A Secret Recipe for Unified Customer Profiles

Some Assembly Required

One of the biggest challenges for marketers today is not collecting customer data, it’s getting it out of the systems that store it and into the systems that use it. Tech team requests, lag times, downloads and uploads, formatting, QC and testing – this is the noble work of marketers operating in a world where technology has at once simplified and complicated every single aspect of their jobs.

A Recipe for Disaster

Speaking of technology, let’s take a little break from it all. Step away from the your computer and imagine yourself in a space we all know well, the heart of any home, the Kitchen. You’re sitting at the table, feeling a bit hungry when suddenly the doorbell rings. It’s your neighbor, and she’s frantic. Someone has backed out of the annual bake sale and she needs your help. She begs you, please can you fill in? It’s for a good cause! You reluctantly agree.

She says you must bake three chocolate babkas by noon tomorrow. “Sure, no problem,” you say, acting like you make chocolate babkas all the time. You close the door behind her and head back to the kitchen to find out more about this thing called babka – and second, how to go about making one. After some time, you learn you can accomplish this task in one of two ways.

One option is to bake the babka from scratch, shopping for the ingredients at the grocery store, following a detailed recipe that requires you to do things like knead bread dough, use a double boiler, and perform several slicing, twisting and layering operations that are supposed to result in the style of loaf you now recognize from the Polish bakery down the street.

The second option is to just go to the Polish bakery down the street, buy two chocolate babkas and go on with your day.

If no one knew the difference, which option would you choose?

Leave it to the Professionals

In this example, the idea of making babka from scratch is how most marketers are pulling together and manipulating the data they need in order to create meaningful communications for their customers. They know they need and want the babka, or in this case a complete picture of their customers, but they must jump through some serious hoops to get it. The process is often a foreign one, requiring a high level of effort, a lot of time and a healthy amount of risk.

It may seem like a lot to overcome, but the solution to this problem is out there, and can be addressed with the right partner. Ingesting and unifying data onto one system can require work, but the end result, the babka, is worth it!

Find out how we have helped companies work to unify their customer data, enabling teams to reduce the amount of time and energy spend getting what they need to do their jobs and more time impacting their business through great customer marketing!

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