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A Perfect Match: CDPs and the Insurance Sector

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Daniel Meyer unpicks the possible application of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) in the insurance sector, and what benefits Teavaro can bring to the sector...

However, this sector is quickly catching up in the matter of taking the opportunity to use data to prevent and mitigate risk, rather than only for their traditional role of compensating financial loss. The time is now ripe for insurers to realise the potential of Customer Data Platforms, and Teavaro is helping the insurance industry capture the benefits.

Marketing and sales funnels in the insurance sector are a multi-channel combination of online and offline channels.

The number of digital channels and touchpoints is growing fast, as self-service customer portals and apps are being introduced to digitise the insurance sector. For example, most major insurers have expanded into the app market, with insurance companies offering multiple apps for each category including content, service and other functionalities.  The creation of these touchpoints and the inclusion into the digital landscape of the insurer is an important step in developing functioning marketing and self-service customer engagement. It seems an obvious step for the growing market of the more digital and self-service-oriented target groups.

Nevertheless, the major part of the acquisitions, renewals, cross- and upsell use cases that these digital channels focus on remains in offline channels such as local sales staff or independent insurance brokers. Although sales numbers have been slowly declining over the past few years, over 50% of insurance acquisition sales – as well as cross and upsell to existing customers – are still realised by local sales staff in an offline environment.  Taking these two factors into account there is a strong need for a marketing and sales solution that enables both the offline and the online channel holistically.

The introduction of Customer Data Platforms in the insurance marketing

The combination of this growing digital landscape and the personal contact through sales staff is generating a vast amount of usable data for marketing which remains untapped as long as data is either stored in several different siloes or not saved at all. To give an example, let’s look at a typical customer story using Teavaro’s enhanced CDP. A customer who has an existing policy for house insurance is looking for car insurance quotes on the insurer’s website. As he has logged into his self-service profile on the website in earlier sessions (perhaps to check his existing policy details or renewal date), the insurer’s digital marketing team is able to re-identify him as a customer through Teavaro’s 1st Party Identity solution even though he is not logged in during his current session.  Assuming that the necessary permissions have been given (stored as they would be in the same profile), the information that he could be interested in car insurance can now be added to his marketing profile.

In the simplest terms, combining the information that he is already a customer and he is interested in car insurance, marketers have sufficient data to make a decision on the next steps for online and offline marketing and sales actions to engage this individual. Not only can they be addressed with a special combination offer for his home insurance with a new car insurance policy – via a display ad or push notification on whichever device or channel – the local sales representative could also receive a notification that one of their clients has interest in car insurance, giving access to real-time customer intent when it matters most. This is just one simple example which shows how insurers could leverage on this wealth of data through a CDP which includes a digital identification solution, to allow assured cross-channel and device engagements, and an integrated consent management solution – compliant with GDPR guidelines – to ensure that those engagements are permitted and valued by the customer.

CDPs are perfectly suited to assist the sector’s movement away from siloed CRM data across their multiple products.

As a bonus, the nature of CDP integration means that very little has to change within the current marketing stack for this deployment to be effective (and thus the improvement can be deployed swiftly). Even if data lakes have been used by the insurer, the CDP will provide more useful data activation by enabling improved integration of those systems across new and legacy marketing infrastructure. Solutions such as Teavaro’s FunnelConnect create a golden record for each identified customer by combining the online data generated during the digital customer journey with existing offline data, providing a meaningful, real-time 360° view of customer intent and activity. Why 360°? Data attribution compliments data activation, bringing data back into the record, not only from the insurer’s own channels, but their marketing activities elsewhere, in the likes of Google and Facebook. Not only does the CDP unify and activate the insurer’s extensive existing data, but it builds that information exponentially, allowing marketers to improve efficiency across the customer lifecycle and the use cases it brings.

This article was written for Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Our mission is to truly connect people, brands and media​

We believe a true connection is built on explicit consent and grows over time as it offers unique value to all. The resulting relationships will be the foundation for scalable people-based marketing by tailoring content and interactions to individual people, not segments. This makes two-way communication possible.
Daniel Meyer, Lead - Paid Media Solutions

About the author:

Daniel Meyer

Head of Customer Success

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Our mission is to truly connect people, brands and medias

We believe that a true connection is built on explicit consent and grows over time as it provides unique value to all parties involved.

