Data-driven Customer Experiences Requires More Than Infrastructure; Customer Data Platforms to Play Key Role in Effective Engagement -- Simon Data CEO Jason Davis

By Lane Cooper, Editorial Director, ​BizTechReports

Customer data platforms (CDPs) will play a critical role in bridging the gaps among data sources and types, while providing information in contexts that are meaningful to the different workforce disciplines that must share information to collaborate effectively.

As organizations look for ways to deliver data-driven customer experiences, many executives have focused on building out their data infrastructure to capture, store and share the explosion of structured, unstructured and telemetry data being generated today. Infrastructure alone, however, will not be enough to develop and implement effective customer engagement strategies, according to Jason Davis, co-founder and CEO of New York-based Simon Data, in a thought leadership interview with BizTechReports​.

The recent surge in data infrastructure implementations has largely been driven by organizations that have invested in emerging technologies -- like the Internet-of-Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and big data data analytics -- to support comprehensive digital transformation initiatives designed to bring them closer to their customers.

Analysts at IDC expect spending on ​AI systems alone to reach $97.9 billion per year by 2023​, more than two and one half times the $37.5 billion spent in 2019. As the conversation about capturing and analyzing the growing array of data evolves, the next phase of discussion will focus on how best to harvest insights from these infrastructures.

Full Audio Interview with Jason Davis

"Businesses are making significant investments in data infrastructure and have fairly well defined data strategies," Davis says. "But these efforts will not be sufficient to build truly data-driven customer experience organizations.”

Customer Data Platforms Bring Context to Deluge of Data

Customer data platforms (CDPs), he argues, will play a critical role in bridging the gaps among data sources and types, while providing information in contexts that are meaningful to the different workforce disciplines that must share information to collaborate effectively.

"CDPs represent an opportunity for key stakeholders -- including marketing, sales and other non-technical roles -- to better interact with technical teams while having direct access to relevant customer data," Davis says. "It's about much more than just having data for the purposes of insights or analytics. CDPs enable marketing and other customer experience leaders to quickly and directly take action in a way that has impact with customers."

That, he explains, is why interest in CDP systems are on the rise, especially in sectors like retail and consumer-packaged goods (CPG).

"I think today’s largest brands are looking at themselves and asking: How can I be more data-driven and build customer experiences that leverage all data assets available,” he says.

A Retail Case in Point

Simon Data is currently working with a large online retailer based in the UK to harness CDP resources to streamline and optimize customer engagement operations. The early results appear promising.

Prior to implementing CDP, the retailer typically invested between 30 and 60 days capturing and analyzing complex data sets to execute digital engagement campaigns.

“The effort required an aggregation of data assets from across the organization. It required a lot of back and forth exchanges with engineering and other members of the IT team. And the process entailed multiple cycles of review and approval to make sure that all the assets and the executional elements were in place,” explains Davis.

The CDP deployment made it possible to streamline the process by making data available in a useful format for the different disciplines in the organization collaborating on campaigns. This eliminated a lot of confusion and accelerated the go-to-market process.

"After the initial integration of data sources using the CDP, we were able to take that time from one to two months down to between one and two weeks,” Davis says.

“At Simon Data, we are working with our customers to make sure that key data is accessible and operational so that it can be used in all sorts of multi-faceted constructs to target customers at the right time, in the right place.”