Blueshift: Customer Profile Management

Overview: Unlike other competing solutions that require complex up-front data modeling and SQL queries with a limited number of data attributes, Blueshift provides a marketer-friendly framework that dynamically adapts to the underlying data, avoiding complex and lengthy deployments. This means that with Blueshift, you do not need to model your data up-front. Instead, Blueshift creates field types dynamically as it receives data from your existing data stores and applications. Dynamic fields in Blueshift are available immediately for use for segmentation, as well as for personalization.

Our platform’s modern way of managing customer data enables you to immediately integrate and leverage customer data from any source despite any potential underlying inconsistencies in data structures. Additionally, our platform will provide marketers with tremendous flexibility when it comes to integrating new data sources and adding new customer attributes to be leveraged across segments and campaigns.

Blueshift's solution helps you maintain a 360-degree profile of customers that updates with every customer interaction. This profile is linked to customer identifiers on each channel: email address, phone number, mobile app device tokens, as well as 3rd party identifiers like Facebook or Display RTB ids.

Blueshift automatically merges anonymous (logged-out) activity of users with their known behavior whenever possible (e.g. in the case of an anonymous web user who logs in or creates an account).

Blueshift's SDK (for mobile apps), Javascript library (for web front-end events), and API (for all other actions) give you a comprehensive set of tools to track known and anonymous customer behavior on the web, mobile and offline platforms.

Blueshift's Responses to Questions on Customer Profile Management

Data Ingestion

1. Does your solution ingest user attribute, event, interaction, and transactional data from any channel (online or offline), device, or internal system that collects customer data throughout the customer lifecycle?

Yes, Blueshift platform's event processing easily ingests online and offline data from all data sources and internal systems, from across channels and devices. This is possible due to our schema-less architecture based on NoSQL technology that dynamically adapts to your data schemas, and takes care of the modeling so you always have a complete, up-to-date view of all your users. Our platform captures all data types, including behavioral, event, transactional, and user attributes.

Real-time user data can be ingested into Blueshift in a variety of ways. For example, for website behavior, we provide a JavaScript tag that can be placed on the appropriate web page. We also have pre-built integrations with several tag management systems, such as Google Tag Manager, Tealium, etc, and customer data infrastructure systems, such as Segment and mParticle, which can streamline the implementation process and reduce the time to value to bring real-time event streaming data into Blueshift. For mobile behavioral user data, Blueshift provides a mobile SDK for integrating your Android and iOS mobile apps with Blueshift’s event processing platform. If the preferred method for data ingestion is via server-side approach by integrating with Blueshift directly from your back-end systems, we provide a flexible and robust web services REST API to send user and behavioral data to us in real-time.

Unlike other solutions that only track user level and behavioral data, we also provide our customers the ability to ingest your product and content catalog, and most importantly we help you to capture user interactions with your products and content so that our platform can learn via our patented AI technology to personalize the most relevant content in future communications with the user.

Data from your offline data sources, such as POS, can also be sent to us in batched mode via flat file transfers (i.e. Amazon S3, secure FTP, etc.) that can be setup one-time as recurring, automated import jobs. As part of onboarding, we can use this same approach to setup a one-time import job to ingest your users' past historical transactional data (i.e., purchases, subscriptions, etc.) so that you have a complete view of your users within Blueshift immediately. With other solutions, you only capture users' data from the time that it is ingested and lose visibility of users' past historical data. With Blueshift, you have visibility of both the users' past and present behavior.

Once data is ingested into Blueshift, this data is immediately available for use by marketers to drive downstream marketing processes, such as segmentation, campaign orchestration, and personalized recommendations and is accessible to other business users.

[Additional information on how Blueshift ingests data] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/4405429180947-Data-Ingestion)

2. What data types and formats does the solution support? Can your solution handle structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data using schema-less ingestion? Describe the methods through which your solution ingests data.

Due to Blueshift's unique and flexible architecture, we can accept data in any format (structured, semi-structured, or unstructured) and can properly index the metadata into the appropriate field for the appropriate user. This is possible because unlike other companies that only support SQL data structures and require complex phases of data modeling up front with limited number of attributes, Blueshift is schema-less and based on NoSQL technology that leverages various key/value stores to dynamically adapt to your data when it’s being ingested. This means that with Blueshift, you do not need to model your data or perform any data mapping up front. Instead, Blueshift can infer the incoming data, classify the data type (i.e., text, numeric, timestamp), and then automaticially create data fields dynamically so that you always have a complete view of your users.

Furthermore, our platform makes it super easy to add, modify, or classify data fields without technical assistance or writing code because it programatically infers the incoming data, automatically classifies the data type (i.e., text, numeric, timestamp), and then immediately adds data attributes. In addition, Blueshift provides the flexibility for marketers to manually add, modify, and classify user data attributes directly within the Blueshift UI. In terms of event data, marketers can easily add, modify, and classify any event activity for tracking user behavior across any channel in just a few clicks within the UI.

