Editor's Note: This content is sponsored by Creatopy.
The way a company works defines the company itself and the kind of success it can achieve. Working in silos limits your perspective, and in turn, this limits the impact of your actions. Instead, by bringing all the information you have together and making it available company-wide, you can achieve synergy—a unified view, a coordinated approach that will help you maximize your output. This is precisely why giants like Netflix, Apple, and Google achieved great success.
At Creatopy, we are implementing this way of working because we aim to bring value to our customers fast, through an excellent experience. In our case, as an ad design platform, this translates into setting creativity free, freeing ad designers from the menial, repetitive tasks they have to do, so they can focus more on the creative part. We believe AI will not kill creativity but will help set it free.
Different departments—marketing, product, sales, and others—interact with the same customer at different points of the customer’s journey, and sometimes even at the same time. However, there is no such thing as a marketing customer, a product customer, or a sales customer. There is only one customer for your company. Therefore, you need to have a unified description of this customer.
If you work based on a fragmented view, you risk that one department’s actions, which are intended to improve a certain part of the customer journey, might be in contradiction with what another department is doing in a different part of the journey. But you won’t be able to see the bigger picture to realize this and can end up drawing the wrong conclusions. Having fragmented data means having different truths, yet there can only be one truth.
At Creatopy, the Digital Customer Genome is our one source of truth.
In biology, a genome is all the genetic information of an organism. The Digital Customer Genome is the information collected from the interaction with each customer. While minding privacy and the type of information collected, it follows each individual customer’s journey through all the phases while they interact with your company. For a SaaS product like ours, for example, these phases would be pre-lead, lead, trial, and subscription.
The Digital Customer Genome brings together all this data, from different first-party sources, and makes it available company-wide, as a single source of truth.
Every department will be able to rely on this data to obtain insights about the customers, formulate hypotheses and run experiments, answering questions such as "Should we do this? Are we doing the right things? Do we need to change something?" based on data, not a gut feeling. The best part is that the decisions you make with the help of the Digital Customer Genome will lead to synergy, they will not compete with each other. It helps all departments work together to offer a seamless user experience.
“Understanding what customers want or need is crucial for making the right decisions both in terms of product development and Go-to-market strategies. We are relying on the end-to-end view of our customers’ journey to create an excellent experience while we interact with users before and after making the purchase. Coming from a cybersecurity background, I am particularly sensitive to privacy and data protection. The Digital Customer Genome asks for great responsibility and transparency on the data we are handling and for what purposes,” says Bogdan Carlescu, VP of Marketing at Creatopy.
A huge advantage of the Digital Customer Genome is that the more you use it, the better it gets. The more experiments you run and the more questions you ask, the more granularity is added to your data. Of course, you can purchase various tools to analyze data, but every time you need answers you’ll have to repeat the same process of putting in the data and getting the results, never being able to scale the process. On the other hand, with the help of the Digital Customer Genome, the more complex questions you ask over time, the better answers you’ll be able to get.
This is the data that you’ll use to train any model of AI, to recommend things, predict things, or automate things. And with the help of AI, you will be able to bring value to the customer fast.
Before wrapping things up, it’s important to touch upon the subject of data privacy. All information that goes into the Digital Customer Genome is first-party data. This implies a huge responsibility on your part regarding how this data is collected and used.
Concerns about data privacy, the security of data, and ownership have to be taken into consideration. Data protection regulations—such as the EU GDPR, the strongest privacy and security framework in the world—are shaping your data collection strategy.
The exchange of information for value has to be fair. You have a product that is valuable to the customer, and they have the information you need to make it the best product out there, one that truly meets their needs. The customer will willingly give you the data that you need to provide value to them if and only if they can see the value right away.
That being said, in order to get the information you need you have to ask the right questions. You need to think hard and well about what you need to provide value to your customer. Drawing predictions based on data can have huge consequences, which is why data precision is paramount. You have to check, double-check and triple-check that what you have is the truth, otherwise you’ll end up making biased business decisions.