Today we are looking into the challenge of creating the single customer view and how this challenge is linked to identity resolution.
The idea of personalising a service or a product in response to a customer’s need is as old as commerce itself, but in the past generation the internet, cloud computing and machine learning have given businesses an unprecedented opportunity to increase its reach and scope. When, in the noughties, Jill Dyché and Evan Levy tried to explain in a book (Customer Data Integration: A Single Version of the Truth, 2006) what customer data integration was like, this phrase had been already criticised for being a repackaging of previous notions such as Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) or plain old Business Intelligence. But the criticism missed the point that the frontier of data analytics keeps shifting. As the volume of customer interactions has surged over the past years, new processes and technologies have become available to retain and link customer data so that companies can engender trust in both prospects and customers and make better marketing decisions. However, at every turn, such technologies and processes, together with the jargon associated with them, have had a short lifespan or seemed insufficient to keep pace with the plethora of new data. Reaching a single customer view (SCV) has so far remained an elusive goal – chasing the proverbial unicorn – but at every turn the instruments available have become more sophisticated. A SCV’s definition usually includes words like ‘holistic’, ‘accurate’ or ‘consistent’ to indicate that any successful effort to join the dots between various channels have to bridge the offline and online divide, break down data siloes, and improve data quality. For instance, in retail, this could mean bringing together e-commerce transactions, in-store purchases, contact information, browsing behaviour on the company website, call center interaction and email engagement. In this case a SCV would be the foundation of campaigns that do not target prospects who are unlikely to buy or have just bought the product you offer – such personalisation failures cost credibility – while instead cross-selling or upselling to customers who might be near the end of a subscription, have recently interacted with the social media or haven’t made any purchase recently. The more integrated the view of the customer, the higher the return on marketing investment. But the multiple points of entry of customer data pose real challenges to existing ways and systems with which businesses have worked so far. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software stores data from customers’ direct interactions and keep tracks of how far along they have moved into the sales funnel, but is limited to transactions and communications with the company, usually not capturing information from other multifarious sources, such as social media, the website or the company app. CRMs stitch together information across some channels, but not across all of them. They also lack the machine learning power to unify data that might belong to the same customer but presents some discrepancies, for instance a misspelled name or address. As a system used by the whole company, it is not particularly oriented to marketers need; for instance it does not provide further segmentation insights for personalisation. Data warehouses, which ingest data for every area of the business, similarly lack capacity for identity resolution and, while useful for spotting patterns and trends, do not provide insights that marketers can action directly. Both CRMs and data warehouses are company-wide tools that are not specifically focused on marketing improvements. Businesses also often still work with Data Management Platforms (DMPs), which are tools more oriented towards marketers needs and do provide segments that can be used for personalisation. However, a limitation of DMPs is that they are disproportionately reliant on third-party data and/or anonymous first-party data tags, such as cookies, device IDs or IP addresses. Since the storage and usage of personally identifiable information (PII) is strictly regulated, DMPs must anonymise any data that they aggregate in profiles. While DMPs can provide anonymised audience segments for specific campaigns, they do not provide the single customer view across all data points that some marketing actions call for. Marketing Cloud Platforms fall short in this respect as well. The likes of Salesforce, Adobe or Oracle Marketing Clouds can be effective in delivering a message to an identified audience on specific channels, but their segmentation ability often relies on demographics characteristics (i.e. female, >40, UK-based) rather than on the last up-to-date registered behaviour. Also, they often constrain marketers into using a single vendor. Last type of software that has entered the solution set to create a SCV are Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) offering a precision tool for marketers that can sit with these others and enhance them. Initially hard to differentiate from other platforms, since they were first introduced a few years ago CDPs have emerged as offering the closest approximation to a true Single Customer View that the industry has so far achieved. This is because it is a tool with one single purpose, precisely the SCV, and aimed at one single team, marketers. In comparison to the platforms above, CDPs ingest data in real-time, so are always up-to-date; they work primarily with first-party and PII data; they capture offline, online, and multi-channel data; and they use machine learning power to join the dots between customer data in different shapes (avoiding data duplication) and to churn out segments that can be activated in personalisation campaigns. CDPs often complement, rather than substitute, other tools. Their precise configuration in any company, unsurprisingly, varies according to the sector, the type of customer and the business goals. It is your decision what data you want to prioritise and which datasets you want to match. That’s why Teavaro has started offering CDP functionalities as part of our product suite. Activating data through Teavaro’s CDP makes the customer journey as smooth and exciting as possible. No matter where you look, all types of solutions pop up in the market promising the best in market solutions for creating SCVs and data activation across devices, browsers and channels. All these promises can only be fulfilled, if the CDP solution is based on or paired up with a strong solution for Identity resolution and Identity Management like Teavaro FunnelConnect. Not being able to digitally identify your customers and visitors across different touchpoints and channels will take away every benefit your CDP Solution has to offer. It’s as simple as that: You have to know who you are dealing with, otherwise you can’t tailor your data activation on a one-to-one basis. If you want to learn more about our Identity Solutions and how they can benefit your digital marketing activities, please reach out! We are happy elaborate on your use cases and how we can help you achieve your goals.