BlueConic
Transforming Customer Relationships with Unified, Actionable First-Party Data

Consumer expectations for relevant, timely, and engaging experiences have never been higher. That’s why businesses across industries today strive to understand their customers’ interests and behaviors and gain a single customer view in the form of unified customer profiles. However, this task is easier said than done. To build unified profiles, businesses need to collect and consolidate a significant amount of first-party data (behaviors, demographics, events, transactions, consent status, customer scores, etc.) from disparate channels and sources—all with consent in mind. This unified profile data also needs to be accessible with the speed, scale, and flexibility that marketing, analytics, ecommerce, digital product, and other growth-focused teams need to ensure optimal outcomes.

That’s where BlueConic comes in. The company’s pure-play customer data platform (CDP) liberates companies’ first-party data from disparate systems and makes it accessible whenever and wherever it is required to transform customer relationships and drive business growth.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Sam Ngo, Director of Product Marketing at BlueConic, explains how their platform helps companies unify their data into persistent, individual-level profiles and activate it across customer touchpoints and systems in support of a wide range of growth-focused initiatives, including customer lifecycle orchestration, direct-to-consumer diversification, analytics and data science democratization, audience-based monetization, and more.

Please tell our readers about BlueConic. And what are the factors that led to the conception of the company?

The foundation for BlueConic was laid in 2014 when our founders realized that optimizing by channel isn’t enough when consumers expect omni-channel experiences. Most traditional technologies are limited to controlling interactions on a single channel, or at best, a few channels. Moreover, they require the help of IT, data science, or agencies to segment, score, or model data for the next campaign. But delivering end-to-end experiences requires a holistic view of customers—no matter how or where data about them is stored. Our mission is to get data into the hands of business users when and where they need it to orchestrate individualized, cross-channel experiences, while streamlining the whole underlying process to make it more efficient.

What are the challenges that your customers face, and how do you help them resolve those?

In one word? Complexity. When it comes to technology investments, companies are starting to realize the importance of bringing operational efficiency to bear.

For example, most marketing teams today still rely on internal IT teams or external agencies to create customer scores and pull lists for segmentation— processes that not only take weeks and cost thousands of dollars, but also effectively neutralize efforts to interact with customers in a timely, personalized way. BlueConic not only unifies first-party customer data at an individual level, but also makes it easy for business users without technical skills to use that data to create robust, multi-dimensional segments, run out-of-the-box models to predict behavior, activate customer lifecycle marketing programs, and more. In today’s climate, it’s also important to streamline consent management. Consent preferences are stored in unified profiles and automatically synchronized across all data sources, channels, and delivery platforms. This eliminates inefficiencies, latency, and risk on the backend so companies can deliver a seamless experience on the front end.

Could you elaborate on the features and functionalities of BlueConic and the benefits that your customers can get from utilizing it?

Everything in BlueConic starts with the unified profile, making it possible to quickly and confidently access data to support a wide range of activation use cases. For example, some companies may start with multi-dimensional segmentation, which enables business users to build dynamic customer segments in just a few clicks and send those segments directly to other marketing and advertising platforms for immediate activation.

From there, they may expand their use cases to include customer lifecycle orchestration and/or modeling and analytics. Using our customer lifecycle orchestration capabilities, companies can ensure that marketing interactions used to capture customer’s attention are relevant and timely. For instance, Bob’s Discount Furniture targets customers who purchased a crib two years ago and are now likely ready to buy a toddler bed. The platform’s persistent profiles make this possible, enabling the company to tailor product recommendations (and suppress others) to individuals based on who they are and where they are on their journey.

With our data and analytics capabilities, data scientists and non-technical users alike can deploy models to calculate propensity, customer lifetime value, recency, and other scores, and use those scores to target the right customers with the right experience. For instance, one of our retail customers is using the platform to understand who their highest-value customers are based on their frequency, recency, and monetary value, and which brands they buy to create lookalike audiences.

What are the factors that differentiate BlueConic from other market players?

A CDP’s underlying database structure shapes the flexibility and agility it offers an organization. Unlike CDPs with relational or event-stream databases that are difficult and costly to scale, our profile-based architecture makes it easy to add new data sources and profile attributes at any time— giving businesses the flexibility to change direction as market conditions dictate. For example, when the pandemic hit, many of our publishing customers were able to take down their paywalls within 24 hours to give readers access to Covid content. Other customers, like Belgian Cycling Factory, were able to get an ecommerce site up and running in just a few weeks, and use the customer data collected from this new channel to optimize their inventory and ad spend. This flexibility and agility is only possible with a data-agnostic, profile database architecture.

What does the future hold for BlueConic?

Privacy is front and center, with a majority of countries now having consumer privacy legislation in place. In this environment, companies need to be transparent about what data they are collecting and how it’s being used to create value for customers. Our CDP has been specifically architected for the privacy-first age, so we’re uniquely positioned to help customers grapple with ever-changing privacy laws and other privacy-first initiatives that restrict the use of third-party data going forward.