How to Get a Customer 360 Without a Traditional CDP?

Traditional Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)are often costly and overly complex, with features that may not fit all businesses, causing integration and maintenance challenges.

So, how can businesses achieve a comprehensive customer 360 view without relying on these traditional CDPs? Is building a compelling customer 360 profile possible while avoiding the pitfalls of expensive platforms?

In this article, we’ll explore practical strategies for creating a robust customer 360 approach that addresses data silos and enhances customer experience, all without the constraints of conventional solutions.

The Struggle is Real

Retailers and e-commerce companies struggle to achieve personalized marketing due to fragmented customer data across systems. Orders, returns, and website activity are siloed, making it difficult for marketing teams to understand the customer journey. 

Rituals, for example, dealt with data from multiple sources, both on-premise and cloud-based. This fragmentation prevented them from getting a unified customer view, leading to engagement issues and higher IT costs. Their data management issues made it difficult to streamline and integrate their systems.

Similarly, Body&Fit, an e-commerce company, faced slow incident resolution and unclear data platform costs, making it difficult to manage customer data and optimize operations.

The Traditional CDP Approach

Traditional CDPs offer strong capabilities to consolidate customer data and build insightful profiles, improving the overall customer experience. However, they come with significant licensing, implementation, and maintenance costs.

Their complexity can create challenges in integrating legacy systems and migrating data, while their pre-defined workflows may not suit every business's unique needs.

Additionally, data privacy regulations raise concerns about centralizing customer data in external platforms.

Flexible Headless Solutions for Better Customer Insights

These flexible systems allow you to manage customer data without being tied to a single platform. Businesses can create a customized customer 360 view without relying on any user interface by unifying customer data through APIs, data warehouses, and integration platforms. This approach also supports robust data governance practices, ensuring data management and compliance are maintained across all systems.

For Rituals, this flexibility was essential for their customer CloudLoyalty program. We captured real-time data from various touchpoints and centralized it in Google Cloud, using Google Cloud Datastore for transactions, BigQuery for analytics, and Contact Services API on App Engine for scaling and load balancing. This setup provided real-time access and comprehensive insights.

As a result, Rituals' loyalty program has experienced substantial growth since 2017, now boasting nearly 25 million MyRituals members, highlighting the success of the headless approach.

Technologies like Google Cloud enable headless solutions by providing seamless integration with advertising platforms, advanced AI marketing tools, and a serverless architecture that eliminates ongoing maintenance. This combination streamlines operations and enhances flexibility, making headless solutions a powerful choice for businesses seeking agility and efficiency.

APIs: The Building Blocks of Customer 360

APIs are essential for creating a customer 360 by integrating data from various systems into a unified profile. They pull information from CRMs, billing systems, e-commerce platforms, and support tools, consolidating details like customer information and purchase history. 

APIs enable instant updates, ensuring every customer interaction is immediately reflected across all connected systems and data sources. This keeps the comprehensive view of your customer up to date, allowing sales, support, and marketing teams to always have access to the latest data.

Enhancing Data Accuracy and Deduplication with AddressAPI

APIs like AddressAPI streamline address cleaning and deduplication, significantly enhancing data quality. For instance, if a customer has two addresses with a typo, AddressAPI can automatically correct and standardize them. It can also merge multiple addresses and email variations into one accurate record. Additionally, when a customer logs in with a new email, AddressAPI helps create a golden record by consolidating all identifiers—addresses, emails, and contact details—into a unified profile, ensuring consistent recognition across all interactions.

GDPR Compliance Considerations

AddressAPI helps with GDPR compliance by handling the right to be forgotten. If a customer requests their data be deleted, AddressAPI ensures that all related information—such as addresses and emails—is completely removed from the system. This process supports effective customer relationship management by enhancing customer trust and ensuring adherence to data protection laws.

Unifying Data with Contact Services API

To achieve this kind of data unification, you can use the Contact Services API to connect various systems and ensure consistency. This API works in two ways: real-time synchronization, where customer data is immediately updated across all systems, and batch analysis through BigQuery, where large datasets can be examined and cleaned.

For example, if a customer updates their address or contact information, the real-time API ensures that all connected systems, such as CRM, billing, and support, reflect the change instantly. Meanwhile, BigQuery can analyze and deduplicate historical data, helping clean up legacy records and build a more accurate view of customers.

Data Warehouses for Storing Customer Data and Analytics

Storing and analyzing customer data is critical to building a Customer 360-degree view. A powerful cloud data warehouse like Google BigQuery is fundamental to effective data management and constructing a comprehensive single customer view. It acts as a centralized hub, efficiently collecting and organizing vast amounts of customer data from diverse sources.

BigQuery not only stores your data, it helps you make sense of it. Its open and flexible architecture and built-in machine learning allow for deep customer understanding.

In the end, a cloud data warehouse isn't just about collecting data, it's about turning that data into actionable insights to:

• Identify high-value customers based on their lifetime value or frequency of interaction.
  
  
• Create customer segments for targeted marketing, such as customers who haven't purchased in over six months or those who frequently return items.
  
  
• Identify patterns of churn based on behavioral data, allowing you to reach out with personalized retention strategies.
  
  

Integration Platforms: Automating Data Flow Across Systems

Data integration platforms automate workflows and data synchronization between different tools to further streamline the data unification process. For example, the Google Application Integration Platform enables seamless connectivity between CRMs, e-commerce platforms, and marketing systems.

For customers with two addresses, the Google Integration Application Platform automatically updates the CRM and all connected systems once AddressAPI corrects the data. 

After customers update their shipping address or return a product, the integration platform ensures their profile is updated across the CRM, billing, and marketing systems. This guarantees that marketing teams can send personalized follow-up emails and customer support has full visibility of the customer's latest interactions, helping to improve customer experience by providing a consistent and accurate profile.

Building a Customer 360 Without a CDP is Possible

With the right tools, creating a comprehensive customer 360 view without a traditional CDP is achievable. Businesses can build a unified customer profile by utilizing APIs to integrate and synchronize customer data across systems and Google BigQuery for advanced storage and analysis. Integration platforms further streamline data flow, ensuring consistency and real-time updates, crucial for delivering a personalized customer experience.

These strategies address various use cases, from managing data fragmentation to improving customer data management practices. Crystalloids can be a trusted partner in this journey, offering expertise and solutions to help you leverage these technologies effectively.