If you’re still struggling with data fragmentation, you’re not alone. As we shared in a webinar titled Leverage People-Based Identity in the Cloud, 12 platforms within an enterprise’s Mar Tech stack use customer data, on average. We wager that it may even be higher, given that a retailer we recently spoke with has over 1,000 platforms that touch first-party customer data.
“Clear, actionable first-party data will only increase in importance over the foreseeable future. If you get more value from it, you’ll be ahead of the pack,” said Gokhan Sahin, Global Solutions Lead at Google Cloud, during our quick 30-minute primer on LiveRamp and Google Cloud Platform’s strategic partnership. He and Dennis Ellis, our Vice President of Global Identity, shared the benefits of bringing cloud and identity strategies together to solve data fragmentation at scale, maximize security and protection of customer data, and accelerate higher cloud ROI.
To learn more about the power of people-based identity in the cloud, watch our webinar featuring Gokhan and Dennis, moderated by James Arra, our Head of Cloud Partnerships, or read through a few key takeaways:
Engage key stakeholders early on
While most teams across an enterprise—IT, marketing, analytics, and others—see the value of having identity in the cloud, one pitfall to avoid is driving an identity and cloud strategy forward without alignment from your key stakeholders.
“What you don’t want is to drive a process with only one part of your business. If it’s driven by the IT team, the tech being stood up may not align with the use cases your business may find most valuable,” Gokhan cautioned.
Speed insights into action
By using LiveRamp AbiliTec in the Google Cloud Platform to unify and deduplicate data for analysis using BigQuery, the path from insight to action becomes much clearer across a number of analytic use cases.
“Insights without action are meaningless,” Gokhan said. “The beauty is, after the process of bringing data together and resolving it, you can take a customer segment like those likely to churn and send them a special offer through your email marketing platform. The same infrastructure powers web personalization, product offers, and customer service, so this segment receives consistent experiences.”
Elevate use cases beyond marketing
Once you have a unified dataset at your fingertips, there’s no limit to what you can do with it beyond marketing. Customer support, supply chain, and inventory are just a few other teams that can benefit from leveraging the same data. As James said, “it becomes a virtuous cycle of testing, improving, and learning.”
Dennis followed up with an example of a product team using a unified dataset to perform research. “We’ve seen product teams at some of our health care clients take the same segments as the marketing team to answer, ‘what are the segments we want to serve with a new product?’ They can leverage these segments to test products with consumers more likely to need them and iterate and innovate based on results.”
To learn more about what our partnership with Google Cloud Platform can do for you, or if you have questions about identity, please email [email protected].