The evolution of the omnichannel experience

♦ Data management platforms (DMPs): These tools enable organizations to amass, organize, and utilize data about customers for ensuing applications, including responses to signals gleaned from that data. “A data management platform would be something you’d use to manage your third-party data and external data sources, whereas a CDP would be more for first-party data,” DeZao observed.

Data modeling

Whichever solutions organizations deploy, they should support the real-time requirements for omnichannel experiences, largely in the form of real-time updates and attendant responses. The latter is augmented via the data science capabilities to which DeZao alluded. Ultimately, the success of these varying forms of centralized data management for omnichannel experiences lies in the data modeling—which is necessary for aggregating and integrating information across channels for respective customers.

“There’s no getting around a good, usable data marketing model,” Bolduc reflected. With such a model, the customer 360 approaches listed in the section above become a “medium where you can attach a core [customer] profile that accomplishes these three things—consent, engagement, and context—to where that engagement is happening, so you have the ability to execute in the channels that you’re seeing these interactions in,” Bolduc said.

Such a data model should be informed by copious amounts of reference data related to characteristics such as purchase history, geographic location, household information, and other relevant details. Ostensibly, that data could come from a plethora of sources. However, the data marketing model Bolduc referenced should ideally exist in the centralization framework organizations adopt. “Connecting to that core data model might require identity management,” Bolduc said. “You can use a third party or have embedded functionality, either in your CDP or in your data platform, as well. Some people utilize DMPs to do that with the advertising world, to connect martech to the adtech.”

Regulatory compliance

If left unchecked, the demands of regulatory compliance, data privacy, and consumer rights could potentially compromise any value from attempts to create omnichannel interactivity with consumers. “It’s not just that you’ve got to hand someone off to a dedicated app to get them to finish a sale,” Zisk commented. “It’s that GDPR and CPRA, the follow-on to CCPA, and a whole ton of other state legislatures are putting pressure on. Customers themselves are putting pressure on, and Apple is putting pressure on.” Thus, adding capabilities for successfully governing data, anonymizing data as necessary, and simply understanding which regulations might apply to those data are imperative for furnishing omnichannel experiences.

Data management tooling that consolidates numerous touchpoints and facets of the customer journey is ideal for this reality. “I advocate centralization for the ability to delete data, expose data rights, and ensure you’ve got compliance,” Bolduc said.

Here are some additional measures for solidifying regulatory compliance across the vast range of horizontal and vertical mandates:

♦ Consent management: Although it hasn’t fostered into a full-fledged industry quite yet, the surplus of regulations and data privacy mandates has made outsourcing these concerns more popular than they’ve ever been. Such consultants initially appeared for email marketing campaign use cases and have become all the more apposite for omnichannel interactions. “Many companies exist just for consent management,” Bolduc revealed. “I think we’ll probably see a continued prevalence of these types of companies that help customers to be compliant because of the complexity.”