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

Big Data: 98 per cent as good as gut feel

The Human Face of Big Data.Via Brian's Books

Not so long ago I was given a demonstration of a very clever bit of kit to analyse big data. By gathering evidence about your expressed preferences shared through social media it could make predictions about the preferences you don't articulate.

Scary clever.

The person presenting proudly told us how their analysis had identified the right kind of music to attract the target market to a new energy drink.
Let's say they picked Artist X as the ideal brand amabassador.

Funnily enough, Artist X was exactly the person the product's brand manager had come up with from their own 'analysis'. I'm sure they had some evidence. Some charts with brand positions. Some brand truths. All that malarky. But they had much more. They had stuff no one had written down, no one could easily define. They had what they felt.

And where was all this processed? In the 'gut' of the brand manager - someone living and breathing and believing the brand.

The vendors of the clever big data cruncher marvelled at how Artist X could be proven to be a 98% fit with the requirements of the brand.

I fear they may be wrong.

I suspect the brand manager was 100% right and that the dimensions of data captured by the tool has gaps - gaps that only guts can currently fill.

You process big data every day - with staggering accuracy. When you drive a car or walk along a crowded street you are processing huge amounts of information and making decisions on it. In real time. If only big data could do that? It's getting better. Our weather forecasts are one example. But it's not 100%. There's still room for your gut - and it's important room.

One final example. When I started out as a local newspaper man, my first sub-editing job was to go through what were called the village columns. We'd call it user generated content today. Reports from local correspondents of village fetes, whist-drives, bowls matches, bring and buys, church services - that kind of micro-local news. It was mostly hand-written (semi-scrawled) and often on unlined paper. And it was my task to correct, amend, headline, and guestimate. I'd mark it all up with instructions for the guys who would set the pages (using ems and picas, font names and point sizes).

And then I'd have to estimate how much I needed to cut or add, what depth I should set images to (for example) to fill the number of pages I had been allocated, accounting for the adverts booked on them. It was a task that was not unlike estimating the number of individual straws in a decent sized haystack.
Yet, within a few weeks, I could mark up all that separate, different-looking, miscellaneous copy and have the output fit within 5 or 6cms of the final column each week. All done without the aid of any big data analysis.

Big data has a hugely important role for organisations (and for governments) moving forward. Who controls it and to what ends it is used will occupy us for years to come. But throughout that process let's not forget the extra value that something human adds.