[Additional information on how to add and connect data sources] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/4407015295123-Overview-of-data-in-Blueshift)

3. Can your solution automatically add, modify, and classify data fields? Describe your ability to define custom data fields and values. What is the limit on data fields and custom events or attributes?

Yes, Blueshift makes it easy to add, modify, or classify data fields without technical assistance or writing code because it programmatically infers the incoming data, automatically classifies the data type (i.e., text, numeric, timestamp), and then immediately adds data attributes. In addition, Blueshift provides the flexibility for marketers to manually add, modify, and classify user data attributes directly within the Blueshift UI. In terms of event data, marketers can easily add, modify, and classify any event activity for tracking user behavior across any channel in just a few clicks within the UI. There are no limits on data fields, custom events, or attributes -- you can collect any number & type of user attributes and event data.

Profile Unification

4. Does your solution connect and resolve identity, event, and attribute data from multiple touchpoints, devices and channels into unified customer profiles?

Yes, Blueshift provides a highly sophisticated, flexible approach to identity resolution. Blueshift builds a single, 360-degree profile for each of your users by tracking behavioral, event, and attribute data for both anonymous and signed-in identifiable users across devices and sessions and merging/stitching profiles using explicit, deterministic methods using a hierarchy of user identifiers. We start tracking users at the top of the funnel anonymously with a first-party cookie or device id, and subsequently merge user profiles once user identity is known after an authentication event (i.e. sign-in). Below is the user identifier hierarchy:

・uuid: Blueshift internal uuid for each user
・customer_id: Unique customer id from your system
・email: Email address
・device_id: One or more device ids associated with the user
・cookies: One or more cookies associated with the user

User profiles get merged when either a customer_id or email (or both) are available, with the customer_id getting a higher priority. User attribute data and event data are resolved and merged into the user profile based on the user identifying himself/herself using one of the known user identifiers listed above.

[Additional information about how we stitch a customer 360 profile using different identifiers]
(https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002713633-360-Degree-User-View#Tracking)

[Additional information on our ability to provide a single 360 profile] (https://blueshift.com/single-customer-view/)

Furthermore, due to our flexible architecture, Blueshift is uniquely able to support customers' use cases where account, group, and householding data model is applicable. In this scenario, different customer profiles are linked to a common parent entity called a group.

[Additional information on how Blueshift can support your account level and householding scenarios] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/360057983793-Customer-groups)

5. Is your solution capable of identity resolution between known and anonymous user data?

Yes, Blueshift provides cross-device identity resolution, as well as identity resolution between known and anonymous users. Blueshift tracks anonymous user behavior using cookies or mobile device identifiers, and subsequently merges the anonymous user behavior with known user activity as known user activity becomes available. Moreover, because we use multiple identity keys, our user profiles are much richer so we can resolve anonymous and known profiles faster, reduce duplicate profiles, and truly capture a full view of users across channels.

6. Does your solution de-dupe users?

Yes, user profiles get merged (de-duped) based on a hierarchy of user identifiers. They are listed below in terms of prioritization.

・uuid: Blueshift internal uuid for each user
・customer_id: Unique customer id from your system
・email: Email address
・device_id: One or more device ids associated with the user
・cookies: One or more cookies associated with the user

User profiles get merged when either a customer_id or email (or both) are available, with the customer_id getting a higher priority.

[Additional information on how user profiles are merged and de-duped can be found here] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002713633-360-Degree-User-View#h_01EWEY1C9M40A26M1S1XFGXVM9)

7. Does your solution maintain unsubscribe or opt-out information for each channel?

Yes. Blueshift supports channel (i.e., email, SMS, push) real-time response management (i.e., subscriber opt-in/opt-out status) via our native integrations with our preferred email and SMS delivery partners. Unsubscribe/opt-out data is updated at the user level in real-time.

Additional documentation on managing unsubscribe and opt-in/out can be found here

Data Access

8. Can data from unified customer profiles be accessed in real-time by external and internal systems via API connections, Webhooks, or query?

Yes, Blueshift gives your external and internal systems real-time access to any data in the user profiles through a set of robust web services REST API. More specifically, your external and internal systems can query our user profiles using our User API. User campaign engagement data (i.e. delivered, opened, clicked) can be easily accessed by your external systems in real-time via our event webhook capability.

In addition, Blueshift offers many pre-built, 3rd-party integration connectors with leading, best-of-breed technology solutions, which provide real-time access to our user profiles once integrated. As an agile company, we are constantly building out and expanding our partnership ecosystem that drive the success of our customers.

[Here is an overview of our API] (https://developer.blueshift.com/reference)
[Here is documentation on our User API] (https://developer.blueshift.com/reference/get_api-v1-customers)
[Here is documentation on our event webhook to access campaign engagement data] (https://help.blueshift.com/hc/en-us/articles/360024686333-Event-webhook-callback-Samples)
[Here is a list of our 3rd party integration partners] (https://blueshift.com/integration-partners)