Customer Data Platform

Enterprise retailers have high volumes of shoppers, transactions and data. They need a powerful customer data platform that helps them collect it all in real-time and develop, retain and recover customers.

Loyal Guru’s CDP handles retail-specific challenges, such as collecting data from millions of shoppers and monthly transactions from all customer touch points, managing customer identification and household accounts, connecting to POS in real-time with specific functionalities such as printing a customer’s up-to-date points balance on a physical receipt, powering cross-border and cross-currency loyalty programs, covering omnichannel needs and much more.

A CDP makes aggregated customer data available for analysis purposes and allows your retail business to take action on it, what we refer to as “activation”.

Activation takes many different forms, but always has the purpose of increasing engagement, improving customer experience and marketing effectiveness, therefore allowing you to develop your customers and boost company growth. The effectiveness of your campaigns is directly linked to your ability to target relevant segments and personalize your promos at scale.

Also, developing a robust, scalable customer data infrastructure will allow you to understand your customers holistically and make your customer data accessible across your organization’s staff and systems to help you make data-driven and customer-centric decisions.

This problem is not unique; many companies have siloed information that is not accessible to all their systems.

For example, the customer service department may have information such as their recent queries, while the marketing department may have contextual information on the same customer, such as their purchasing habits. By failing to marry this information due to data existing in different silos, a 360-degree customer view becomes impossible to construct.

Aside from being an organizational nightmare, this has a direct impact on the customer experience. For example, a client who has recently submitted a complaint to customer services might still be targeted by marketing emails asking for referrals. Or a customer who’s recently made a purchase might continue to be retargeted with ads for the product they just bought.

Loyal Guru’s CDP module helps retailers generate a holistic customer view and eliminate the inefficiencies and lack of transparency that data silos create. This in and of itself has a measurable impact on core business metrics.

Loyal Guru´s CDP provides the necessary foundation, strategy and structure to ensure your data is managed as an asset and transformed into meaningful information, including the availability, usability, consistency, integrity and security of your data.

Data governance should be about clarity, not just control. Loyal Guru´s CDP opens the possibility of providing data context at scale, enabling both control and clarity so that your entire organization can become data-aware and data-driven.

Think of CDPs as the much-needed evolution of CRMs for retailers to handle large volumes of shoppers, transactions and data in real-time.

While CRMs are effective at handling well-structured attribute data, they were not built to collect and interpret complex behavioral and other unstructured data.

CRMs cannot take in all the data that each in-store purchase, website visit, app session, email open, digital ad clickthrough, etc. generates about an individual nor infer what it says about his or her interests.

Additionally, CRMs can only store data if the person has some kind of identifying information like a name, email address or customer number. CDPs on the other hand can store data for anonymous visitors, not just known individuals.

Depending on your situation, this option might not be advisable. If you have limited internal resources and no experience in launching or updating a customer data platform, chances are high that building, maintaining and evolving the framework internally will be a time- and energy-consuming nightmare for your IT department. It would also give your marketing team less control and less ability to operate independently from IT.

In terms of technology, satisfaction among platform users is higher amongst those using third-party vendors, contrary to loyalty technology that’s built in-house.

Loyal Guru’s integrations, support and customer success team will handle most of the technical work. Generally, your marketing operations staff will need to provide us initial guidance, and your IT department will need to provide us with secure access to selected company systems.

Once Loyal Guru is up and running, it will provide you with an easy-to-use interface that makes your daily operations easy, and maintaining the CDP will take less work than you’re used to. Deployment will be finished in weeks, not months or years. After that, day-to-day tasks should be fully automated, so that your team simply needs to monitor the processes.

We are well aware that integration is one of our clients’ main concerns. Whether you are using all or just one of Loyal Guru’s modules, our secure APIs integrate seamlessly into your tech stack or, if you prefer, we can work with ETLs.

Loyal Guru CDP module has standard connectors for CRM systems (such as Salesforce and Zoho), ERPs (such as SAP and sage Intacct), marketing automation tools (such as Salesforce, Oracle, and ActiveCampaign), POS technology (such as comerzzia and EDISA) or customer service solutions (such as Zendesk, Freshdesk and DRIFT).

Our storage partner for CDP in retail is Google Cloud, which ensures you will retain 100% control and ownership over your data.

In addition to that, our platform is modular and designed for you to pick and choose the functionalities that you need as you grow and scale your business.

Loyal Guru is built with security at its core and certified under ISO 27001. We comply with all data protection and privacy legislation so you can feel confident that your company and customer data remain secure and compliant.

Your data is encrypted at rest and protected by TLS in transit. Your Loyal Guru password is hashed using bcrypt. We limit internal access to critical tools and resources using time-based access. You can control access to your data sources and the platform with fine-grained permissions to manage how users interact with your customer data. Multi-factor authentication provides an additional layer of security beyond your username and password when logging into the platform.

Our Privacy Policy honors CCPA, the GDPR, the Privacy Shield Framework.

Don’t panic! This situation is more common than you might think.

It seems that most retailers that have tried to embrace the digital transformation investing in complex software, ended up with unhelpful data, inscrutable findings and complex excels that never get pulled off the “online shelf”.

We built our platform specifically to provide insightful and actionable data to retailers.

Loyal Guru’s CDP makes sure your siloed data gets collected and that it’s never again outdated, inaccessible or unorganized. As a result, you will have full access to robust customer insights that every team can rely on for higher ROI, without tedious manual data crunching across multiple departments.

Our customer integrations team will walk you through the process of effectively integrating your current tech stack and collecting customer data from all sources.

Ok, let’s get a bit technical. In order to create a single picture of an individual, data within Loyal Guru’s CDP is collected from multiple sources and stored at the individual level with a single profile for each person.

Loyal Guru’s CDP module can do this either through deterministic matching — stitching profiles together based on a clear, common identifier (such as user ID, phone number, email address, etc.) — or probabilistic matching — making an educated guess about which profiles represent the same person based on behaviours, location, similar data, etc.

With Loyal Guru you will also be able to group individuals under a single household account, also known as “family account” or “householding”, which will allow you to address them as a whole and launch more effective promotional campaigns.

Pooled accounts are a data gold mine that allow grocery and retail businesses to learn more about their customers for better segmentation and targeted marketing, leading to higher conversion.

Household accounts also encourage points spending that would have remained stagnant in a member’s account because they get closer to a redemption opportunity, adding value to the customer as well as the loyalty program.