The benefits of embracing customer obsession

Before we dive into the practical steps, let’s talk about why customer obsession matters. Companies that truly embrace customer obsession enjoy a multitude of benefits, including:

• Accelerated revenue growth: Customer-obsessed companies grow their revenue 1.6 times faster than their counterparts.
• Improved customer retention: By putting the customer at the center of everything they do, these companies foster loyalty and keep customers coming back. Delta Airlines, for example, made operational changes like backing planes out at a 45-degree angle and stocking repair parts to improve on-time arrivals, ultimately boosting customer satisfaction and retention.
• Boosted employee engagement: When a company is customer-obsessed, employees feel more connected to the mission and are more motivated to deliver exceptional experiences.

On the other hand, companies that fail to prioritize customer obsession risk falling behind. They may lose market share to more customer-centric competitors and see their revenue decline over time. A billion-dollar retailer could lose up to $37 million over 12 years by not investing in customer obsession. That’s a mistake no enterprise can afford to make.

The four hallmarks of customer-obsessed companies

So, what does it mean to be customer-obsessed? Here are four key characteristics that set customer-obsessed companies apart:

1. They are customer-led, not just customer aware. They don’t just know who their customers are; they use a deep understanding of customer needs, wants, and motivations to guide every aspect of their strategy. Revolve, for example, uses social media data to determine sourcing, inventory, and product strategies based on customer trends.
2. They are insights-driven, not just data-rich. They don’t just collect data; they derive meaningful insights from it and use those insights to inform decision-making.
3. They are fast, not perfect. They prioritize speed and iteration over perfection, allowing them to respond quickly to changing customer needs.
4. They are connected, not siloed. They break down internal barriers and foster collaboration across departments to create seamless, cohesive customer experiences.

5 steps to start implementing your customer obsession strategy

Now that we understand the benefits and hallmarks of customer obsession, let’s talk about how to start putting it into practice. Here are five actionable steps you can take to begin your customer obsession journey:

1. Use email as a strategic tool: Email is more than just a promotional channel. With the help of an advanced email marketing platform, it can be a powerful tool for identifying customers across platforms, conducting market research, and building long-lasting relationships. Cordial client Adore Me uses a shopper’s email address to identify users across mobile push and SMS and deliver personalized product recommendations based on a unified customer view, resulting in a 4x increase in click rates.
2. Create interactive email experiences: Engage customers within the email itself by incorporating interactive elements. Cordial client Orveon, a leading beauty company, continued website quiz conversations via email to capture valuable first-party customer data and increase conversions by 3x. 
3. Empower your email team: Your email team is key to customer obsession. Equip them with the technology to nurture their creativity, foster collaboration, and leverage data-driven insights. By empowering your email team, you can create more meaningful, personalized experiences for your customers. For example, Cordial client L.L.Bean uses email to strengthen brand relationships by tailoring content to individual customer tastes, sending a mix of educational guides to some and editorial features to others based on their preferences.
4. Practice empathy: Empathy is at the heart of customer obsession. Listen, interpret, act, and monitor to practice empathy and create human connections with customers through email and other touchpoints. Continuously listen to feedback, interpret it for actionable insights, act on those insights, and monitor results.
5. Start small, but start now: Becoming customer-obsessed is a journey. Don’t wait for the perfect moment to start putting the customer at the center of your strategy. And don’t think of it as a trade-off with other priorities. Begin by establishing mechanisms to listen to, collect, and act on customer feedback. Take small steps each day to integrate customer insights into your decision-making, and watch your customer obsession grow.

By implementing these practical strategies and focusing on the customer at every turn, you can start your journey toward becoming truly customer-obsessed. The road ahead may be challenging, but the rewards – in terms of revenue growth, customer loyalty, and employee engagement – are well worth the effort. So take that first step today, and watch your organization transform as you put the customer at the heart of everything you do.

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A decade ago, most would simply visit a local store and look at a few options at their local retailer. Others may have browsed online and made their purchase.

However, in today’s context, each individual’s shopping method is as unique as their fingerprint. Considering the number of channels and the abundance of digital devices to engage with those channels, it’s no surprise that brands struggle to track buying intent across different channels and devices.

Connecting the dots

The multi-device, multichannel reality we operate in has created infinite possibilities for brands and consumers to interact and engage with one another. 

For marketers, it’s vital to identify and match which online devices and channels are associated with a consumer, as well as who that consumer actually is. Each interaction a consumer has with a brand, irrespective of the channel, gives rise to a unique identifier for that interaction, or ‘tag’, that can be tied to that individual. The marketer’s opportunity is to connect the dots and match these various anonymous user identifiers to bring into focus the identity of the consumer. This is where an identity graph (ID graph) can be a marketer’s competitive edge.

Identity graph, explained

ID graphs tie together various identities and their associated activities across various devices and channels in order to understand a single customer’s behavior.

An ID graph enables identity resolution, which is the process of connecting identifiers from multiple platforms, channels, and devices and matching them to a single known customer profile. Properly identifying a customer enables marketers to deliver highly personalized messages and improved customer experiences.

Without an ID graph, there’s no way to understand a single customer’s behavior across channels and devices. As a result, if a customer interacts with your brand by providing their email in-store, then browsing your website via their laptop, and on their mobile browser,  you won’t be able to connect the dots to identify all of those behaviors as coming from a single person. Instead, all of those interactions will appear to come from separate people.

With Cordial’s Identity+, our fully integrated identity resolution solution, marketers have the ability to identify, match, and convert more customers faster and increase ROI through intelligent personalization. 

Why and how Cordial’s ID graph works

In Cordial’s world, every interaction is an opportunity for connection, whether it’s between brands and customers, messages and data, or strategy and results.

