Customer journey orchestration. Integrated MarTech suite or best-of-breed solutions?

Intro

According to a research study by Gartner, for 91% of marketers, the best-of-breed approach is key to meeting or exceeding their expectations in customer journey orchestration. Despite the integration nightmares. But only 20% of them are able to achieve this.

Why? The challenge of getting best-of-breed tools to orchestrate your customer journeys doesn’t get solved once you integrate the platforms. What is going smoothly may suddenly hit a bump and spoil the whole show.

The Story

Here’s one of our banking clients that trusts best-of-breed approach. They use Unica to build customer segments and orchestrate campaigns, and use Acoustic to relay campaigns on Email and SMS channels.

For over two years, the client was able to achieve campaign velocity targets. They were able to run 50+ campaigns every day. Until they hit a roadblock.

One fine day, suddenly the campaigns became chaotic. Campaigns were taking an hour to complete; some even took 5! Deadlines were missed, and people upstairs were asking uncomfortable questions. Schedules using #SendTimeOptimization fell by the wayside.

Platform vendors were called. They suggested increasing database size. But this didn’t make much difference. Someone needed to get to the root of the problem. We were called. As we are their MarTech partner.

Problem: We discovered the root cause for crawling campaigns. A bloated distended database. Not cleaned up in 2 years. An unwieldy database of - 205mn email contacts and 2mn SMS contacts.

Solution: Prima facie, use Acoustic Purge feature to delete obsolete output lists. But.

We knew using Acoustic's native Purge feature to delete contacts is not so straightforward. Every time a contact is deleted from the main database; Acoustic's purging workflow recalculates its size and tallies it with all child databases. Imagine you had 250,000 obsolete contacts to delete. The recalculation process would run in a loop just as many times! And for each child database!

The workaround Solution: The Unica Campaign Acoustic messaging duo works well only if there is a synergy in terms of messaging throughput. But this isn’t the case here.

We recommended 2 things:

Priority 1 - Campaigns to run on time. So, we scheduled all deletions to run between 0830 and 1100 hrs. Campaigns should run on schedule from 1130hrs and not be slowed by the load from the deletion activity. The Show must go on!

Priority 2 - Find a different way to speed-up the deletion process, while still maintaining database integrity.

We advised the following work-around:

• Develop and run a query for contacts to be deleted, in bite-sized 15-day batches. Store the output to a temporary query database. (1)
• Import temp data into backup db inside the client's environment. (2)
• Validate counts of the two, just to be sure.
• Execute Acoustic Purge and store output in purged contacts database (3)
• Validate counts and hash totals between purged data and backup data.

After this, cancel the post purge revalidation loop that Acoustic defaults into. Essentially, we advised that the client does manually, what Acoustic is doing through a program loop to ensure database integrity. Sometimes MarTech is funny.

Happy Outcomes

To date, 24 months of obsolete email contact data has been deleted. SMS data cleanup is still pending. Some more miles to go before they sleep.

Campaigns and emails go in 15min frequencies as planned. No more hanging.

Process for consistent cleaning up of database memory integrated into workflow.

The Takeaway?

Does this mean brands should blindly opt for integrated suites over best-of-breed solutions? It depends. Both the options have their own pros and cons. That’s why platform selection is an important phase in MarTech procurement.