“Too many companies are still focused on top-of-funnel metrics like opens and clicks, as opposed to what really matters most — loyalty and long-term customer lifetime value,” says Myles Kleeger, President and Chief Customer Officer at Braze. “Those factors depend on building relationships, which in turn depends for many of today’s customers on two-way interactions.”
Businesses used to get by with fixed and predictable storefronts, whether physical or digital. Advances in personalization can revitalize the digital experience, but even this isn’t enough. Many customers also expect two-way interaction with a brand through messaging or online chat.
“Data from a lot of customer engagement is unstructured and needs to be integrated into the data layer by some additional tool or process…Once the unstructured data is standardized, brands can create unified customer profiles to power customer experience beyond marketing use cases,” says Michael Harrison, managing director at analyst firm Winterberry Group. Once unified, all the data can be activated through coordinated decisioning and orchestration.