How Brightspeed’s Marketers Move Ultrafast With a Composable CDP

Brightspeed moves fast. From launching their first marketing message together in a conference room in 2022 to today, Brightspeed turned their business into the fifth largest Telecommunications Provider in the United States. And with speed like that, you don’t have time to stop.

As Brightspeed’s business continued to make moves, they needed a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to support their scale, security, segmentation and self-service goals as they grew their customer base (rather than weighing them down with faulty data integrations and SQL chaos).

We sat down with Jonathan Bradley, Senior IT Manager, Marketing Technology and Customer Insights and Robert Preston, Senior Data Architect at Brightspeed to discover how they use ActionIQ’s Composable CDP to meet and exceed their business goals while seamlessly integrating into their warehouse-first infrastructure centered around Google BigQuery.

Below, take a look at their key criteria for a CDP, with details on how they use ActionIQ’s complete, Composable CDP to move ultrafast, with zero bulky data operations.

Key Criteria for Brightspeed’s CDP Evaluation

The team at Brightspeed has been around the block with CDPs. In fact, vendors in general tend to give seasoned CDP buyers some level of trepidation. Often, they get lots of promises around support and product roadmap that don’t materialize over time. You don’t want to be any vendor’s fool.

So Brightspeed was looking for a true partner. In fact, Jonathan shared that this was his fifth implementation of a CDP in his long-spanning career, saying, “CDP has been around for a long time, but not CDPs that actually work. This product, it just blows me away. This is my fifth big CDP in my career and I told my CIO, this is the one that works. I don’t like vendors. And I know most people probably don’t like vendors, but we love ActionIQ.”

As such they had a core set of non-negotiables for evaluating their CDP partners, leading to ActionIQ. Let’s take a look.

Marketing Self-Service Access to Insights

For Brightspeed, enabling their marketers to actually view a complete customer profile, create and activate audiences aligned to key campaigns and independently orchestrate across numerous channels was critical. And beyond the execution, they needed visibility into performance and incremental benefits to drive continuous improvement. This is key to maintaining that speed and scale.

Seamless Connection in the Stack With Their Cloud

The Brightspeed team needed a CDP partner that would fit seamlessly into their existing data infrastructure. Brightspeed using Google BigQuery as their Cloud Platform. For this reason, having a solution that integrated seamlessly with their data cloud was key.

Unrelenting Security and Governance

Jonathan explains that with Telecommunications, security and governance are uber-regulated. He explains that, “on top of all our success criteria, our regulatory environment was the absolute toughest one. One of the big qualifiers for us was ‘how do we get our secure data into a cloud-based CDP while maintaining compliance?’ Top to bottom, ActionIQ helps us fulfill all of our regulatory requirements.”

Going No-Copy and Getting All Results With ActionIQ’s Composable CDP

In Brightspeed’s evaluation, working with a Composable CDP was perfect in meeting their key requirements. A truly Composable CDP is an application that spans across all of your systems and integrates seamlessly with your existing infrastructure and data warehouse.

To double-click on one of Brightspeed’s key criteria for their CDP, they were looking for a foundation built on their Google BigQuery environment. And actually, this architecture is what sets the stage and enables every other benefit. You’ve heard it before – you need the right wiring to turn all the lights on. Simple, but true.

Going All in With ActionIQ HybridCompute

To enable better security and self-service access to their full dataset, the Brightspeed team uses ActionIQ HybridCompute.

The beauty of HybridCompute, is that it sits in the middle between the data warehouse, and ActionIQ enables businesses to connect directly to their data warehouse. What makes it unique is that you don’t have to go all in with choosing where your data lives. ActionIQ connects to the data warehouse, but brands also have the flexibility to have data either all in in the warehouse, or partially in ActionIQ – giving data flexibility for the real world through a federated query pushdown.

By cutting down on copies and giving marketers access to the full breadth of data wherever it’s stored, technology and marketing teams alike get those benefits. Less copies means better security and regulatory compliance – a non-negotiable for every brand.

Lightbulb Moment: Easier Marketing Process Breeds Creative Teams

With data that’s seamless and quickly activated by marketing teams, they’re able to move faster and get more creative with the marketing activations they’re launching.

Jonathan explains, “In the past, with passing [data] back and forth, measuring size and execution and manually moving data left and right, it took three weeks to a month for campaigns to go live. That’s where you miss revenue opportunities. With ActionIQ, because the data is ever present and it’s so easy to use, the teams are able to be much more spontaneous and creative in how they’re going to market with segments. Now, it’s fun to do.”

He added, “you can train anybody very quickly. Usually, it takes me a half hour to an hour before someone is largely functional and just wants me to get out of their way so that they can start creating segments and sending them. It’s really that easy.”

Use Cases Brightspeed Kicked Off With Their CDP

After just three weeks, Brightspeed was up and running with ActionIQ with plenty of support like technical resources, QA, architectural design project management.

“A lot of vendors promise technical resources during deployment but it’s like pulling teeth to have them actually come up with a plan that’s going to work for you,” Jonathan mentioned. “When ActionIQ showed up on day one, they had a full deployment plan from start to finish — assisting with proper data modeling, providing the right level of hand holding all the way through and managing QA at every step.”

To get started, Brightspeed focused on one of their biggest initiatives: to drive growth of their fiber product. Brightspeed has two core products – fiber and DSL. One of their initial use cases was to convert their DSL customers into their fiber product. To do that, they focused on a few core use cases.

Driving Cross-Sell Adoption and Abandoned Cart

These standard marketing campaigns don’t go out of style. When done correctly, they’re invaluable to marketing teams. With ActionIQ, the Brightspeed team was able to assist marketing teams in creating very complex journeys for customers and prospects.

That started with increasing adoption of their fiber product, with campaigns that were self-serve.. Then they launched abandoned cart, but then added in other channels like outbound telemarketing.

Going From Anonymous to Known With First-Party Data

Using a solution that’s futureproof is key in flexibility and scale. One critical imperative that the Brightspeed team was excited to take advantage of was a foundation of first-party data, and moving use cases towards that more futureproof acquisition environment.

Jonathan explains, “That was the next huge plus. What we can do via first-party cookies, and total customer consent, is we can very easily start with what would originally be an anonymous visitor very quickly into somebody that we know and marketing can cater the message. This is great functionality with ActionIQ.”

Answering The Ultimate Question: What is Working and What Should I Try Next?

Marketing is all about unlocking that next step to support your business goals. With the tools that enable you to make that next best step better, again and again, you can innovate and grow.

What’s next for Brightspeed? It’s all about creating that next best step for customers. They plan to continue exploring omnichannel marketing to give customers an experience that surrounds them, implement more AI into their marketing efforts for personalization and optimization, and empower their digital marketing channel to rely more on internal identity data and reduce ad spend by marketing to the right audiences.

Looking for a CDP that will scale your customer experience? Reach out to us now to see how we can partner with your team to meet your unique goals, or read more about the CDP landscape in our CDP Market Guide.