How 4 Leading Brands Leverage a Composable Customer Data Platform

There’s a reason data cloud companies such as Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, AWS Redshift and Teradata are making huge waves. They’re helping enterprise brands embrace the power of composable technology stacks. Enter composable customer data platforms (CDPs).

Composable CDPs map directly to the data warehouse, embracing this single source of truth that are the central data hubs for enterprise organizations. Instead of making copies and shipping it off to a separate CDP, the CDP computes directly where the data lives — in the data warehouse, lakehouse or cloud.

What does this mean for customer experience teams? They get self-serve access to up-to-the-minute data, with what happens in the background powering better customer experiences, with better and more complete data for better audience segmentation, journey orchestration and real-time experiences.

We could talk about the benefits of composable CDPs all day, but seeing is believing.

In this post, we’ll explore stories from Liberty Latin America, Atlassian, Saks and Northwestern Mutual on how they went composable to get real results for their team, and better experiences for their customers.

4 Customers Who Save Time and Increase Performance With a Composable Customer Data Platform

Atlassian Increases Conversion by 71% With Better Audiencing

With 10 terabytes of data and 288 million customers, Atlassian needed a way to harness information swiftly, securely and seamlessly, but there was a gap between their data goldmine and their marketing team’s activation.

Traditional methods of pulling audience lists from the data warehouse meant delays, bottlenecks, and frustration. Atlassian needed a solution that was as dynamic and agile as their team. Atlassian had already aggregated their customer data in data warehouses in a standardized, organized way. It needed a solution that would build on its success — not waste its effort and investment.

That led Atlassian to a composable customer data platform. Atlassian could rely on ActionIQ’s composable CDP to tap into its ever-growing Databricks lakehouse and activate campaigns across the customer experience. With a marketing-friendly user interface, Atlassian’s marketing team could use ActionIQ’s activation layer on top of its complete, real-time set of data in Databricks to launch audiences — SQL-free.

With a customer data strategy that saves time and dollars with the flexibility to grow with the business — the Atlassian team can optimize their resources where it matters and reach a new level of efficiency to power growth, achieving 71% increase in customer conversions with ActionIQ audiences over control. Through granular segmentation of first-party data, they elevated their customer acquisition game, achieving a 5X increase in reach, a 6.7% saving in paid media costs and 50% reduction in RoAS. Check out the use cases they launched to get those results in the full story below:

Northwestern Mutual Goes Zero Copy With a Composable Customer Data Platform

The team at Northwestern Mutual knew something was wrong when they were seeing a proliferation of fragmented data with their on-prem database, with about 200 data labs scattered throughout the organization. They wanted to achieve proper data lineage with all of the classifications of data, and all the security measures — they knew it would be easier to do that and cut down copies by putting it all in one place.

They decided to adopt the data lake and move to Databricks as their central store of data for a centralized data lakehouse with an activation engine — enter ActionIQ and Databricks.

They had three key priorities when they were redesigning their infrastructure, and found that the combination of Databricks and ActionIQ would meet those criteria in the following ways:

Simplify Data Footprint and Reduce Handoffs

Data fragmentation had become a major problem for Northwestern Mutual — when they were designing their stack, they were looking for a solution that would allow them to reduce some of the friction with their data engine and simplify their data footprint. Their composable infrastructure was perfect for reducing handoffs with a CDP that requires no copies whatsoever — tapping directly into the lakehouse.

Ensure Governance and Compliance

Privacy, governance and security are non-negotiable for any organization — but for a company like Northwestern Mutual, making sure that compliance and reduced risk are built into the fabric of their processes is paramount. With a composable customer data platform, no copies are required to query the data, which eliminates the need to worry about copies on copies of data increasing risk and cost. With a composable model, ActionIQ taps directly into Northwestern Mutual’s secure, central store in Databricks to activate data.

Streamline Operations and Speed-to-Market

Before Databricks and ActionIQ, the team at Northwestern Mutual took months to get a single marketing campaign out the door, which often meant that the campaign was no longer relevant. With ActionIQ’s HybridCompute, business teams can access data directly and quickly, with models that are ready-to-be-utilized for campaigns like cross-sells, upsells and everything in between acting on the freshest data available from Databricks.

Now, marketing teams enjoy the simplicity of activating their campaigns without waiting months for a request, and data engineers enjoy the simplicity of having their data centralized in the lakehouse — without having to deal with backlogs of requests. You can catch the full story on how Northwestern Mutual went composable here.

Saks Prepares Their Customer Experience for the Future With a Composable Customer Data Platform

For leading luxury brand Saks, data is incredibly powerful. It empowers team members across the organization to make decisions that are always smarter and better, through both success and failure. But in order to unlock that data-driven strategy, you need a CDP to democratize and activate that data-driven decisioning and action — from the analytics team all the way to the marketers and beyond.

But not just any CDP would fill that order. They needed a solution that would give them the freedom to scale that entire experience, and evolve as quickly as the retail environment evolves.

Saks’s data is all in Snowflake, where it’s managed by Nivy Swaminathan, Vice President of Advanced Analytics and Personalization and her team. They build data science models, predicting outcomes at a user level, and all of that rich data gets written back into their Snowflake data system. ActionIQ mirrors that work to allow marketers access and activation of all of those insights-driven audiences. With ActionIQ, Saks activates audiences in 10 channels (and growing) through integrations, with first-party data as a signal to activate on different platforms.

The return from having a CDP for Saks manifested in time savings, agility to rapidly test, learn and optimize on data-driven insights and audiences, and self-service for their marketing teams. You can read the full story of how Saks went composable here.

Liberty Latin America Goes Zero Data Copy to Deploy in 75% Less Time

Data replication is at odds with every IT team’s imperative — keep data secure, keep costs low and get the best insights. And its implications reach across the enterprise business.

That’s why Liberty Latin America (LLA), a leading telecommunications company, decided to go zero-copy and tap into their AWS Redshift Warehouse with a composable customer data platform to save their “SQL Guys” time, give marketers access to activate insights and maintain every standard of security and governance.

Liberty Latin America discovered that ActionIQ’s HybridCompute had the qualifications of what they needed in a CDP — with seamless integrations, self-service access for marketers and flexibility to adapt data strategy.

Mauricio Romero, Senior Director of Advanced Analytics and Data Governance at Liberty Latin America explains, “Finding HybridCompute was kind of a pleasant surprise… Instead of just replicating random amounts of data where you are just dumping data into a CDP and ending up with a mess that nobody understands, now we have our semantic layer that we fully understand.”

Liberty Latin America was able to get started in just a few days with the seamless integration ActionIQ has with Amazon Redshift — in that time they were up and running with 30 cloud tables, 4 markets launched, 468+ attributes in redshift and deployed in 75% less time. Read Liberty Latin America’s full story here.

Quick to Start, Built to Last — Proof of Concept ActionIQ’s Composable Customer Data Platform in Minutes

Unlike traditional CDPs that require data to be pulled into the CDP, ActionIQ is a new kind of CDP – Hybrid Composable – that can map to existing data sources like Snowflake or Databricks, making setup a breeze.

ActionIQ is offering no-cost POCs that can be stood up in as little as 30 minutes. Just bring your data from an existing cloud data warehouse like Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, or AWS, and watch as a simple marketer-friendly interface gets quickly mapped directly to the data where it lives – no data copy required. This process takes only minutes to complete, and allows business users to test self-service audience building and journey mapping, and data teams to test and validate queries natively pushing down to their existing data warehouse investment. Reach out now to see if you qualify for our CDP POC.