Avanade and Amperity are proud to announce the collaboration between the companies to accelerate value as our clients manage the modern customer. It's been far too long and too difficult to get to a unified 360-degree customer profile. We’re launching our efforts across Europe and building on our work together in North America. Available today, Avanade’s Customer Data Platform solutions, powered by the Microsoft Cloud and Cloud for Retail, together with Amperity, solves this problem.

Most brands today are failing to solve the challenge of collecting and connecting all the data from various channels that gives a true view of each customer, hindering their ability to deliver exceptional experiences throughout the customer journey. By not connecting these digital and physical dots, brands risk taking a hit to their brand loyalty, leading to significant churn, and lost revenue.

For example, one of Amperity’s large chain retailer customers relied on their loyalty program to predict churn, but didn’t anticipate that many customers had multiple loyalty accounts and others didn’t use them at all. The brand was confusing customers with their messaging as well as over-discounting. Using patented artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) identity resolution, Customer360, and predictive capabilities powered by Azure Data Lake Storage, Amperity was able to combine in-store and online point-of-sale data allowing the brand to improve the customer experience and pull back on wasted spend.

“Today, retailers and brands are increasingly looking to data, analytics, and automation to deliver more consistent, relevant experiences for their customers,” said Shelley Bransten, Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Retail and Consumer Goods, at Microsoft. “Through our collaboration with Amperity and Avanade, Microsoft and the Microsoft Cloud is helping those brands and retailers to capture customer data across all their channels so they can make real-time business decisions and ultimately deliver on the promise of a seamless and personalized shopping experience.”

Solving the challenge of ‘messy data’
With customers expected to spend more than $1.2 trillion over the next few months, many brands are searching for ways to truly know their customers with the goal of providing the products and personalized experiences today’s consumers demand. However, becoming truly customer-centric in this climate is no longer a question of multichannel or omnichannel. The customer is the only channel.

That might sound like an admirable sentiment. But to transform it from platitude to reality, brands must empower their teams with the most relevant customer insights. According to RETHINK Retail, “organizations operating from poor quality customer profiles are losing out on revenue. These profiles generate inefficiencies that can result in disappointing outcomes such as marketing campaigns that are misaligned with target customers’ needs and wants.”

The power of AI & ML in the customer experience
To know a customer, brands have to unify and activate their customer data — across each and every touch point — it needs to be accurate and trustworthy, so no time is wasted deduping databases before personalization decisions are made. The reality is that brands either have a goldmine or an expensive storage problem because their data is so difficult to connect, mine, and use. That’s where AI and ML come into play.

Through its work with Fortune 500 brands, Amperity discovered that on average, brands have misidentified 23% of their customers, a number that represents, on average, 53% of their revenue. If a brand personalizes before tackling messy data problems, they are activating experiences based on inaccurate data and running the risk of getting it wrong.

Brands can quickly unify data across silos, identify who their customers are, and personalize their interactions based on what they need and want, within a real-time, 360-degree view with Amperity and the scale of Microsoft Azure. The joint solution provides brands with a single source of truth to understand a customer’s frame of mind, influencing factors, history of buying patterns and their next course of action. It ingests and integrates customer data from digital and offline sources, stitching together the customer’s profile to make the data even more actionable.

“Brands have to rethink how they approach first-party data due to third-party identity graph and cookie deterioration, government regulations, and evolving consumer expectations in a privacy-first data world,” said Matthew Biboud-Lubeck, Head of Europe and UK at Amperity. “By embracing a first-party data strategy, brands have access to accurate customer profiles built on a strong identity foundation. Across our hundreds of clients, this approach is proven to exponentially expand reach and directly improve ROI for customer retention and acquisition.

This global offering represents a tremendous opportunity to compress time to value across customer data-powered initiatives. Our joint customers can take advantage of the cloud scale of Microsoft Azure, the global expertise and scalability of Avanade, and the premiere enterprise-grade customer data platform of Amperity to deliver meaningful customer experiences and business outcomes.”

That is why the joint efforts between Avanade, Microsoft, and Amperity are foundational to help brands unify, access, manage, and activate first-party customer data — securely and at scale.

To take advantage of the modern data hub powered by Amperity, contact us today to start your risk free 90-day pilot.