In a world where we now buy basically everything online and where smooth digital services like Netflix and Spotify have made customer expectations skyrocket, we need to look beyond traditional recommendations and cross-sell methods which are channel specific. To be successful today, you need to take a holistic approach to your digital experiences, touch points and data. You need to tailor the experience to each context, and in order to do so you need to rethink your approach. The ability to make unique combinations of customer and content data and tailor it to every context in real-time is a key capability to instantly give customers what they expect.
First, what do I mean with context? Context can be a variety of things, it can be:
- A specific location
- The current weather
- The type of screen your customer is browsing
- Past interactions your customer had with your touch points
- A specific price range
- A specific product category
- A specific brand(s) in your portfolio
The real value for customers (and the business) is when you can combine this contextual data with the more traditional and structured data you have about your customers, such as: where they live, their gender, how old they are, what they have previously purchased etc and the content you have created about your products and brand.
This is an impossible task with a traditional tech approach
Because of the fragmented CX tech landscape, customer and content data sets are stored in separate backend systems, like CRM, ERP and DAM systems (that are often built on legacy technology). These systems were not built to make data accessible in real-time for delivering a digital experience, they are built to create and store data. This ends up being a hindrance when you want to put the data to use and create an experience with it. You need to combine it with other contextual data and fuel the combination to a frontend touchpoint in milliseconds, and do so on a global scale to meet customers’ expectations of a compelling experience. The bigger business you have, the bigger your problem is: If you want to make tens of thousands of API calls per second, most legacy “systems of record” fall over and the data becomes inaccessible.
One additional factor that is driving the need to rethink your approach is the need to use more 1st party data (as a result of the new “cookie laws” demanding consumer data privacy). For you to build 1st party data sets that are big enough to base relevant experiences on, it is critical that you can capture and reuse data across experiences and touch points (aka contexts). Having this ability, instead of working with channels in isolation will build you a valuable data pool much faster and make sure it is continuously up to date and relevant.
An Experience Data Platform is the solution to deliver contextually relevant experiences
With an Experience Data Platform from Occtoo, you can overcome these challenges and start to put all your data to use. With Occtoo you can unify, combine and collect customer, content and context data from your backend systems and all your digital destinations and customer interactions through real-time Experience APIs. This gives you a dynamic, and up to date data-pool that your digital touch points have instant access to. You can quickly create new experiences for new contexts without the need for a lot of developer resources. This solution enables your team to spend more time creating sophisticated experiences and give customers what they want given each context. And as the number of customer touch points is ever increasing, it is crucial that you can quickly build new experiences to continuously innovate your customer experience at the same pace as customer behaviors and expectations change.
With Occtoo in your stack you will finally be able to put your data to use and easily build new relevant experience fit for any channel and context
Even more great news: You don’t even need to replace your technology investments(!). Occtoo sits on top of these backend systems, being the data layer that combines your assets and makes the datasets available in real-time. This actually makes your previous investments in backend systems even more valuable. You are able to combine all your data into unique and relevant customer experiences and you can instantly scale them across the world. Regardless of whether your customers are browsing your mobile app on a sunny day in Sydney, discovering your assortment of Apple computers on your in-store screen in Miami, making their shopping list on Alexa in Shanghai, or researching a selection of premium shoes on your website in Buenos Aires, they all get a relevant experience tailored to their unique context.
You might also like: The time-consuming and costly problem with how digital experiences are built, and how to fix it!
I hope I sparked some thoughts on how you can reimagine your digital experience technology stack. To win market and wow customers, this is what you need going forward: Offer contextually relevant experiences in any of your current or future touch points wherever your customers interact with you.
Please reach out to me at moritz.zimmermann@42cap.com or to the team at Occtoo here if you want to learn more!
Want to learn more? Contact the team at Occtoo and learn how you can fast forward your customer experience innovation
About Occtoo
Occtoo is an Experience Data Platform that supports retailers and brands to build relevant digital experiences and applications at rapid speed. Occtoo's platform makes it easy to access and unify enterprise data from backend systems such as CRM, ERP, PIM etc. and combine it with behavioral and contextual data to create relevant digital experiences that can be deployed in any channel or frontend in real-time at a global scale. Selected companies being successful with Occtoo is Cartier, Fjällräven and Nordic Nest.