Palantir and Zeta Global announce strategic partnership.Read News
Palantir and Zeta Global announce strategic partnership.Read News
As brands accelerate into an AI-driven future where customer data is centralized, customer-centric analytics power tactics and strategies that produce meaningful growth, and interactions are orchestrated across numerous channels in real time, messaging governance is becoming foundational.
Simply put—consumers are interacting with your brand too quickly and across too many channels for you to respond coherently across those channels without rock solid controls in place.
The question then becomes: How can brands put effective governance in place to apply real-time intelligence in a disciplined way?
The answer—it should be managed by your customer data platform (CDP). “The CDP already occupies the one layer in the stack expected to maintain customer context consistently and make it usable across systems,” the CDA and CDP Institute asserts in The CDP’s New Role in AI-Driven Marketing, a report commissioned by Zeta Global. “The modern CDP is ideally suited to give the enterprise an accelerated path from customer data to governed action.”
They go on to say “a CDP should not merely expose data to AI tools; it should help determine what those tools are permitted to consider, how decisions move into execution, and how the business learns from what happened. In that role, the CDP makes AI-driven engagement more usable, governed, and accountable where customer experience is actually decided.”
In order to take action in a given situation with a given customer, a number of factors need to be known and available to your systems and AI agents. Some of those factors might include consent, eligibility, suppression, approvals, timing windows, and channel.
Those various factors break down into three categories:
Let’s walk through three situations to demonstrate how these three categories of information can help systems and AI agents respond appropriately and consistently.
Customers become understandably frustrated when they experience a customer service failure, such as a cancelled flight, delayed delivery, or product that’s damaged upon delivery. Sending customers promotional campaigns when they’ve just had one of these failures risks them rage unsubscribing from your promotional messages or even marking them as spam.
To prevent the loss of opt-ins and lifetime value, brands would be wise to suppress customers from promotional campaigns for a period of time following an incident. To operationalize this, your CDP could be designed to supply answers to the following questions:
Context: Which channels has the customer opted into for promotional messages?
State: When did the most recent customer service failure occur?
Control: How long after a customer service failure should promotional messages be suppressed?
That information would allow audience building for promotional campaigns in every channel your brand uses to exclude customers affected by service failures, thereby avoiding unnecessary churn.
For some customers who have lost their mothers, Mother’s Day promotions can make them feel sad or even traumatized. No brand wants to make their customers feel that way. For that reason, and to also avoid the risk of unsubscribes and tune-outs, an increasing number of brands are giving their customers the option to opt out of Mother’s Day promos.
Regardless of the channel through which the Mother’s Day opt out was expressed, brands should suppress Mother’s Day messaging to the customer via all channels. To operationalize this, your CDP could be designed to supply answers to the following questions:
Context: Which channels has the customer opted into for promotional messages?
State: When did the customer opt out of Mother’s Day messaging?
Control: How long should Mother’s Day messaging opt-outs be honored before they need to be requested again?
That information would allow systems and agents to avoid sending Mother’s Day messaging to the small subset of your audience that has told you they wouldn’t respond positively to receiving those campaigns. This same logic can be used to power Father’s Day opt outs, as well.
Cart abandonment occurs for a wide range of reasons, from being interrupted to wanting to confer with a partner to being unsure if the product is 100% what they want to buy. Sending a shopping cart abandonment message gives brands an opportunity to address some of those reasons.
To operationalize this, your CDP could be designed to supply answers to the following questions:
Context: Which channels has the customer opted into for promotional messages? This is important because cart abandonment campaigns are not transactional, and therefore require a promotional opt-in.
State:
Control:
As you can see, the governance of a cart abandonment campaign is considerably more complex than suppression rules around customer service failures and Mother’s Day campaign opt-outs. However, it’s that level of detail that allows your marketing systems and AI agents to create appropriate and effective customer experiences.
