We've seen a lot of approaches to rethinking existing technology stacks in recent years, and there is a core theme amongst them all that is impacting how much value organizations are getting from their investments: these platforms are starved for data and are unable to feed themselves in a meaningful way on their own.
The frustrations that come from wasted technology investments generally have a powerful ripple effect through a business, and always ends up in a loss of momentum and internal politics as each person or division tries to do better than the last. However, the mistakes of the past are rarely ever heeded as organizations look to the future doomed to repeat themselves unless the cycle is broken.
You'll see evidence of this in many places, such as analyst studies and other surveys. For example, Celebrus recently commissioned an Opportunity Snapshot from Forrester where 61% of the respondents said that capturing and making sense of digital customer data is difficult for them. In addition, in the "2021 Martech Replacement Survey" by MarTech.org the most replaced technology in the past year was Marketing Automation followed by Email and CRM.
Celebrus recently commissioned an Opportunity Snapshot from Forrester
where 61% of the respondents said that capturing and making sense of digital customer data is difficult for them.
In many cases, the symptom that people see is "X" platform not performing or delivering upon the promises that vendor has made during the sales process. Solving for that symptom, organizations will go out to RFP and immediately look to change vendors. However, it's solving for that symptom that ultimately leaves the underlying true causes running rampant: your data pipeline is awful, inaccurate, not available in real-time, and unable to support any of your use cases.
We recognize that it is incredibly difficult to sift through the marketing lingo and false promises to truly understand what good looks like in the data capture and contextualization space. However, the time has never been more critical to solve for that once and for all. Whether you're tagging, building data layers, or attempting to retrofit code for native/hybrid mobile apps you've probably realized just how fragile, antiquated, and time consuming those approaches are. It's a vicious cycle because, ultimately, you're never done. The data is never fully accurate, your digital channels are constantly changing and thus breaking your code and trying to get that data into other systems in real-time becomes a fool's errand.
Before you look to invest in activation technologies, such as campaign management or decisioning, you really should solve for the data problem first. Otherwise, you'll be starving these systems and giving them zero chance of realizing their true potential for your organization. Keep in mind that a platform that focuses on activation, and claims to also do data capture well, is simply a jack of all trades and a master of none. Stop letting amateur solutions try to fix your first party data strategy; It's the most important strategy for your business if you want to succeed.
Find out more: Celebrus and Teradata commissioned a custom study by Forrester, leveraging primary research to explore the data and analytics challenges of CX decision-makers around the world:
