Operational Customer Profile: The Missing Piece to Your Customer Marketing Puzzle

Operational Customer Profile: The Missing Piece to Your Customer Marketing Puzzle

You might have a lot of customer data that needs to be pieced together - but you don't have to completely transform your marketing strategies to see the bigger picture.

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Have you ever tried to piece together data to get a better understanding of your customer's preferences? You have demographic data, a handful of website visits, and maybe some purchase history. But when you try to connect the dots, the picture is blurry. You can see glimpses of who your customer is, but you're missing the bigger picture. This scenario is a common challenge for many marketers.

According to our "State of Marketing" report, only 31% of marketers are fully satisfied with their ability to unify customer data sources, and only 32% are completely satisfied with how they use customer data to create relevant experiences. The problem lies in the fragmented nature of customer data. It's scattered across different systems and platforms, making it difficult to get a complete and accurate view of each customer.

To overcome this challenge, marketers need a way to bring this data together and make it actionable. This is where an operational customer profile comes in.

What you'll learn

• What is an operational customer profile?
• What challenges do marketers face with fragmented data?
• How to build a framework for an operational customer profile
• The power of an operational customer profile
• The benefits of an operational customer profile
• An operational customer profile in action

What is an operational customer profile?

An operational customer profile is a detailed representation of a customer's interactions with a company. It includes information such as purchase history, demographics, preferences, and engagement with marketing campaigns. This profile provides valuable insights for marketers to tailor their strategies and improve customer satisfaction.

For example, a marketer could use an operational customer profile to identify customers who have recently purchased a certain product and send them a targeted email promoting a complementary product. They can also be used to personalize the website experience for individual customers, displaying relevant products and recommendations based on their past behavior.

What challenges do marketers face with fragmented data?

Customer data often is stored in different systems. Website analytics, email marketing platforms, and CRM systems each capture different aspects of customer behavior and touchpoints, but they rarely communicate with each other seamlessly.

Piecing together these fragmented data points is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Marketers have manually extracted data from multiple sources across different departments, cleaned it up, and combined it into a coherent profile. This manual effort is not only inefficient but also increases the risk of human error, leading to incomplete or inaccurate customer profiles.

When customer profiles are fragmented, valuable insights can be lost. Marketers struggle to understand customer preferences, identify upsell opportunities, or segment their audience effectively. As a result, marketing efforts are less targeted and less effective.

How to build a framework for an operational customer profile

An operational customer profile provides a foundation for gathering and analyzing customer data to create a comprehensive and actionable view of each individual. Website analytics reveal browsing behavior, CRM systems hold customer interaction history, and social media data shows customer sentiment. By combining all this customer information, operational customer profiles allow marketers to tailor their strategies to provide personalized customer experiences.

Personalization is the creation of individual moments of mutual value between two or more stakeholders. In other words, personalized moments must create relevant and valuable interactions between everyone involved - a retailer and a customer, a financial advisor and a client, or a fan and an artist. But to do this effectively, organizations must embrace a customer-centric, data-first approach. Here's how:

• Wrangle: Gather, clean, transform, and organize raw data into a usable format.
• Structure: Organize and format raw information into a cohesive and logical framework making it easy to understand.
• Model: Create a representation of the relationships within a dataset to find the connections between different pieces of data.
• Audience: Divide a target audience into distinct groups to effectively tailor marketing strategies and messages.
• Action: Implement a process or a set of predictions to increase engagement across each and every touchpoint.
• Goal: Manage results for future optimization and intelligence.

These steps work together to transform raw data into actionable insights, accessed in a single customer view.

The power of an operational customer profile

When built on accessible data, you can use an operational customer profile to tailor your marketing to your customer's specific needs, predict what they might want next, and create a seamless, connected experience. Let's break down what that could look like.

Build a solid foundation for effective AI and Agentforce

By providing a unified and comprehensive view of customer data, an operational customer profile can also serve as the foundation that allows AI, personalization, analytics, and automation technologies to work more effectively. For example, AI can analyze customer profiles to identify patterns and predict behavior, while personalization tools can use the profile data to tailor interactions. Additionally, analytics can provide valuable insights into customer engagement and performance, and automation can streamline processes based on customer preferences.

