Customer Intelligence Platform [CIP] : The missing intelligence layer in the modern data stack.
Background
The modern data stack has democratized data access and has made it easier for product stakeholders to collect customer data and take actions on them. CDP/CDIs like segment and rudderstack have made it easier to bring your siloed customer data into one centralized location such as a cloud dataware house like snowflake, bigquery, redshift, which are rapidly becoming the centralized store for your customer 360 data, however the power of CDWs remain untapped. Business Intelligence tools like tableau, looker, power BI, metabase are pretty much the only solutions that are tapping into these data warehouses, however the whole purpose of data democratization is that anyone in your organization should be able to leverage the data to improve their decision making process, clearly these BI tools are not designed keeping in mind the non-technical users.
Customer Intelligence | Present Day
Present day intelligence has a limited view sitting on top of siloed data sources, product analytics tools such as mixpanel, amplitude are designed for user events only, other than obvious pitfalls of these solutions like losing data control and privacy issues, the insights itself remain limited, if one wanted to get deeper into how user behavior is dependent on other business data like customer transactions(stripe), marketing actions(iterable), customer success(zendesk) that’s not an easy experience, getting such joint insights usually requires one to email their product analyst team and ask them to run a query and hopefully get an answer within the next 24–48 hours. A simple query like running a conversion funnel analysis for users who had > 5 transactions in the past month is a task that amplitude/mixpanel user’s can’t perform today without help from product analysts.
In summary present day user intelligence platforms are either siloed themselves like amplitude/mixpanel or too hard to use like tableau/looker/powerBI.
What is a Customer Intelligence Platform [CIP] ?
A customer intelligence platform is the intelligence layer that sits on top of your 360 customer data store and can be used by anyone in your organization to help them make better & faster decisions and should natively feed into marketing and sales execution engine, example — running a campaign for a particular cohort of customers or running a reactivation campaign for users who churned at a particular stage in the funnel.
The properties of a customer intelligence platform
- Plug n Play : Easy Integration.
- Compute Only : No data duplication.
- Real Time : Insights as soon as events happen.
- Interactive : Ability to ask any question.
- 360 Customer Insights : Ability to ask vertical & horizontal questions.
- Democratized/Self Serve : Meant to be used by everyone.
- Designed for Execution : Feed into execution platforms like braze, iterable.
Why a Customer Intelligence Platform?
Data is only as good as it’s interpretation, we are living an age where we have more data than ever however in reality a very tiny fraction of it is leveraged by decision makers, one requires complicated intelligence stack, long email threads to get answers to very simple questions
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Where does a CIP fit in?
CIP is the intelligence layer for your customer data that simply sits on top of your 360 customer store such as a cloud data warehouse and feeds into your marketing, sales and growth automation tools.
Conclusion
The innovation in cloud data warehouse technologies remains untapped today, it’s time we build a democratized intelligence layer on top that truly leverages the power of these data warehouses and enable everyone in your organization to make product led decisions.