Cheetah Digital CEO Discusses New Engagement Data Platform

Despite advancements in marketing technology, brands and marketers still struggle to create a single, unified view of the customer. To overcome this problem, Cheetah Digital has announced the debut of its Customer Engagement Suite. The Customer Engagement Suite is designed to enable marketers to deliver personalized experiences, cross-channel messaging, and loyalty strategies using a foundational data layer, the Cheetah Engagement Data Platform. Built specifically for enterprise marketers, the Cheetah Digital Customer Engagement Suite combines the depth and breadth of a robust data platform with real-time, cross-channel execution capabilities in a single, unified solution. Recently, Loyalty360 spoke with Sameer Kazi, CEO of Cheetah Digital, to get his take on what the Cheetah Engagement Data Platform can offer the loyalty industry.
 
“What we’ve done for the last two years is contemplate how we can compete in the market,” Kazi said. “We’ve been looking inward to who we are, what we do, and our purpose. Our competitive set includes marketing clouds and point-solutions providers that are doing very interesting things in the market, but we want to take advantage of a big opportunity by getting super focused on direct marketing. In doing so, we think we’ve found a way to out-innovate point-solutions providers and marketing cloud contenders.”
 
Enter Cheetah Digital’s Customer Engagement Suite and its “foundational data layer,” the Cheetah Engagement Data Platform. The platform is designed, Kazi said, to use “real-time signals from consumers, decision on those signals, and create action on those signals, which is extremely important for modern marketing.”
 
Working in real-time, as Kazi stresses, is the key differentiator of the Customer Engagement Suite. “The problem is,” Kazi said, “either IT has built a data warehouse, or data is stuck inside of channels like email. It’s a given that we need to have data management capabilities that can ingest any type of data and create a single profile view. That’s why the Engagement Data Platform natively connects to systems of action.”
 
When asked what led Cheetah Digital to create the platform, Kazi replied, “Our DNA is around permission. We are the holder and manager of permission. With everything that’s happened in privacy over the last couple of years, zero-party data is important. Marketing based on real relationships is going to rule the day. There is a need to respect consumer privacy, but if you can create an excellent value exchange, you create those relationships and gather declared data. Actioning that data is the logical next step. You complete the cycle with brand advocacy. Experiences, messaging, and loyalty represent the marketing lifecycle of the consumer. No one else is thinking about solutions from that vantage.”
 
Kazi also noted that increasing brand awareness is still one of the most important marketing goals in the current environment. “Most progressive marketers know that the three most important metrics are lifetime value, CSAT, and NPS,” Kazi said. “Maniacal focus on those is the thing that will create the most success. They decide your tactics and strategy. Solving for that is the most important work any brand is going to do in the near term. Getting a single customer view is a challenge, but everything flows from it. What you are really trying to get to is whether your customer will recommend you. If not, there’s work that needs to be done.”
 
In addition, Kazi pointed out that near-term goals can and should flow into a brand’s long-term strategy. He said, “Organizational evolution is important. The loyalty team is the consumer of info from marketers, and consolidation of customer marketing into a holistic point of view is a necessity. Once brands can figure this out, near-term goals and the gorilla-goal of NPS become aligned.”
 
Kazi admitted, however, that many challenges lie ahead. He said, “How do I personalize and create a consistent experience in any channel all of the time and in real-time? Between big data, real-time streaming, and other tech, we have the capacity to do this. But the thing that marketers want solved is, I have a single customer view, now I want to decision across all of my data in any channel in as close to real time as possible. That goal hasn’t been reached just yet.”
 
Kazi concluded with some final thoughts on customer loyalty as a whole. “The reality is that true loyalty goes beyond managing tiers and rewards. It is a state of mind that you have to cultivate over numerous customer interactions. Then, when you have the system, that’s the cherry on top of the cake. The middle components are important in driving advocacy and loyalty, but when you focus on relationships, you achieve emotional loyalty.”

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