TechBytes with Chris Comstock, Chief Product Officer at Claravine

Tell us about your role and the team/technology you handle at Claravine.

I am responsible for the Product strategy of our Digital Experience Data Management Platform and working very closely with our customers and partners to ensure we are helping them get the most value out of our partnership. In terms of Marketing software, we are very focused on the customer experience as our most successful customers roll this out to anyone responsible for customer experience and their agencies.

What runs the Claravine data engine?

We are a Cloud-based solution to capture, standardize, and manage all metadata related to customer experiences. By allowing marketers direct access we can help them make sure the campaign and data are properly configured and then distributed to any combination of their execution or analytics platforms.

What is the current definition of Data Analytics for digital campaigns?

If you asked this question years ago, I think the majority of people would have said web analytics. Today, with the low barrier to entry for Machine Learning and Cloud Computing, everyone is building their own definition of Data Analytics and Personalization engines. The quicker a brand can react or automate the analytics, the faster they are able to respond, which helps them retain and acquire new customers.

How can marketers leverage Intent data and digital signals to obtain true Identity Resolution?

Consumers are willing to provide their information to brands they trust, so I believe marketers need to understand which intent data and digital signals lead to acquiring their best customers. Once they understand these efforts they can focus on helping improve their Identity Resolution. In the last few years, the explosion of the CDP market can help automate the combination of datasets and create a single view of the customer.

What are the challenges in fully maximizing media performance across digital platforms?

Google and Facebook. The two biggest platforms to reach consumers both have a vested interest in maintaining limiting access to customer and media performance data. Over 60% of paid advertising is spent between the platforms and with the recent changes Google is making to remove the DoubleClick ID, it is going to become even harder to understand true media performance.

As part of my new role at Claravine, I’ve made it a top priority to battle this major challenge by developing deeper integrations with Google and Facebook on Claravine’s platform. Now, marketers can use Claravine to synchronize and enrich data before and after campaigns launch on these two platforms and many others.

Do you leverage AI ML algorithms at Claravine? If yes, tell us more about your AI research and analytics.

At Claravine, AI ML comes into play when we help improve and automate Marketing data as well as how the data is connected across the Marketing organization.

One of the biggest challenges we see with Marketing organizations is from an operational and workforce standpoint. There are so many people on the Marketing team engaging with customers, setting up experiences, and analyzing those experiences, that we are trying to better connect those teams to better deliver the ideal customer experience.

What does it take for an organization to build true customer intelligence?

A customer-first culture. You can have the best tools in Marketing around Customer Intelligence, but if your culture and management teams don’t stress the importance of using data in every interaction with the customer, the intelligence will not take you very far. Where we have seen data play the biggest impact is within companies that have exceptional Data Management Platforms and a workforce that understands and values that data.

How do you differentiate between various data points- Audience, Customer, Intent, Sentiment, and Big Data?

An audience represents a group of prospective or current customers. A Customer is typically when you have personally identifiable data. The intent is the stage of the customer in the decision process and sentiment is their attitude towards a marketers’ brand. Digital experiences and technology have enabled us to collect countless, varying interactions that can help us better understand audiences, customers, intent, and sentiment which results in Big Data, or in a more general term, the data all marketers need to sort through.

How can an organization obtain a successful customer identity program?

It may sound simple but start by giving one person or team in the Marketing organization ownership and authority to implement a customer identity program. This will create a sense of accountability and drive that otherwise is lightly spread across multiple teams – or is missed entirely. Along with this is putting in place the right technology, which will allow not only consolidation of customer data, but also the flexibility to put the data to use quickly.

What impact does identity have on the customer journey and experience?

When a brand understands who we are as a consumer and can tailor the message to us, it creates a positive experience for both the consumer and the brand. The brands that focus on identity and implementing that data in a timely and relevant way are the ones that put the consumer first and are overall, more successful.

What are your predictions about your market/customer base in the next 3 years?

GDPR and data protection reform have opened the eyes of a lot of brands and I would expect that over the next 3-4 years we will be seeing a rise in internal reflection around first-party data and how it is being used. A number of customers are going through Digital Transformations to standardize, centralize and understand how data is used across their organization.

Most large organizations don’t have clear visibility or a record of what experiences are delivered to their customers or how their data is being used, including by their agencies. Now that the GDPR is creating new requirements, I expect companies around the world will be more carefully assessing and relying on technology to ensure full compliance.