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Modern organizations have multiple touch points continuously collecting customer data. Data collection is essential for firms that use it for personalized marketing campaigns and improving customer experience. Analytics provided by this data help enterprises observe customer behavior and make critical business decisions. However, before firms can explore any use cases, it is crucial for them to recognize the data touch points where vital information is collected.

Organizations have different departments, all of which have different interactions with the customer. Each of these individual data sources builds a unique dataset that provides other aspects for creating a customer profile. Let’s look at some of the various elements of a business that contribute to customer data collection.

Ecommerce

Ecommerce businesses are online stores that carry out sales and purchases of goods, mainly without a physical presence. Online shops experience a massive influx of customers compared to in-store businesses due to better pricing and increased convenience. When customers interact with the website, the application generates and safely stores data.

Online shops store information such as location data, products viewed/bought, buying frequency, and other personal data of the consumer. Consumer data collection can be challenging, so businesses integrate customer data platform (CDP) tools to establish data pipelines. These tools help collect customer interactions from email, phone calls, and website transactions. They also help retrieve data from your marketing campaigns and provide insights into customer demographics and the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.

Integrate.io offers an easy data collection pipeline from various CDPs such as:

  • Invoiced: Collection of billing and payment information.

  • SalesForce: Data management for interaction between customer and business.

  • Mailchimp: Email and email marketing campaign data.

  • Google Analytics: Collection of analytics data for web traffic and user trends.

Related Reading: Ecommerce Data Tips: How to Use Data to Get Ahead of The Competition

Marketing

Many large-scale enterprises have marketing departments that carry out all the marketing-related operations. Marketing teams target the product market by analyzing user trends and requirements. They utilize customer data to analyze their requirements and prepare marketing campaigns and materials accordingly. These campaigns are carried out using standard television advertisements, social media, and relevant forum websites.

Under the SAAS model, many firms even provide marketing services to other organizations. These providers offer tools that collect relevant data to construct marketing strategies, and some also provide services for building and carrying out complete campaigns. Examples of marketing firms include:

  • AdRoll: AdRoll helps with user retention by capturing visitor data and retargeting them with personalized ads. This tactic increases the conversion rate and increases returning users.

  • Campaign Monitor: Campaign Monitor provides easy-to-use tools for email marketing. They also offer tools for customer feedback and review gathering.

  • AppsFlyer: AppsFlyer provides users with real-time ROI tracking on a centralized dashboard. It helps understand which of the marketing campaigns are beneficial and which need to be altered.

Integrate.io provides seamless data capture from multiple marketing platforms, including the ones mentioned above. Data from all these sources is combined into a centralized data warehouse.

Related Reading: Top 3 Ways to Automate Your Marketing Data Collection

Sales

Sales departments design strategies to increase the sales of a product by approaching the correct consumer. Sales usually work in parallel with marketing teams but have different agendas. A marketing team targets the market, and sales targets the customer.

The sales team collects customer data from multiple fronts, including social media. They also explore internal logs for customer behavioral data to build customer profiles. These help them in planning marketing campaigns directed towards particular users. Sales teams usually utilize customer demographic and location data to help them understand what would suit any specific consumer.

Third-party sales resources help organizations in capturing and understanding user data. These firms also offer leads and trends calculated from third-party data to help your target the correct customer base. Some sales-directed tools are:

  • Clearbit: Clearbit offers advanced tools for capturing and enriching visitor data.

  • Hubspot: Hubspot offers sales and marketing tools that help create a marketing strategy directed at returning customers to reduce the churn rate.

  • Crunchbase: Crunchbase is a global customer database. They offer verified customer data such as contact details, demographics, and location data so companies can easily target clients.

IntegrateIO’s integration API functionality allows you to gather data from the above-mentioned third-party resources and many more.

CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology that allows the integration of customer data from multiple sources into a centralized repository, creating a customer data platform. CRM provides organizations with a single-page view of all of their customer analytics. They provide data analysis from communication logs, visitor data, customer location information, and contact information. Organizations can use this centralized data to understand their consumer base better.

Modern CRM software includes data in-flow automation, which updates records for existing customers in the CRMs repository. Multiple teams can utilize this software for planning business strategies.CRMs are offered as SAAS products by different vendors such as:

  • BaseCRM: BaseCRM is an intelligent sales platform that uses big data technologies and real-time computing to improve the sales pipeline.

  • Zendesk: Zendesk organizes valuable customer data, including user information, customer service history, and support tickets, and creates a single access point for users.

Furthermore, Customer data platforms allow organizations to personalize customer experience to improve retention rates and reduce churn.

Related Reading: How Data Integration Can Help You Manage Your CRM

Payments

Monetary transactions are a large part of an ecommerce business as well as SAAS products. Once customer acquisition is complete, the next step is to make the payment process seamless and secure. Organizations have to take special care in designing their payment pipelines since this aspect of business deals with critical information. Payment portals collect customer contact information, demographics, and debit/credit card details which makes data privacy all the more important.

Payment details and history are important data for organizations to understand consumer behavior and ensure measures to satisfy their needs. Most organizations utilize specialized third-party payment integrations since these are trusted, secure, and offer a smooth checkout experience. integrate.io offers easy integration of data from several billing services such as:

  • bill.com: bill.com allows you to send recurring invoices to your customers, tracks the status of invoices, automates payment overdue notices, and keeps a record of all transactions performed.

  • Stripe: Stripe is an all-in-one payment solution for all kinds of businesses. It provides a payment gateway to carry out online transactions.

  • Invoiced: Similar to other services, Invoiced offers an easy invoice management solution. It uses advanced management and automation features to make billing procedures buttery smooth.

Analytics

Analytics is the process of observing data for trends and highlights. Organizations employ skilled data analysts to perform data analysis which then forward all the relevant reports and dashboards to concerning teams. Data analysts work with data generated across the entire organization. The analysis is performed on every aspect of data discussed throughout this article, such as finance, marketing, and customers’ personal data.

In recent years, firms have started using automated analytics tools. Some offer a user-friendly interface to create visualizations and dashboards with a few clicks. Most advanced analytics tools use AI techniques to predict future trends and highlight important or unusual activity within the data. These advanced tools reduce manual work and offer insights that might be missed via human effort.

Some famous analytics tools are:

  • Amplitude: Amplitude is an analytics platform that provides trends related to user activity. It tracks various user activities and displays them on a single pane.

  • Dundas BI: Dundas BI includes customizable dashboards, stunning visual analytics, and multi-age reports to present your data in a way that drives faster decisions.

  • Segment: Segment allows firms to load their customer analytics data into an SQL database. This gives users more flexibility on what they wish to do with the data.

*Exclusive Content By Bill Inmon: Performing Analytics on Call Center Data*

Summing it up

Modern enterprises generate gigabytes worth of data every day, and a large part of it is related to users. Customers interact with the organization and the product in multiple different ways, which include website visits, communication, demos, financial transactions, etc. To tap into the potential of collected data, organizations need to recognize these touch points and create data pipelines to bring all this information under a single umbrella.

Integrate.io’s automated data collection solution allows you to gather customer data from multiple online tools and resources. We offer integration APIs for a wide variety of SAAS applications, CRMs, marketing tools, and sales platforms.

To learn more, contact our experts today.