Collecting consumer data in a CDP is about understanding customers and providing more personalized experiences, but getting that data where it needs to be is difficult.
Twilio Segment, the CDP Twilio purchased in 2020 for $3.2 billion, may assist by making data more portable and enabling reverse ETL (extract, transform, load) to get it where it needs to be.
Kevin Niparko, VP of Twilio Segment, calls this new technique Segment Unify. It entails generating customer records from many data sources, storing them in the data warehouse of choice, and utilizing reverse ETL to transport the data to where it’s required.
Segment Unify is our next-generation customer data platform. There are two main features—first, identity resolution and profiles. Second, Niparko told TechCrunch that this is building the golden customer record across all digital signals.
“We then give portability around that with profile sync so we can put it right into a data warehouse like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift, where data scientists and engineers can include that into their models, analytics, and business intelligence. “We also provide reverse ETL, which is a synchronizing back out of the data warehouse into all of the tools in that marketing and analytics stack, independent of vendor,” he added.
Niparko thinks this flexibility without vendor lock-in makes his platform stand out. “This gives data scientists and analysts the ability to take the insights that they’re uncovering in the data warehouse, sync them into a marketing automation tool, like Customer.io, sync that into other tools like Amplitude or Mixpanel to help the entire organization leverage that same singular insight around the golden customer profile,” he said.
He argues this can help clients achieve true personalization. The world is heading toward one-to-one engagement. I think that will require, or base with portable customer data, and then layering in AI that can reason about all these different signals and provide the one message that’s perfect for that consumer at that moment of their journey.”
Crossfit, MongoDB, and Sanofi are using the software before its formal launch today.