And it all comes together with Agentforce. Let's say you're a retailer looking to improve your customer service. After setting guardrails and actions, use agents to not only deliver comprehensive account snapshots for service reps, but also take action by giving personalized responses to customer inquiries. Or, let's consider a healthcare company wanting to find a better solution for provider network management. Gain a 360 degree view of the network and quickly review provider information and past performance and let agents take action by optimizing network adequacy and lower patient wait times.

Deliver personalized customer experiences

Imagine receiving an email from a clothing retailer recommending a new product that perfectly matches your recent purchase. Or perhaps a streaming service suggesting a show based on your viewing history. These are examples of personalized customer experiences, made possible by an operational customer profile.

By combining data from various sources, an operational customer profile creates a comprehensive picture of customer preferences, behaviors, and interactions. This allows businesses to tailor their interactions to meet specific customer needs, creating a more relevant and satisfying experience.

Predict customer needs and proactively offer solutions

Let's say you receive an email from your internet service provider offering a faster plan just as your usage starts to exceed your current limit. Or, a subscription box service sending a replacement item before you even realize you're running low. By analyzing customer data, businesses can anticipate emerging trends and identify potential pain points, allowing them to provide timely and relevant assistance before customers even need to ask.

Build a connected customer journey

Now, imagine you open a personalized marketing email, followed by a targeted social media ad promoting the same product. When you contact customer service with a question, the representative has access to your entire purchase history and can provide tailored assistance.

Operational customer profiles can be used to build a connected customer journey that extends beyond marketing. By sharing customer data and insights across departments, businesses can ensure not only a personalized experience, but a consistent one across every touchpoint that builds stronger relationships, increases loyalty, and grows revenue.

The benefits of an operational customer profile

In today's data-driven world, having a complete and accurate view of your customers is not just nice to have - it's a necessity. An operational customer profile provides a powerful framework for achieving this goal. By unifying fragmented customer data, it delivers a comprehensive understanding that drives a range of benefits. Most importantly, you can harness all your data, from any source across the business, to gain insight into customers and increase their lifetime value. Here's how:

• Data mapping: Prepare new data for seamless consumption by marketing teams and downstream systems using a click-and-drag interface to standardize and map incoming data to the data model in Data Cloud.
• Zero-Copy data access: Unify and leverage non-CRM or third-party data without needing to physically move or copy it.
• Out-of-the-box connectors: Reduce the amount of custom integrations and maintenance preventing marketing teams from using data in campaigns. Ingest and combine customer data with native connectivity to Salesforce apps (Marketing, Sales, Service, Commerce), prebuilt integrations to cloud storage, and the ability to connect to any system with MuleSoft.
• Identity resolution: Understand how different types of data (e.g., anonymous, unstructured, real-time) captured in different systems tie back to a single individual. For example, determine that [email protected] and [email protected] are associated with the same person using user-defined rules to link disconnected records together.

An operational customer profile in action

Let's say a fictional eCommerce retailer uses Salesforce Data Cloud to create and leverage operational customer profiles for more effective advertising efforts. By consolidating data from various sources within the Salesforce ecosystem, the company gains a comprehensive view of customer interactions, including purchase history, browsing behavior, demographics, and engagement with marketing campaigns.

This enriched data allows the retailer to segment customers into highly targeted groups based on shared characteristics and preferences. For example, the company might identify a segment of customers who have recently purchased smartphones but haven't yet purchased a compatible phone case.

Using Data Cloud's segmentation capabilities, the company can launch a targeted advertising campaign promoting phone cases specifically designed for the newly purchased smartphone models. These ads can be strategically activated on relevant platforms and websites, increasing the likelihood of reaching the intended audience and driving conversions.

Data Cloud also allows the retailer to personalize their website experience for individual customers. By using the operational customer profiles within the platform, the company can display relevant product recommendations, tailored offers, and personalized content, enhancing customer engagement and driving repeat purchases.

You might have a lot of customer data that needs to be pieced together - but you don't have to completely transform your marketing strategies to see the bigger picture. It might just be the missing piece to your marketing puzzle.

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I lead a team of product marketers focused on Data Cloud for the marketing buyer. I joined Salesforce in 2017.

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