Time for tech to step up with a single truth view

Fake News needs stamping out. It's undermining democracies and right now it's costing lives.

Every time a Covid denier or anti-vaxxer spreads their evidence-empty theories they risk not only many lives, but - no doubt unwittingly - they also support an insidious racism. 

Ask yourself - who would want to target the South Asian Muslim community with the bullshit about pork and alcohol products in the vaccines? Who benefits from creating extra risk of Covid death in a community already over-represented in the list of victims?

Just as we all have a role to play in preventing the spread of the virus, so we all have a role to play in preventing the spread of fake news. So crank up your crap filters. Challenge with facts or just block and walk away (don't feed the troll...)

But we could use some help in this. We have the tech to be much smarter in our response to fake news - and more scalable.

Through data validation and verification - and the application of AI and ML to unstructured data, we have made great leaps in personal identity. Customer Data Platforms enable clear sight of the individual - where-ever you tread digitally - whether that be web, mobile, voice and increasingly in the digitally augmented real world. It's why when (potentially) Alexa listens, Facebook targets you with an ad.

We call it the Single Customer View - aka the one version of the truth. Once established as a kernel it is built upon with each new data discovery - person A is - called X, lives at Y, eats at Z. These remain true until updated - always back to that single person A as the kernel.

Given the alarming and real challenge of Fake News, it's time the same tech guns were turned on fact, rapidly evaluating the source of the kernel of the fact, ranking it for quality and quantity of source to provide an early estimate of accuracy - and then built upon with a network of validation. Posts could be red / amber /green flagged in real time.

Imagine the frustration of the anti-vaxxer whose links to sources are instantly red-flagged for reputation? That might wake them up, too.

Yes, I know, there are questions about whose version of the truth we test by. Google already offers more weight to links it trusts. The BBC already decides what stories it will broadcast and how it will tell them. Our access to 'truth' IS already edited.

The web was meant to be a way that truth could always find a way - overcoming state control or media mediation. But the last few years have taught us that our mass congregation in social networks makes (some, too many of) us vulnerable to influence and control by bad actors.

Those bad actors exploit human vulnerabilities (and build bots to do the same). Now good actors must step up and rebalance - subjecting lies to scrutiny and giving those susceptible to believe them to the tools to alert them to the distinct possibility they are being sold a pup.

Image via UN

Value in the gap between real relationships and the Uncanny Valley

The rise of Customer Data Platforms and the demise of simple CRM is plotting a course toward the CX-centred One Office - a re-platformed enterprise designed to predict and align supply to demand through orchestrated and automated systems of experience, productivity, trust and intelligence.

They are a response to the increasingly fractured and distanced relationship that brands have with their customers. Customer expectations have been on the rise since the possibility of personalisation online started to emerge after an era of one-size-fits-all mass media marketing. We now bathe in the warm glow of being 'remembered' by the airline crew or hotel staff. We like that companies keep track of our previous purchases and other items we browsed - for our convenience.

We yearn for the kind of customer intimacy the marketplace once delivered to us through face-to-face transactions at the same store, in the same town, week after week. We loved that they anticipated our need - the deli starting to prepare our order the moment they spotted us in the queue, for example.

1-2-1 relationships were easy in the real world. They just weren't scalable.

It is in the gap between real relationships and an uncanny valley of intimacy extrapolated from data, that the new platforms compete.

Customer Data Platforms - such as Adobe's Real Time CDP, Salesforce's Customer 360 Audiences, Amazon's Amperty and MS Dynamics CDP bring together data from as many digital touch points as their users are able to identify - and instrument - to provide a '360 degree' view of the customer. 

They can be managed directly by the marketers best positioned to use the outputs and - through smart orchestration - cut out the need to access, manage and reconfigure multiple systems to create customer profiles, plan and test marketing campaigns, design strategies and predict behaviour. They meet the increasing focus on Life Time Value among marketeers to counter the ever-rising Cost Per Acquisition they face amid tough competition in Search.

The intent is to optimise CX down to the segment of 1 - in real time. The intent is to sell more stuff to people.

It's a rapidly growing market with over 100 vendors already in the space and in which a series of high-profile acquisitions have seen the likes of SessionM acquired by Mastercard, Treasure Data by ARM and Allsight captured by Informatica.

For enterprises late to digital, they offer a fast track to catch up and even over take rivals in digital marketing.

But for all the trumpeting of the application of AI, built-in controls on privacy and security of data, their successful application remains both data and human dependent. They are no panacea for limited data sources, or for creating appropriate customer-centred strategy or tactics in response to insights gleaned.

The best are able to play the roles of both systems of insight and systems of engagement - not only achieving a view of the customer, but deploying the next best action to engage that customer.

But the journey need not, and should not, stop there. 

The winners will be those that see their future in becoming seamlessly integrated with systems of productivity - that understand that their role is in the journey to a CX-centred One Office enterprise in which front-middle and back office are one. (One Office is a vision for 2025 laid out by HFS Research).

This identifies an opportunity for CDPs: To provide insight for business decision making not just in marketing and sales, but across the product, service and experience design lifecycle.

CDPs have a role to play in making products which are best fit with deeply understood customer need. Close that gap and the CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) collapses - with satisfied customers readily taking on the role of enthusiastic peer-to-peer marketers.

Engaging qualitative CX data - at the level of anthropological and ethnographic research - offers a way to address the 'Why' questions that quantitative data misses - reducing the breadth and cost of A/B testing - and time to market. Known as Thick Data, this insight into the emotional lives of consumers goes beyond that available in big data. It can explain why consumers choose what they do, the reasons behind their behaviour, and offer guidance on why some trends stick when others do not.

The extension into value innovation (iterating products and services with the focus on end user need) places customer need at the heart of the organisation. When amplified within a One Office environment the enterprise is equipped with the dynamic and connected processes and capabilities to recognise new contexts, gather insight into human needs emerging in those new contexts, and produce responses at pace towards those emerging needs.

The best businesses have always known their customers well and responded fastest to their changing needs.

CDPs can do so much more than simply understand and respond to current needs with marketing. They can be the cornerstone in anticipating new needs and producing best-fit responses as they emerge.

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash