TL;DR: The word of the day is confluence. This article summarizes the confluence of your data goals, marketing expectations, and consumer privacy & protection policies. We’ll conclude with how OpenINSIGHTS Customer Analytics & Predictive Insights platform addresses all of these challenges – with no on-going subscription or software fees.
Your Data Goals
Ownership. It’s your shopper data. It’s one of your greatest assets and your most important weapon for optimizing your business. You’ve known this and it’s why you’ve been working towards data ownership – to bring your single shopper view in-house. However, you probably continue to encounter challenges with data availability (granular behavioral data) and identity reconciliation. You’ve been fighting an up-hill battle against legacy systems to consolidate transactional activity, from in-store and order management, into a single, modern, high-performance data environment.
OpenINSIGHTS: Your Internal Single Shopper View IS your CDP, so stop spending on both
Empowerment. It’s why many of you undertook ownership efforts and why data ownership remains a high priority today. You had a vision not just to centralize data, but to create organizational centralization around the customer.
OpenINSIGHTS: The goals of being a “Customer-Centric Company” and a “Data-Driven Organization” were always connected.
Machine Learning. Yes, beyond the vendor buzz, you know there is real value in leveraging data science to produce insights. You’ve taken steps – hired the right people, provided access to the data you can – and you’ve even seen some early results. The next big challenge you will face won’t come from the data, it will come from the data science.
OpenINSIGHTS: Transitioning data science from project to product requires specialization.
There is a chasm that exists between data science projects and data science product. The span between creating an insight once vs. an “operational insight” which perpetually runs, self-tunes, and provides sustained value is substantial and requires specialization in architecture, infrastructure, methodology, and development.
Policy
Beyond GDPR. GDPR was the beginning, a precursor to the next consumer protection and privacy rallying point for legislative bodies both abroad and in the United States. From CCPA to New York Senate Bill 224, disclosures of what data we have and who can access it (3rd party access) are driving both tighter compliance and re-evaluation of where and how data is distributed.
Data Liability. New methods of quantifying data liability are already sweeping across the insurance and financial services vertices and will soon find their way into retail.
OpenINSIGHTS: $1.58 per customer record, per distribution, is average cost per data breach – let’s limit that liability .
The liability standard is not just $.58 per record in your database, it’s $.58 for every instance of that record both within and out of your enterprise. For an average retailer, their distributed PII represents just under $200m in potential liability.
Data Repatriation. Data repatriation is simply the concept of bringing your data back into your enterprise and limiting its distribution. This is a trend we are already seeing in top tier retail brands, specifically in martech, as they begin leveraging non-PII bearing keys/tokens to distribute audiences to their vendors and mobilize marketing programs.
OpenINSIGHTS: Data Repatriation in retail is following paths already blazed in martech by financial services vendors a decade ago.
Marketing
Vendor Spend Re-allocation. When you own your data, your reliance on external vendors diminishes. You could save well into the 6 to 7 figures annually through the elimination of vendors or premium features that are no longer required.
Strategic Marketing. When data’s possibilities move beyond simply descriptive to prescriptive, opportunities open up. We can drive higher quality traffic (to stores and digital properties), maintain and expand share-of-wallet, and mitigate churn risk while maximizing win back. This path is only enabled through customer intelligence, focused on retail and designed for cross sales channel customer optimization.
Tactical Enablement. There are gaps that exists between being able to deploy a handful of programs and achieving real scale. The first is creative execution – which should be able to align audience, to campaign thematic, to individualized merchandising, as it’s the only path to achieve scale. The second is one of sharing information with your marketing vendors – be it key based or PII – enabling them to readily assemble marketing/advertising programs. Both of these are core to recognizing that the mission of customer intelligence isn’t audience, it’s marketing enablement.
OpenINSIGHTS
Data Goals. We deploy all of our technology into your own existing cloud. Yes, it’s your single shopper view, but one that manages what that means in a retailer’s world. It’s our machine learning, including our collection of existing insights (including our neural network), and the infrastructure to transition your own internal efforts from project to product. It’s LookerBI – deployed by us – with training included, because data’s value is only potential until we unlock it.
OpenINSIGHTS goes beyond data ownership. All Open infrastructure is perpetually licensed to you, including source code availability, with no on-going subscription or software fees.
Privacy & Consumer Protection. Open is now providing its Privacy and Consumer Protection designs as part of its core deployment model. As part of deployment, we sit down with your team to review options, including discussion on future policy considerations. Ultimately, we design the level of deployment that aligns to your needs today and demands for tomorrow.
Marketing. Open is marketing transformation. We provide a path that clearly aligns strategic business goals to required customer insights, to marketing program enablement and execution through your vendor ecosystem.
In Closing. We built OpenINSIGHTS to modernize marketing. While we won’t make any statements of perfection, we will offer that OpenINSIGHTS provides a strong foundation for data, infrastructure and organizational transformation.
by Angel Morales
