer data into your MDL
and associating it with the 360-degree customer views you’ve
created. After you’ve done this, you can uncover each custom-
er’s transactions and interactions and map that against your
next-generation customer 360 view.
The challenge becomes even greater when you consider that the
customer data you rely on to produce great experiences comes
from multiple sources. Depending on the application, your cus-
tomer data may have different customer names, email addresses,
and devices; and it’s probably plagued by poor form fills, major
data gaps, duplicates, and conflicts. Don’t let this knowledge hold
you back on the data that goes into your MDL. To maximize the
MDL’s value, consider including the following:
»» Customer relationship management (CRM) data

»» Marketing automation data
»» Web analytics data
»» Ecommerce data
»» Transaction and point-of-sale (POS) data
»» Social media data
»» Third-party data
»» Any kind of data
This task is tough enough that most marketers simply give up and
accept a fragmented customer view as the price of doing mar-
keting in an application-centric environment. That’s a shame
because solving the problem is well within reach.
Real-time data streaming doesn’t just deliver incremental improve-

ments, it triggers a host of big changes. The customer experience
doesn’t just improve, it evolves. And your marketers, salespeople,
and customer services teams can do things they could never do
before. To capitalize on real-time customer data, you need a data
management infrastructure that allows you to do three things:
»» Sense: Capture event data and stream data from a source,

such as social media, web logs, IoT sensors.
»» Reason: Automatically combine and process this data with
existing data for context.
»» Act: Respond appropriately in a reliable, timely, standardized way.
To sense, reason, and act in real time, you need an intelligent data
streaming platform — a connected ecosystem of tools that can
tackle every task. Crucially, this system will be “intelligent” —
empowered by AI that can automate time-consuming manual
tasks and accelerate processes.
AI needs data management; and data management needs AI. AI

is the secret sauce that transforms a proficient data management
infrastructure into a strategic business asset. And it’s the key to
making real-time customer engagement a reality.
The chief benefits of real-time customer data can be summed up

in a sentence — your people deliver a better quality of service,
which drives customer satisfaction, which leads to more revenue.
But this downplays the transformative impact of real-time cus-
tomer data. It makes more sense to invest in one platform that
can tackle the entire end-to-end sense- reason-act process. That
way you can manage everything through one interface. Enter the
MDL.
Get the most out of your MDL by prioritizing reliable and accurate
data, delivered in real-time for instant engagement and to meet
modern customer expectations. A best practice is to partner with
your Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Data Officer (CDO),
or Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to build an infrastructure that
brings together data at the speed of engagement. Because your
data comes into an MDL from many sources, by teaming with
your IT team, you gain an ally that has a common understand-
ing of the data ecosystem across the enterprise. Before you start
creating your MDL, invest time in understanding your data. See
the nearby sidebar “You can’t use what you don’t know about” to
find out what you can use to build your MDL.
YOU CAN’T USE WHAT YOU DON’T
KNOW ABOUT
A successful customer experience program needs to include two criti-
cal pieces: discovering and understanding relevant data. Your cus-
tomer experience initiatives won’t get far if they don’t include these
two essential processes. As you embark on using your data to create
a 360-degree view of your customers, you need to answer some sim-
ple questions:
• What data do I have?

• Where does it reside?
• What processes does it touch?
• What is its quality?
• Who’s responsible for it?
• Where does it come from?
• What data is it related to?
A data catalog provides answers. It gives you visibility into data wher-
ever it resides — in applications, infrastructure systems, on-premises,
or in the cloud — and helps you understand what data to bring into
your marketing analytics. It also helps put data in context, so you can
see where data has come from, who’s been using it, how it’s been
used in the past, and how it’s been transformed. Such context helps
analysts and data scientists make informed decisions when using
data so that ultimately it delivers greater value to your marketing
efforts.
The benefits include improving company-wide communication,

removing conflict, reducing the time to find data, reducing the num-
ber of iterations required for project delivery, and providing a solid
foundation for data governance, regulatory compliance, and data
stewardship initiatives.
To uncover the value in your data assets, lay the right foundation. And
an intelligent data catalog has a robust set of capabilities that sets you
up for success. Only then can you discover data assets quickly and
understand what’s truly useful.
Looking at the benefits of an
MDL for Marketing
An MDL provides your marketing operations team with the
following:
»» Essential insights into measuring marketing outcomes by