Cordial’s Identity+ offers seamless integration with leading identity partners for real-time identity matching, ensuring that no potential connection is missed. While many other solutions will make use of various ID Graph databases to resolve identity, Cordial’s solution integrates with our existing native JavaScript (JS) tagging features and the Cordial platform. This broadens the likelihood of properly identifying a user by querying an ID Graph database, while retaining the native JS capabilities to log and reconcile behavioral data.

And best of all, we make it easy to view and quantify the incremental lift in identified contacts and measure the attributed revenue with our new Identity Dashboard. The dashboard provides at a quick glance, how many anonymous contacts our Identity solutions have identified and how much revenue it’s attributing.

On average, clients using Cordial’s Identity+ solution have seen a 20-30% lift in identified contacts turning what otherwise would have been site traffic into a customizable sales opportunity. 

Looking ahead

Cordial’s Identity+ is more than an innovative solution; it’s a shift in the paradigm of personalized retail communication. It highlights our commitment to creating lifetime customers for the world’s leading brands. With Identity+, we are enabling retailers to not just communicate, but to connect in more meaningful ways with their customers, shaping the future of digital retail.Looking to the future, our product team is ready to continue pushing boundaries. As the need for improved user identification, increased privacy, and personalized communication grows in the industry, our identity solutions stand ready to adapt and expand.

If you would like to learn more about Identity+ or any of our identity solutions, please contact your Client Success Manager or schedule a demo with a Cordial expert.

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So from a purely logistical standpoint, constantly moving heavier and heavier data loads with traditional means isn’t sustainable — or affordable — because your data will only continue to grow and grow. And if your marketing organization hasn’t already invested in data sharing to accommodate this exponential shift, you’re already being left behind. The future of data is all about quick, easy access in real time.

Here are two key reasons why:

• Customers demand better experiences. A comprehensive view of your customer is the single most effective way to deliver a relevant and timely customer experience, but its value depends on high-quality data collection and real-time distribution and accessibility.
• Businesses are shifting to first-party data to optimize those experiences. For years, companies have used third-party cookies to track and understand buyer behavior online. Now, amidst privacy concerns, industry changes, and regulatory laws, marketers will have to lessen their reliance on third-party data and increase their collection and activation of first-party data to achieve better personalization.

So what is data sharing?

Put simply, true data sharing is about making your data accessible to others — without having to move or duplicate your data. 

On a broader organizational level, Lydia Clougherty Jones, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, touts data sharing as “the way to optimize higher-relevant data, generating more robust data and analytics to solve business challenges and meet enterprise goals.” And we couldn’t agree more, especially when it applies to activating your customer data — seamlessly and in the most cost-effective way.

That’s why Cordial has partnered with Snowflake, the Data Cloud Company,, to integrate Snowflake’s Secure Data Sharing with our platform.

And what is Snowflake’s Secure Data Sharing?

Snowflake’s Secure Data Sharing is a proprietary way to allow businesses, like Cordial, to seamlessly grant and share data with clients who use the Snowflake Data Cloud. Unlike traditional data sharing, Snowflake Data Sharing is far easier to use because it provides immediate access to ready-to-query data, eliminating friction and unnecessary costs that come with typical extract, transform, and load (ETLs) data sharing solutions.

How does Secure Data Sharing work with Cordial?

With Secure Data Sharing, no actual data is copied, transferred, or exchanged between accounts — eliminating data movement. All sharing is accomplished through Snowflake’s unique multi-cluster shared data architecture.

And why is this important? Well, it means that sharing data from Cordial to your Snowflake account does not take up any storage in a client account, and therefore, does not contribute to your monthly Snowflake data storage cost. The only charges to you as the client are for the compute resources used to query on shared Cordial data.

What are the benefits of Secure Data Sharing with Cordial?

Gain instant access to valuable first-party customer data from Cordial directly within your Snowflake account. Seamlessly and securely join customer generated data from Cordial with other Snowflake data, to unlock new insights about your business faster and easier than ever before.

1. Unify your data and unlock its potential:

• Gain a comprehensive view of your business.
• Make your data accessible to everyone across your business ecosystem and partners.
• Analyze behavioral patterns and generate funnel reports to better understand your customer’s buying behavior and patterns.

2. Improve data agility and reduce cost:

• Immediately access your data in real-time, accelerating time to insights.
• Pay only for the compute charges you use on shared data from Cordial.
• Empower your business intelligence team by getting them the data they need without engineering.

3. Get immediate and secure access to your data:

• Spend more time leveraging and analyzing your data, not managing it.
• Secure your data with built-in permissions, revocable access, and governance controls.
• Leverage Cordial customer and event data alongside the rest of your Snowflake data to power feature sets within your application, such as dashboards, attribution models, user predictions and recommendations, data visualizations, and more to enrich business insights.

Ready to make the most of Snowflake and Cordial?

Our partnership with Snowflake already has made an impact, and we look forward to guiding your brand to success. 

“Cordial’s Snowflake Marketplace offering has given us a more seamless way of accessing and analyzing our data. Sharing data that used to take hours, now only takes a few minutes to complete,” said Hyrum Ward, Manager of Data Engineering at Purple. “All our valuable first-party data from Cordial is now instantly available and queryable alongside our hundreds of other data sources in Snowflake, so we can easily marry up a variety of data points to gain new insights about our business.”

In addition, data access can be extended bi-directionally, allowing clients to easily ingest and leverage data from Snowflake in the Cordial platform for improved message personalization, segmentation, and business outcomes.

Get in touch to schedule a demo or to learn more about Snowflake’s Secure Data Sharing integration and how we can put our insights to work for you.

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