AgilOne Differentiates Itself From Competitors

AgilOne provides a customer data platform for enterprise B2C companies. The platform offers predictive models to understand customer behavior and real-time APIs to orchestrate personalized experiences. It is designed to create omni-channel customer relationships to improve growth and revenue. The company has offices in Sunnyvale, San Francisco, New York, Istanbul, Manila, and London; has 125 clients; and has been in business for 11 years.
 
Recently, Loyalty360 sat down with Omer Artun, CEO and Founder of AgilOne, to discuss what the company’s platform does, how it’s different than competitors, and his thoughts on customer loyalty and privacy.
 
“We are a customer data platform, also called CDP,” said Artun. “Only recently has the CDP category become a household term among marketers, but there is still a lot of confusion about what exactly a CDP is. CDPs have grown out of the CRM category, providing analysis that CRMs do not provide, and CDPs have also evolved out of capabilities provided by marketing service providers—for example, Epsilon or Acxiom. The demand for CDPs came from marketers needing to understand and access customer data, and to do so on a modern SaaS-based platform. A CDP does three things. First, it resolves the identity of the customer. Second, it provides analytics on customers, including behavioral and predictive analytics. And third, a CDP lets customer-facing channels, like email, SMS, the call center, access data.”
 
He continued, “Customer data comes from both online and offline sources, such as loyalty systems, ecommerce systems, and so forth. Any time the customer purchases, you want to bring all of that data into the CDP where it can be unified into the clean, master customer record. With events occurring in real-time, a CDP ingests this data into the system in real-time as well—much better than the old-school batch process of marketing service providers.
 
“For brands with a high price point and lower purchase frequency,” added Artun, “a CDP is especially helpful with a CRM-based approach to loyalty, as opposed to a points-based loyalty program. For example, one AgilOne client wanted to kick off a loyalty program to reward and improve experience for their highest-value customers. We helped identify the attributes that would trigger the loyalty program, as well as the tiers that customers could achieve with these attributes. Now, this customer runs promotions for their high-value customers, rewarding them based on their attributes and the tier they achieve. Not only is this program increasing their purchase frequency and overall order value, it is also creating brand evangelists by improving customer experience for their key segments.”
 
He also explained who AgilOne’s real competitors are. “Our real competition is in the form of legacy marketing service providers like Epsilon and Acxiom. They piece together a custom solution for each brand to create a marketing database. Our big differentiator is that we provide a scalable platform with real-time APIs, essentially future proofing our customers’ business for change and technology evolution. We don’t compete with Janrain or the like,” he said. “They provide identity-access, identity-management type of solutions which define who has access to specific services.”
 
Another differentiating factor, Artun said, is speed. “[Our customer data platform] is a fast solution that scales out really well. It’s not pieced together like it would be with a marketing service provider. In the old-world perspective, marketing service providers would manually pull lists for segmentation. With a CDP, marketers can access the data directly, and the data itself is far richer, cleaner, and full of intelligent insights than what marketing service providers can deliver.”
 
When asked to define personalization, Artun replied, “There are multiple levels of personalization: personalizing offers, personalizing communication, personalizing a customer experience or the journey. I might be personalizing offers based on where the customer is in the lifecycle. If somebody’s at risk of churning, I might put that customer on a path to win them back. For customers who are browsing but not buying on a short-term scale, I might personalize the content or offer to boost conversions. So, when we talk about personalization, we need to talk about context. It can mean a lot of different things.”
 
When asked about how his company tackles the data privacy issue, Artun said, “First of all, we’ve chosen to operate in a first-party data space, so we support GDPR and we support privacy. I personally think that honoring customer preferences is part of delivering a quality, relevant customer experience. I see brand transparency as another type of personalization. If the customer has said don’t contact me, don’t track me, or don’t send me personalized offers, you’ve actually personalized their experience by complying.”
 
“Of course,” he continued, “we are GDPR-compliant, but even beyond that, because we manage the identities of customers, we can actually permeate the GDPR request to other subsystems. So, if the customer says, ‘Forget everything you know about me,’ AgilOne can delete that record within the company itself and also within all downstream systems.”
 

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