In our recent webinar, Plinc (formerly Planning-inc) delved into the core principles of a customer-first approach, sparking a vibrant exchange of thoughts and inquiries. As we received an array of insightful questions from our engaged audience, we decided to answer the most frequently asked questions we hear about this topic.
Watch the full webinar recording
Q. What is customer-first?
A customer-first strategy entails prioritising the customer at the epicentre of all business decisions, emphasising customer-centricity over product or vertical-led strategies. This approach hinges on robust customer reporting and KPIs and requires advanced personalisation and targeting capabilities.
Q. Is gathering all customer data for personalised marketing essential, or is having the right data on your platform enough?
Balancing personalised marketing and gathering comprehensive customer data is crucial. Gradually enriching personalisation with more data enhances its effectiveness. A continuous 360° Single Customer View is pivotal for gaining insightful customer understanding. Without this comprehensive view, decisions risk lacking the necessary precision required for impactful outcomes.
For example, Plinc’s Future Value Model enables marketers to create super-targeted audiences, tapping into customer data like transactions and website engagement to optimise their campaigns. Using AI-powered solutions to analyse and predict customer behaviour helps users forecast audiences and plan during peak periods. However, to effectively use this model, a business must ensure its core data foundation is comprehensive, unified, and built for insight and activation.
Q. Is there an optimal update frequency that brands should aim for when it comes to updating their content or information?
The optimal frequency of update depends on specific use cases. Utilising advanced technology allows near real-time updates, exemplified by instances like Crew Clothing’s Black Friday reporting.
Q. What defines sophisticated personalisation?
Sophisticated personalisation entails seamless cross-channel experiences, ensuring consistency across various online and offline touchpoints. It also involves contextual personalisation rooted in customer transactions and behaviours, offering tailored experiences that resonate deeply with individual customers’ interests and actions.
Q. Which element is most crucial for enabling a customer-first approach?
While reporting and insights are pivotal, the fundamental data structure is the bedrock. Establishing a robust data foundation is imperative as it underpins the effectiveness of subsequent initiatives, including reporting, personalisation, and other customer-centric strategies.
Q. How will generative AI like ChatGPT influence content creation for personalisation?
AI models, including ChatGPT, present an opportunity to scale content creation, especially in scenarios demanding diverse messaging variants. However, privacy and brand governance considerations must accompany open AI models for content creation.
Q. How do you balance the need to have all data in one place with the cost of collecting and using that data, especially when platform charges are based on data points, updates, and API calls?
When integrating with campaign platforms that charge based on data updates or volume, our approach is to keep the main broadcasting platform (like Email Service Providers) as lightweight as possible. This ensures cost control, avoiding unnecessary charges for hosting and updating. We maintain the core data and orchestration separate to limit these costs. By doing this, we also keep our options open to easily switch platforms, while ensuring our essential data remains internally accessible across the business. This approach reduces risks associated with relying solely on a single system in case of a future move or change.
Q. What is Unilyze?
Unilyze, Plinc’s AI-enhanced, real-time data platform, connects millions of customers and billions of interactions for insight and activation. Unilyze provides an updated daily view of customer performance, split by about 100 different views off the shelf. These analytics encompass loyalty segments, lifecycles, and predictive segments, empowering more informed discussions among customer marketers.
The questions asked in the webinar showed how a customer-first approach has many different layers, which include starting with good data, updating content often, and using advanced ways to personalise. We introduced customer dashboards that not only enhance team discussions but also democratise data access, catering to the needs of ‘citizen analyst’ – putting data in the hands of non-technical experts to meet core customer North Star KPIs and achieve cross-channel personalisation capability, effective diagnostics and measurement and agility.
If you have questions or want to learn more about Unilyze, get in touch. Our solutions experts are happy to discuss your business’s customer-first transformation and provide tailored insights.
