Top 3 priorities for the CIO in 2023 as a Data Steward – Part 2

Introduction

In the first part of this series, we covered the importance of setting up a real-time customer data platform and why it should be a top priority for the Chief Information Officer (CIO), who plays the role of a data steward.

In part 2 of this series, we discuss the second-most priority for a CIO as a data steward, i.e., enabling cross-channel customer journey analytics.

This may seem like an irony given the privacy developments that have happened over the last few months.

• The CPRA amendment has been made to California's CCPA and Virginia's comprehensive privacy law, the VCDPA.
• CPRA enforcement is scheduled to commence in July 2023. Colorado, Connecticut, and Utah's privacy laws will come into effect later in 2023.

What this means to a CIO is that, as a data steward, they need to be even more vigilant in using customer data.

Yet, we strongly believe CIOs should enable their CMOs to get access to cross-channel customer journey analytics.

Let’s see what it is, why it is important, and how CIOs can go about it.

What is cross-channel customer journey analytics?

Cross-channel customer journey analytics is the process of capturing and aggregating your customers’ interactions across touchpoints such as email, social media, websites, mobile apps, and offline channels like in-store interactions, call center interactions, etc., and then analyzing the same to gain a comprehensive understanding of their journey.

Cross-channel customer journey analytics helps identify opportunities to optimize and personalize their experiences to improve customer satisfaction and drive business growth.

This involves analyzing customer data collected from various sources, including transactional data, behavioral data, demographic data, and social data, and mapping customer journeys to understand their behavior, preferences, and pain points.

Cross-channel customer journey analytics deliver a 360-degree view of customers. It enables your CMO to deliver a seamless and consistent experience across all channels, improve customer engagement, and increase customer loyalty and retention.

Why cross-channel customer journey analytics is important for your business?

The basic challenge with current piecemeal analytics tracking solutions lies in the way visitors are identified.

The same customer is identified with a temporary cookie ID on a pre-login website, an email address or mobile number in the mobile app, a customer ID or email ID on a post-login website, a mobile number at points of sale, and so on.

Furthermore, integrating data from these sources is a nightmare.

This is where cross-channel customer journey analytics come into play.

Imagine you are the CIO of a retail brand that also has an e-commerce portal. Let us see a simple scenario to discover how your CMO has been hampered by insufficient analytical capabilities and how cross-channel customer journey analytics would help.

1. Imagine Samantha, your prospect, visits your e-commerce portal for the first time from her laptop without logging in. She browses for a pair of jeans and exits after seeing a couple of brands.
2. A few hours later, she downloads your app and looks for a pair of jeans again as a guest user. She exits the app without taking any other action.
3. Two days later, she creates an account in the mobile app using her mobile number and casually browses products without any real intent.
4. The same day, she visits your physical store and buys the same pair of jeans that she browsed on your e-commerce portal and the app.
5. She gives her mobile number at the point of sale for the purpose of billing.

Given the current analytical capabilities that are not integrated, your CMO may end up retargeting Samantha to buy the pair of jeans even after she has bought them in the store.

Isn’t the retargeting ad a waste now?

If your CMO had had a cross-channel customer journey analytics capability, this is what would have happened.

1. Samantha’s browsing pattern on her anonymous session, including her device details, would have been captured by the analytical platform.
2. The moment she created her account, the cross-channel customer journey analytics platform would have mapped her anonymous browsing behavior to her profile.
3. After her purchase of the pair of jeans in the store, her mobile number would have been used as an identifier, and her profile would have been updated.
4. When your CMO’s team was preparing the retargeting list, Samantha would have automatically been excluded, thus saving the media money that would have otherwise been spent on retargeting.

This is a na?ve example of how cross-channel customer journey analytics helps a retailer. Your CMO can build hundreds of complex use cases for using cross-channel customer journey analytics, thus contributing to both your organization’s top and bottom lines.

A word of caution. The above use case may seem relevant to a real-time customer data platform as well. However, unlike a real-time CDP that tracks individual-level data, customer journey analytics platforms aggregate all user data and present a holistic picture for you to craft and optimize experiences.

How can CIOs go ahead enabling cross-channel customer journey analytics?

As the CIO and data steward, the first and foremost step towards going about this is to identify an enterprise Customer Journey Analytics solution that is built for this purpose.

One that can track and integrate data from any source. One that complies with privacy guidelines such as the CCPA, GDPR, etc. One that gives insights and does not confuse you.

However, providing your CMO with access to cross-channel customer journey analytics platforms is only the beginning. And not the end.

You need to help your CMO with what metrics and events are to be tracked and how to stitch identities so that she can visualize journeys.

Also, remember that there is a fine line between using the capabilities of cross-channel customer journey analytics to be prescient and being creepy.

Help your CMO make the platform users aware of the privacy labels and policies that you will create on the datasets and the restrictions that you impose on users for using sensitive data.

Also, ensure warnings and labels are added to reports with sensitive data and explain how the data should be treated.

This allows your CMO’s team to confidently use data while complying with the policies that you set as a Data Steward.

If you have an in-house team that can do this, fine. But it is always best to leave this to a cross-channel customer journey analytics expert .

This marks the end of Part 2 of this three-part series. Tune in for the final part, where we cover why Data Cleanroom should be the third priority for a CIO who is also a data steward.