giving visibility into the end-to-end customer journey
»» The capabilities to integrate your most important data across
all your marketing applications
»» Increased agility and data analysis that allows you to achieve
the outcomes you want
»» Cross-channel visibility into how individuals from specific
customer accounts engage with your website, content, and
marketing programs to support account-based marketing
(ABM).
An MDL fuels the analytics that can make your marketing efforts
stronger and provides richer insights into your customers and
prospects. Several trends have emerged in recent years that fuel the
need for an MDL. An MDL makes it easier to harness the potential of
»» Digital marketing
»» Content marketing
»» Data science and next-generation analytics
»» ABM
»» Personalization
»» The convergence of Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service
»» DMPs and the AdTech boom
So that you can replicate and personalize your marketing efforts
to greater success, the knowledge you consume from these trends
helps your teams
»» Prioritize your activities and resources for the individuals

most likely to buy.
»» Identify the influencers and the influenced.
»» Understand the path to purchase.
»» Isolate the moments of truth your customers’ experience.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Recognizing your data is a strategic asset
»» Focusing on growth, agility, and speed
»» Identifying your strongest team

members
Chapter 7
Ten Principles for an
Intelligent Customer 360
View
A
re you looking for additional guiding principles to help you
harness the full power of your data for marketing? In this
chapter, you discover Informatica’s top ten principles for
an intelligent customer 360 view so you can ensure customer
interactions are personal, relevant, and seamless. Informatica has
found that data-driven marketers who follow these principles are
wildly successful in delivering a great customer experience.
Manage Your Data as a Strategic Asset

Some marketers think of their data as an ever-growing problem
with no solution. Do you feel this way? If so, you’ll never be able
to use the full value of your data to gain a competitive advantage.
Actively managing your data as the strategic asset that it is helps

you attract more and better prospects while building great rela-
tionships with your current customers. You want to be able to fol-
low your customers on their end-to-end customer journey.
CHAPTER 7 Ten Principles for an Intelligent Customer 360 View 69
Put Together Your Strongest Data
and Operations Team
It’s key that you carefully vet and hire someone with the profes-
sional credentials to do the job when building your data and oper-
ations team. Seek team members who are naturally curious and
who can provide you with the insights from applying advanced
and predictive analytics to your data.
Bring Your Data Together in One Place

Right now, unless you’ve managed your customer data effectively
with some kind of end-to-end customer data management tech-
nology, it’s likely to be stuck in silos and stored in systems and
applications all around your organization. Other critical customer
data may also be managed externally. Like any organizational
project, you have to consolidate it to get the most out of it. This
means you need to identify all your data and put it in a central
location such as a customer data platform (CDP), a data ware-
house, or a customer data lake. Now, you’re ready to strategically
manage it. For more information on CDPs and data lakes, check
out Chapter 6.
Connect the Dots So Your Data

Is Trusted
To better understand your customers’ buying behaviors and
to predict their next moves, you need to base your actions on a
trusted customer profile that’s built from all data, including pre-
viously untapped sources such as social media, call notes, and web
chats. It’s imperative that you do this, or customer experience
initiatives will suffer.
The best way to build a trusted customer profile is to master your

data. What do I mean by that? Mastering your data means recon-
ciling all the disparate high-value data known about your cus-
tomer into one cohesive master, or golden, record that can fuel
your business applications and analytics. Use artificial intelli-
gence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to extract and
infer new insights from your data that’s found in web chats or
emails, and then add those insights to the master record. You can
learn more about mastering data in Chapter 6.
Focus on Your Operational Levers

Operational levers are the activities that help you reach your
marketing goals. They help you understand how your market-
ing activities impact the end-to-end customer journey. When you
select the right metrics and track the right data, you should be
able to make good predictions about the outcome. Using your data
to identify the strategic operational levers will facilitate that.
Test, Measure, Optimize

