Navigating The Messy Middle With Treasure Data

“Modern customer journeys are substantially digital, and are not linear. Consumers in their relationships with brands are continuously foraging for information, in a continuous loop between exposure and experiences, in what Google calls ‘the messy middle’. Marketing and customer-facing enterprise functions including contact centers, customer service and sales, must operate based on the same set of unified customer data, from a product like Treasure Data CDP for Service, to optimize the exposures and experiences that will result in purchases, retention and loyalty.” - Thomas Kurian, Treasure Data, Head of New Markets. 

Consumers deal with scale and complexity by using cognitive biases encoded deep in their psychology.

They look for information about a category’s products and brands, and then weigh all the options. According to Alistair Rennie and Jonny Protheroe, Google’s consumer insights team, this equates to two different mental modes in the messy middle: exploration, an expansive activity, and evaluation, a reductive activity. Whatever a person is doing, across a huge array of online sources, such as search engines, social media, aggregators, and review websites, can be classified into one of these two mental modes. They loop through them repeatedly until they arrive on a purchasing decision. More times than not, the purchasing decision is none at all. 

Contact centers and customer care functions can be leveraged to alleviate the messy middle and deliver higher conversion rates than ecommerce, which typically ranges between one and two percent of online shoppers. Enabling agents to have more instinctive data-powered conversations with AI powered, real-time agent assist suggestions (for example, what product to upsell or cross-sell) will enable improvement in conversions.

“The qualitative aspects are the right brain thinking of marketing. So they’re very good at creativity… at psychology, at sociology, anthropology, brand position. All the beautiful soft skills of marketing. However, when marketing has become very tech driven, very data driven, they’re struggling quite a bit.” - Raja Rajamannar, CMO, Mastercard, Business Insider’s 25 Most Innovative CMO’s in the World

Driving customer loyalty with customer data platforms (CDP)

With emerging technologies and better data aggregation, marketing, sales, and contact centers can drive customer loyalty. As an example, assume we have a scenario where a customer calls about an out-of-stock item and wants to find out the expected restock date. With the Treasure Data CDP for Service installed, the customer service agent not only can see the customer’s purchase history, but also the customer’s recent browsing history on the brand’s ecommerce site, and engagement with the mobile app. In addition, the Real-time Agent Assist feature provides the agent a “next best product” recommendation based on the customers buying and browsing history - as a replacement for the out-of-stock item. When that recommendation is delivered to the customer and is accepted, the agent has successfully converted a stock check to a sale, all based on a personalized product offer. This kind of personalized, helpful, at-the-right-time customer experience is what leads to repeat customers.

It’s important to remember that humans are far better in delivering personalized, meaningful, human experiences, but we need data to do that effectively. There are new and high expectations on customer experiences. According to CCW Digital research, 59% of consumers state that their experiences with brands have either not improved or gotten worse since the beginning of the pandemic. This may be unsettling considering 60% are saying it’s a more important factor in their purchasing decisions than it was before 2020. To deliver quality experiences for increasingly critical consumers and to improve customer loyalty metrics, companies need to empower agents with a single view of customer data in real-time so the agents can help their customers in a personalized, meaningful fashion, in any given moment. 

Why Treasure Data is breaking through the market

Customer data as an enterprise service helps deliver great customer experiences across the whole organization. Personalized engagement should not be a miracle, but more of a routine process, when all teams in the company are powered by unified, centralized, and real-time customer data.

“Contact centers are moving to the cloud, finally. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for enterprises to reset the tech stack for their contact center, invest in scalable, high-performance SaaS-based solutions like the Treasure Data CDP for Service, to finally equip their teams with the data they need to meet the new and future expectations for knowledgable, personalized and empathetic customer service and experiences.” - Thomas Kurian, Treasure Data, Head of New Markets. 

Benefits include the following:

No change management or retraining costs: Treasure Data CDP for Service surfaces a Single View of Customer along with AI-powered real-time agent assists like Next Best Product suggestion, in the same pane of glass (contact center or customer service application) that the agents are trained to use. This is designed to ensure Treasure Data’s contact center solution customers can realize time to value quickly with little to no retraining/change management. As there is often high churn in contact center employees, time to value is a very important selection criteria for any contact center solutions, with 8-12 weeks being ideal.

Real-time service: The Treasure Data CDP for Service delivers data in seconds, not minutes. This eliminates the universal need for agents to ask their customers to wait for a few minutes while they access customer data.

Support for multiple customer care and contact center applications: In their initial release, Treasure Data provided support for Genesys CX, Zendesk and Salesforce ServiceCloud. Their plan is to add to this initial tranche so they can deliver this valuable unified customer view to as many enterprises as possible.

To learn more, visit treasuredata.com