Brands such as Uber, Netflix, and Amazon have set such a high bar for customer personalization. With their powerful built-in data systems, cutting-edge predictive analytics and machine learning systems, these companies have a good understanding of their customer’s journey across various touch points, thus allowing them to offer consumers a more rewarding and enriching experience.
Unlike these big brands, though, not all companies are fortunate enough to be optimized for personalization from the ground up. In order to give customers a consistent, more personalized experience, companies need to equip themselves with a comprehensive yet easy-to-use platform that will allow them to make sense of an enormous amount of customer data and get a 360-degree view of their customers. That’s where the Customer Data Platform (CDP) comes in.
SourceForge recently caught up with Omer Artun, the CEO and Founder of AgilOne, a premier Customer Data Platform for enterprise B2C brands, to discuss some of the recent trends in the CDP space. Artun also talks about their latest offering, theAgilOne 360 Profile for Customer Service, and how it enables call center and customer service teams to provide more personalization, improve the customer experience, and potentially increase sales and engagement levels.
Q: Catch us up since we last spoke. What has AgilOne been up to lately?
Omer Artun, the CEO and Founder of AgilOne
A: We have seen the Customer Data Platform market explode over the last year, especially for large enterprise retailers, CPG companies, and travel companies. However, the fast growth of the market has also led to some confusion about what is and isn’t a CDP. Currently, there are more than 80 companies claiming to be a CDP. Tag management companies, mobile app vendors, personalization tool providers, and others that have rebranded as CDPs so they can leverage the growing market opportunity, so the confusion is warranted. We usually point potential customers to a recent Gartner report that defines the components that make up a CDP for reference,
We continue to educate the market and sharing our customers’ successes with using a customer data platform. And, we continue to evolve and expand our platform, adding machine learning enhancements and other new capabilities that are keeping us at the forefront of the CDP landscape.
Q: In July, AgilOne launched first-ever CDP capabilities for call center and customer service teams. Can you please tell our readers more about your latest offering?
A: AgilOne cleanses, dedupes, stitches, and appends customer data from all online and offline sources, including data from events, journeys, campaigns, and transactions; this is combined with predictive intelligence and insights for each individual customer. For each customer, AgilOne’s 360 Profile includes customer summary attributes, transaction history details, the customer journey, customer record details, and a household summary.
Customer service agents can use the 360 Profile for Customer Service during a support call to look up details such as a customer’s preferred store location, recent website, email, or mobile activity, preferred method of communication, likelihood to buy, product repair, and product return history. Unified profiles are surfaced through the AgilOne 360 Profile UI and API to give an in-depth view into each customer. Profiles are searchable in both the UI and API, even with partial information such as phone number or email. Profiles are configurable to include any customer data relevant to the brand.
Q: How does the AgilOne 360 Profile for Customer Service differ from the existing technologies that customer-facing teams currently use to access customer information and provide a better customer experience?
A: The key difference is that other technologies offer a limited view of the customer, typically providing only customer purchase history, return history, and previous call center history. There are so many pieces that are missing with that approach. AgilOne fleshes out the profile of the customer by showing the call center agent how they have engaged with emails, social channels, the website, store events, etc. — any data from a customer engagement. Also, AgilOne’s customer intelligence such as identifying a customer with predicted high lifetime value or a likelihood to churn is now visible to a call center agent.
Q: The AgilOne 360 Profile for Customer Service is the first of its kind within the customer data platform category. What factors motivated your team to develop this latest solution?
A: Many of our customers have a philosophical belief that any customer-facing team should have access to all relevant customer data, and they specifically wanted to make the data available to call center representatives and for retailers, also make it available to representatives in store locations. While CDPs are typically sought after by marketing teams, all teams can benefit from customer intelligence. Part of what we’re seeing is the CDP expansion from the limited realm of marketing and into the broader suite of the organization.
Q: How can enterprises take advantage of your latest solution? Should they be existing users of the AgilOne Customer Data Platform (CDP) in order to enjoy its functionality?
A: Not all CDPs will be able to provide this to call center teams, so AgilOne is the brand to contact if this capability is important to your business. We can easily set this up for existing customers.
Q: What rising trends in the CDP market are you most excited about? How is AgilOne meeting these?
A: In the same spirit of making CDP data accessible to call center and customer facing teams, we are also seeing a trend where brands want to give business intelligence and analytical teams direct query access to the data. We launched a capability called Lightning IQ that allows these teams to have direct access, to share data with other systems such as data visualization tools, and to develop custom models that can be fed back into AgilOne.
Another trend we’re seeing is for customers to be able to orchestrate the way that they engage with customers across multiple channels and systems, so we’ve developed features to help with this too. We are also anticipating that the demand for machine learning and predictive intelligence within CDPs will continue to grow, and we’re developing even more “out of the box” functionality to support this growing demand.
Q: Do you have any new offerings that your customers should look forward to?
A: We will be announcing new capabilities on our Machine Learning Engine and analytical capabilities — look for an announcement coming soon.
About AgilOne
Founded in 2005 in Silicon Valley, AgilOne is driven to serve B2C enterprises in all industries through their Customer Data Platform (CDP), a comprehensive and omni-channel big data platform that helps bring the customer profile in full view through the use of analysis and actions. By combining big data enterprise platform, unified data, analytics and machine learning, as well as customer data activation and orchestration, AgilOne helps their clients to predict and to determine their marketing messages across all appropriate customer touchpoints. AgilOne is the trusted partner of brands like Serena & Lily, Vineyard Vines, Nine West, and many more.