One of the single greatest benefits of great customer data is that
you can use it to test new ways to achieve the results you want.
When you actively manage your data, you can get immediate
feedback on marketing programs, campaigns, or your current
channel mix. Testing and making changes quickly can be the best
way to ensure a successful outcome. It allows you to experiment
often and to fail fast, or to expand on what’s currently working.
Build an Environment Based

on Growth and Speed
Change is happening more quickly than ever before and shows no
sign of slowing. Take the current wave of digital disruption that’s
changing everything — including how your customers interact
with your company. You need the right customer data manage-
ment technology to continuously improve your data. Otherwise,
your marketing team will struggle to be nimble. This will limit your
ability to improve your customers’ experiences. Ultimately, you’ll
lose sales.
CHAPTER 7 Ten Principles for an Intelligent Customer 360 View 71
Create a Data Culture
A data culture is a learning culture. While marketers traditionally
relied only on their creativity and intuition when planning cam-
paigns, that just won’t fly today. A data-driven culture supports
that creativity with facts and insights about your customers and
actual results.
The key to developing a data culture is to share trusted customer

data across the organization so everyone can demonstrate results
by pointing to actual data. Success becomes repeatable by others,
and failures become avoidable (or at least limited).
Include Self-Service Capabilities

You have questions that need quick answers, and you want data
at your fingertips. You don’t have time to log requests into an IT
queue to get the data you need to figure out what’s working and
what’s not and how to better serve your customers. Your IT team
should make it easy for you to find the answers yourself.
Ask IT to give you self-service access to the technology and infor-

mation you need to make an impact on the business. Take the
time to work with them so they clearly understand your require-
ments, and get it right the first time.
Partner with Your CIO and CDO

Marketing is probably the biggest consumer of data and IT ser-
vices, which makes your Chief Data Officer (CDO) and Chief Infor-
mation Officer (CIO) VIPs with whom you need to collaborate.
Your CDO and CIO are motivated to work with you, too. Successful
data-driven marketing depends on a solid relationship between
Marketing, data, and IT. In the right environment, this partner-
ship works to solve the critical data management issues Market-
ing struggles with every day.
Notes
Notes
Notes
Notes
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Manufactured in the United States of America

CHAPTER 1: Introducing a Great Customer Experience.............. 5

CHAPTER 2: Rethinking Your Customer Data.................................... 15

CHAPTER 3: Looking at Successful Marketers................................... 23

CHAPTER 4: Creating an Intelligent Customer 360 View.......... 31

Table of Contents iii

CHAPTER 6: Sorting the Options for Managing Your Data...... 53

CHAPTER 7: Ten Principles for an Intelligent Customer

iv Customer 360 For Dummies, Informatica Special Edition

It takes a series of great customer experiences, both online and

Marketers need data to understand their customers fully, but

»» An offer for an item that was purchased from that same

To avoid these missteps, step up your game. Offer your custom-

About This Book

Icons Used in This Book

This icon highlights information that’s important to know. Tip

This icon calls out information that’s helpful to remember.

Information contained here points out struggles you want to

Beyond the Book

»» “Seven Steps Closer to Intelligent Customer

2 Customer 360 For Dummies, Informatica Special Edition

»» Using great data to impact the customer

To deliver great customer experiences that inspire return visits

CHAPTER 1 Introducing a Great Customer Experience 5

Recognizing changes that impact

»» Always-connected consumers: Consumers have come to

6 Customer 360 For Dummies, Informatica Special Edition

CHAPTER 1 Introducing a Great Customer Experience 7

Reaping the benefits of a great

»» Customer loyalty and trust: Every company strives to gain

8 Customer 360 For Dummies, Informatica Special Edition

According to Forbes Insights, data-driven marketers are six times

Looking at the elements of a great

To avoid driving your customers away, you truly need to know

CHAPTER 1 Introducing a Great Customer Experience 9

Why is this a common problem? Tactical or isolated attempts to

Another method is to try to fix the data manually. Marketing

A third method is to correct the data once a year, spending money

10 Customer 360 For Dummies, Informatica Special Edition

Do you understand your buyer’s end-to-end journey? When you

Recognizing why you need it

In order to display easy website navigation, you have to know

Impacting the Customer Experience

CHAPTER 1 Introducing a Great Customer Experience 11

Segmentation Identify opportunities to cross-sell, upsell, or acquire a

A trusted customer profile enriched with demographics,

Personalization Increase lead conversions by personalizing your

When your trusted customer profile is combined with

Relationships Improve your marketing results by bringing your

After you have a trusted customer profile, you can link

Marketing analytics Maximize your ROMI by understanding why customers

A trusted customer profile that’s connected to the

12 Customer 360 For Dummies, Informatica Special Edition

• Create micro-segments of customers for highly targeted

CHAPTER 1 Introducing a Great Customer Experience 13