How customer data stays secure yet available for collaboration
The Coronavirus has touched all aspects of life, including how and where people work. Even remote workers have had to draw some new boundaries with family at home. With a rapidly growing remote workforce, companies have been scrambling to adjust processes and infrastructure to keep the teams running and productive. Those that had moved to the cloud prior to this crisis are reaping real benefits now. Having the right tech stack is the foundation of seamless collaboration and effective remote work. Many technologies and software available can help teams perform like a well-oiled machine while working from home.
Marketers are familiar with tools that lend themselves to a virtual workplace, like marketing automation, e-commerce, content management, social media, and CRM systems. However, working remotely has its risks. Unsecure open networks, shared devices, personal use, keeping files and data on local machines, and phishing attacks raise data security flags, including data loss or leaks and customer privacy violations.
Secondly, the customer data in these systems are often siloed. Using siloed data creates gaps in the understanding of the full-funnel buyer journey, resulting in inconsistent customer experience. Exporting data and sharing files to close this gap can make data vulnerable. Furthermore, these manual steps to understand customers take time and adds steps in the marketing process, resulting in inefficiencies and productivity loss. Finally, for remote marketing team members, collaborating online is effective, but not as effective as in person.
A customer data platform (CDP), like ViewN, addresses these data security and productivity issues.
Customer Data Security and Privacy
CDPs have data security and privacy capabilities. When implementing a CDP, marketing teams examine their customer data capture and collection processes. Working with different sources of first-party data needs powerful technology to clean, tag, and merge the customer data. AI automates critical data management tasks efficiently and accurately. This cleansed, collected data is stored and kept secure by a high-level of encryption. CDPs also manage audit logs that monitor who accesses the data. Many CDPs provide role-based security models based on each marketer’s needs. With these data security measures in place, CDPs help ensures business continuity and minimizes risks of leaks and loss.
CDPs increasingly are indispensable tools for protecting customer privacy especially as CCPA and GDPR compliance regulations are now enforced. The capability of collecting and unifying the customer data from multiple sources and delivering actionable insights to marketers is also applied to ensure privacy preferences are enforced across disparate systems. With a CDP, privacy officers have one system of record to work with when responding to customer issues, while achieving compliance with new privacy rules.
Remote Marketing Team Productivity
The goal of a CDP is to help marketers create a more personalized customer experience and improved buyer journey. Unifying, analyzing, and making customer data available to other systems breaks down the barriers and gives cross-functional marketing teams a consistent and complete view of customer profiles, and target audience segments. Marketing teams use the holistic customer view, from a “single source of truth” to collaborate and develop programs and multi-channel campaigns, promotions, and offers. While a 360 degree understanding of the customer is important for any team, it’s very powerful for a remote team, as it keeps everyone on the same page, strategically. When customer insights are tied to real data, customer understanding is consistent across the organization, Remote marketers access these insights to optimize their respective programs.
Additionally, a CDP increases marketing’s productivity as it eliminates manual data pulls, spreadsheet manipulation, and file sharing for data analysis. These manual steps take time and mistakes can occur. With a CDP, AI generates analysis and actionable insights, including target segment opportunities and audience lists. These insights help employees demonstrate empathy to customers, who would normally receive it while interacting in a store or in the office. Empathy is what is lost between brand and customer due to digital experiences. That is what segmentation focused CDPs like VIEWN, build back for the marketer - understanding. This timely information is delivered to marketers, wherever they work, increasing their productivity, improving the customer experience, and enabling them to meet KPIs.
Today’s Uncertain Times. Ready For A Better Future
The COVID-19 pandemic and stay-at-home advisories have affected the economy and changed forecast models companies had put together at the beginning of 2020. With schools having to stay remote and a cure still a while away, uncertainty will remain for a bit. With the shift in customer priorities, companies have pulled back to re-evaluate how to respond. A CDP’s segmentation engine that keeps a pulse on customers, helps marketing teams understand and catch trends as they are happening, particularly how they impact the customer or the brand. This understanding and insights on customer attitudes and preferences enable marketers to react nimbly in the turbulent near-term. However, a CDP isn’t just a COVID-19 work from the home fix, it’s an investment in the future.
While it’s hard to focus on the future in these uncertain times, it’s important to realize that digital engagement is trending now and will accelerate when the pandemic is over. The digital customer experience creates an enormous amount of data and opportunities to gather insights about the customer, create better buyer journeys, and retain high-value loyal customers. Even when the COVID-19 pandemic is behind us, remote working may be here to stay. Remote marketers can be productive with a CDP, during the pandemic. They will be armed to handle the customer data explosion, as well as the changing attitudes and trends when things return to “normal”. Let’s hope we get there soon!
Thanks for reading. Please stay safe and in good health.
If you would like more information about ViewN and how our CDP may benefit your marketing team or brand, please click here.
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