Historically, marketers and customer experience (CX) professionals have used behavioral information to inform their decisions. This includes data from websites, mobile apps, CRM apps, and campaign tools. But there are looming problems with this approach. First, the availability of behavioral data is increasingly at risk as privacy attitudes change and customers, brands, and regulators shift focus towards privacy-first experiences. And second, behavioral data alone is incomplete. It lacks the operational information from subscriptions, billing, contracts, offline activity, cancelations, and transaction histories that can be a better predictor of future customer actions and preferences.

Without a new view of customer intelligence, CX professionals can inadvertently jeopardize customer-facing initiatives. Success in the future requires an increased emphasis on operational data—and AI models that help make sense of the data.

Identifying alternatives

Most organizations depend on a diverse and growing array of back-office systems and applications to store and process customer information. There are often separate applications for demand forecasting, order management, financial management, project management, asset management, warranty entitlements, and service logistics, for example. By consolidating and using operational data from these kinds of systems, you can reduce the dependence on behavioral data while simultaneously building a richer, more complete view of the customer.

What specific types of customer data should you prioritize? That depends on so many factors that it is virtually impossible to predict the precise combination of source systems that will yield success. Implementing a purpose-built tool for combining front- and back-office data is a far easier solution.

Considering a customer data platform

Customer data platforms (CDPs) like Oracle Unity help businesses consolidate and use data to understand customers and their journeys. CDPs can:

  • Eliminate data silos to create a more holistic, unified view of your customers or key accounts across enterprise data sources.
  • Deepen customer intelligence to improve cross-channel personalization in marketing, speed sales cycles, and enable predictive customer service, all of which help organizations increase customer engagement, loyalty and ultimately, revenue.
  • Help you manage customer data in ways that comply with data privacy regulations to avoid costly fines and penalties.

Oracle Unity Customer Data Platform

In addition to these general CDP benefits, Oracle Unity is purpose built to marry front- and back-office data sources. It combines customer intent signals from digital properties with back-office operational data to create comprehensive, real-time customer and account profiles. AI models, built natively into the platform, use these complete profiles to help with next best offers and actions, propensity modeling, intelligent scoring, and real-time recommendations. You can use Oracle Unity to do things like:

  • Leverage offline data for online experiences: Data on in-store purchases, call center interactions, or even warranty registrations through the mail can seed digital profiles to deliver a personalized online experience, even if you haven’t interacted with that customer in a digital context before.
  • Improve cross-sell and upsell campaigns: Financial data like customer billing, subscriptions, and contract information can power AI-based, next-best actions and drive customer engagement to proactively prevent churn.
  • Create successful win-back campaigns: Including inventory data in customer profiles can dramatically improve win-back campaigns targeted to customers who missed previous purchase opportunities.
  • Identify customers with a high propensity to buy: Group and opportunity scoring can quickly and accurately identify opportunities within a buying group by using AI to detect signals based on role, title, and engagement.

Summing up

With Oracle Unity, organizations can turn data from ERP and other back-office systems into trusted, AI-enabled customer profiles. These profiles help maximize enterprisewide customer intelligence that improves every customer engagement, a significant long-term payoff.

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