Driving business decisions with real-time data

APIs are not new news; they’ve been around for 20 years and have grown exponentially.

From powering ecommerce, social platforms and Cloud applications they have become ubiquitous since the explosion of smart phones. They improve integration and automation, leading to better services and innovation, saving time and money – linking both internal and external systems.

With 83% of respondents to The State of API Integration Report 2020 believing API integration is now a critical part of their strategy and 43% seeing a direct increase in revenue it is clear that this is the direction of travel for most organisations.

Added to this, the desire for most brands to provide a more personalised and seamless experience to their customers with 66% of consumers stating that content, that is not personalised, would stop them from making a purchase, real-time information is more important than ever.

To facilitate these real time business requirements, we have made our suite of demographic products available via our API, enabling organisations to access real-time insight about their customers directly into their marketing tech, consumer databases or websites.

The API enables you to code up new customer records instantaneously for immediate onboarding as well as providing insight across digital applications for content personalisation and messaging. With our API you will have the ability to improve business decision-making and user experience whilst achieving personalisation at scale.

THE BENEFITS OF A REAL-TIME API

CACI have taken the Acorn, Ocean and Fresco data products and made them available via our real time API. This allows for the coding of an individual instantaneously, and can change the use cases and application of the products. Here are just some of the benefits our clients are experiencing with CACI’s Demographic Data API.

– Immediate onboarding

Many organisations use CACI’s data products such as Ocean, Acorn and Fresco to plan the customer journey a new customer will follow as they onboard them. Understanding your audience’s affluence, lifestage, and lifestyle can make a big difference when creating tailored messaging and customer engagement strategies, by providing a view of the products your customer may be interested in, in the future. It is particularly important to get this right during the onboarding process as getting it wrong can affect the way a new customer perceives your organisation.

Knowing this additional insight at the start of the relationship can be immensely helpful, from knowing whether they are a Rising Metropolitan who may be interested in getting on the property ladder to an Asset Rich Grey who is planning for life enhancing expenditure or saving for their grandchildren, messaging can be adapted accordingly.

Similarly, if you are a leisure organisation, you might want to understand which shows your customers might be interested in attending in the future; adding CACI’s data can provide the insight you need to predict this while you build up a picture of their transaction habits.

– Siloed data

Another benefit of using the API is that it can assist organisations with myriads of siloed legacy systems containing customer information. It can be complex and expensive to pull data that is sitting on a marketing database, using the API can be a quick and efficient way to provide marketeers access to key pieces of information that drive their marketing communications programmes.

– Website and Email Personalisation

Identifying customers when they appear on your website enables you to serve tailored page content immediately, based on customer characteristics. Adding insight to a customer or prospect in a logged in environment or when they enter their postcode on a web form, enables instant journey planning and content personalisation.

For example, on a grocer’s website, a Successful Surbubs family will be looking for different products than someone who falls into the Student Life Group. Adding this colour to individuals, means that you can personalise content and create appropriate digital journeys which are dynamically adapted as they browse.

– Geo location

Additionally, at the point of placing a home delivery order, appending the geo location of the property can immediately assist in planning the delivery logistics, as well as helping drivers identify properties when on route, especially when it is dark or they are delivering in rural locations.

– Quote journey analytics

A number of our clients are interested in understanding the types of customers who drop out of the funnel during the quote process, compared to those that go on to convert. By adding key demographic, lifestyle or your own segment information to a record as it goes through the quote process, enables you to improve the effectiveness of your digital journey planning. Understanding whether a prospect might need additional reassurance or if they are more likely to be driven by price could affect the conversion path each customer follows.

– Providing insight to sales, customer service or chatbots

We also support our clients with bespoke APIs. For example, one organisation has a bespoke API system built by CACI, which provides real time insight to their inbound call handling teams for both sales and customer service applications, This allows for tailored scripts to be followed dependent on the customer segment.

With studies showing that it is likely 85% of customer interactions will be handled without a human in the future, providing demographic information in real time can provide different routes for chatbots to follow.

BEGIN YOUR REAL-TIME DATA JOURNEY

With the world moving to more automated ways of dealing with data and consumers expecting things to happen in real time, being able to understand your customers or prospects immediately can make a huge difference to the customer journey, maximising the revenue opportunities available to you.

You can discover more about CACI’s suite of consumer data products here, or to speak to one of our data experts and gain a better understanding of how you can integrate these products in real-time with your CRM system, websites and call centres, please get in touch.