Data & Identity Management

Your business is unique and so is the way you view data. Often, customer engagement platforms enforce rigid schemas and limits on number of attributes, that makes it hard to work with the data you want to use. That's why it's critical to understand the platform's flexibility with data.

For true cross-channel customer engagement, you need to be able to store the different customer identifiers for each channel in one system that offers a 360-degree view of the customer and be able to maintain customers' opt-in or opt-out status on each channel. It should be able to tie anonymous browsing behavior (e.g. when the customer is browsing, but has not logged in), to the known customer profile.

Finally, this data should be accessible in real-time by systems within your martech stack.

RFP Questions for Data Management

Data Ingestion

1. 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.

2. Does your solution provide pre-built connectors to ingest data from source systems?

3. Does your solution support both real-time data streaming and batch processing?

4. Can your solution ingest real-time behavioral event data, product catalog data, customer interaction data, transactional data, and customer account data types and make it available for use immediately?

Profile Unification

5. Does your solution connect and resolve identity, event, and attribute data from multiple touchpoints, devices and channels into unified customer profiles?
6. Is your solution capable of identity resolution between known and anonymous user data?
7. Does your solution maintain unsubscribe or opt-out information for each channel?
8. Can your solution assess data in the unified profile to determine the most accurate version of name, address, lifecycle state, and other attributes. Are data fields constantly updated as new data becomes available?

Data Access

9. Do business users have direct access to all data in the unified customer profiles without IT configuration and development? Is data available for segmentations, analytics, campaigns, and other system functions?
10. Can data from unified customer profiles be accessed in real-time by external and internal systems via API connections, Webhooks, or query?

Read Blueshift's responses to these questions