Recap & Outlook: Customer and First-party data-driven Transformation

This is a summary of my team's 2021 experience, based on 500+ meetings with our Customers, industry professionals, executive sponsors of Digital Transformations, and P&L owners of lines of businesses that spoke to us about improving their business using Customer and First-party Data.

Business Goals

Even though our 2021 conversations were conducted across FS, TMT, Retail sectors, the "desired outcomes" in the minds of the industry colleagues can be clubbed together into the following three areas:

Better Customer experience

Digital and eCommerce executives are driving collaboration between the creative side of the Customer Experience (page flow, look and feel, image and creative) and the data-driven Customer Journey orchestration and activation (customer identity graph, golden path analysis, real-time discounting, marketing activation, retargeting, persona and segmentation). Real-time Data-driven CX has graduated from a slideware aspiration to a must-have capability in Digital commerce.

Greater Revenue resilience

P&L owners are actively partnering with their Data & Insights counterparts to harness the First-party data in finding new non-linear revenue streams to provide resiliency in a volatile Covid/semi-lockdown environment.

Bigger Cost reduction

Data and Machine learning have made Automation not just possible, but also significantly effective in reducing repetitive tasks and providing a substantial time and cost advantage.

The What/How?

The Cloud

In 99% of the conversations we've had in 2021, the overall data architecture included a major cloud provider. Businesses have hired data engineers and data scientists, and are actively building ETL into their public cloud instance, collecting more and more data from enterprise and digital sources into the data lake in Cloud. The data lakes are in cloud-based warehouses like BigQuery and Snowflake. This situation is vastly different from two years ago when there were still questions about building Hadoop data centers. In all fairness, Cloud capabilities and in-house teams training have come a long way recently, driving more and more organizations to adopt Public Clouds and data warehouses.

Data Unification

Even though how Cloud-based data lakes are common sights at most organizations in 2021, data unification (post ETL) has become the next front. Specifically, it is challenging and rewarding having a customer 360 view built off of digital and enterprise data right within the data lake without having to worry about building these from scratch or worrying about managing complex hourly/daily data file dependencies, having business alerts, lineage etc.

It's all well and good to perform ETL and manage the operational complexity to get the data into one data lake with reliability, resilience, and scalability. It's a different order of magnitude of a challenge to unify this Customer and First-party data into a common data model and analytics-friendly schema that can be used by data analysts and data scientists, as well as for real-time activation, in a scalable and reliable manner.

Outlook & Summary

It isn't a coincidence that we are noticing an increased level of collaboration between internal teams at our buyers, in tandem when cloud providers like GCP and Azure are seeing their revenue grow 50% YoY.

Our conversations with customers and buyers often have had two or more sets of stakeholders join in from across Data & Insights, Cloud and Big Data, Business Intelligence, Marketing, Omnichannel CX, Ecommerce Trading. Many internal departments have now got interdependent KPIs and benefit from working on platforms that have the potential of supporting multiple initiatives without a lock-in penalty.

It is the start of the demise of point solutions to solve individual tactical challenges that come with managing and scaling Customer and first-party data, for each individual team (Digital, CX, Marketing, ...). 2022 will be pivotal in the adoption of an integrated data eco-system on common/open cloud tech that enables many teams at the same time.

Cloud is the foundation of this change, Customer and First-party Data unification is the vehicle.