AWS for Industries
Tealium Delivers Cross-channel Customer Experiences with Amazon Personalize
Personalization is a key element in elevating the customer experience. It involves tailoring products, services, and interactions to meet the unique needs and preferences of each individual customer. When done effectively, personalization impacts positively business performance, making customers feel understood and valued. It also helps businesses differentiate themselves from competitors, increasing loyalty and advocacy. Personalized experiences can be achieved through data-driven insights that allow companies to understand better their customers and create actional insights.
In this blog post, you will explore how Tealium Customer Data Hub helps companies to collect and unify customer profiles including their interactions. They then, activate these interactions in near real-time with Amazon Personalize to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
Introduction
As customer expectations continue to evolve, brands that invest in hyper-personalization are better positioned to thrive in a competitive marketplace.
Delivering hyper-personalization is a powerful strategy that enables brands to create meaningful, one-to-one connections with customers. This results in:
- Highly customized experiences across various channels
- Increased engagement
- Increased loyalty
- Business growth
As technology continues to advance, the potential for even more sophisticated and effective hyper-personalization strategies will continue to grow.
However, it comes with several challenges that brands must navigate to be successful, including:
- Ensuring data privacy and security
- Balancing personalization with customer trust
- Handling large data volumes
- Real-time processing
- Managing the costs associated with technology and talent
Customer data platforms (CDPs) are a crucial technology for addressing these challenges because they centralize and manage customer data, enable segmentation and targeting, and support automation and campaign orchestration.
Tealium launched an integration with Amazon Personalize an Amazon Web Services (AWS) service that allows companies to quickly build and deploy curated recommendations and intelligent user segmentation at scale using machine learning (ML). This integration aims to help brands harnessed the power of data and technology to deliver hyper-personalize product recommendation to customers. By leveraging Tealium Customer Data Hub, brands can collect cross-channel customer interactions and activate it in near real-time with Amazon Personalize. This can fuel machine learning models that use customer data to generate item recommendations for customers.
Overview About Tealium
Tealium is a leading CDP and tag management system (TMS) that empowers organizations to manage and leverage their customer data effectively. It serves as a central hub for collecting, unifying, and activating data from various sources—enabling businesses to better understand and engage with their customers.
Tealium’s identity resolution capabilities allow businesses to create a comprehensive and unified profile for each customer. By stitching together data from various touchpoints and channels, Tealium provides a 360-degree view of each visitor or customer.
This holistic view is instrumental in understanding customer behavior, preferences, and interactions. Companies can deliver highly personalized experiences to their customers. By recognizing visitors across different devices and sessions, businesses can tailor content, offers, and recommendations—ultimately improving engagement and conversion rates.
Tealium enables cross-device tracking, allowing organizations to follow a user’s journey seamlessly across smartphones, tablets, desktops, and other platforms. This capability ensures that user data is linked accurately, helping marketers optimize their ad targeting and content delivery strategies. Tealium’s visitor stitching helps in attributing conversions and interactions accurately to the right marketing channels and campaigns. This data-driven attribution can lead to better-informed marketing decisions and improved return on investment (ROI).
Tealium provides a robust platform for managing data privacy and compliance with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. It helps organizations ensure that customer data is handled ethically and in accordance with legal requirements.
By understanding who their visitors are and how they interact with their brand, companies can deliver more relevant and engaging content and experiences. This can lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
The Tealium Integration Marketplace is a robust ecosystem of pre-built connectors and integrations that enable seamless data flow between Tealium’s CDP and various third-party tools, services, and platforms. This marketplace offers numerous benefits, and when coupled with Amazon services (like Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and Amazon EventBridge) it becomes a powerful tool for managing and leveraging data on AWS. It simplifies data integration between Tealium’s CDP and AWS services.
This integration offers near real-time data ingestion, scalability, flexibility, and access to powerful AWS analytics tools. They enable businesses to make data-driven decisions and enhance customer experiences within the AWS environment efficiently and cost-effectively.
Solution Overview
In the solution walkthrough, we will show you how Tealium Customer Data Hub collects customer interactions from a wide range of data sources in near real-time and streams these interactions to an AWS customer account by leveraging Amazon Kinesis Connector (available in the Tealium Integrations Marketplace). Moreover, we will highlight the near real-time customer interactions ingestion in Amazon Personalize, as well as the near real-time product recommendation powered by Amazon Personalize.
Figure 1 Architecture Diagram
The following steps explain the end-to-end data flow with this solution throughout the reference architecture diagram (as shown in Figure 1):
- Tealium Customer Data Hub collects customer events (also known as user interactions) from data sources such as the web and apps.
- Tealium EventStream API Hub streams customer events in near real-time to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams using Tealium Kinesis Connector.
- Amazon Kinesis Data Streams receives the customer events in near real-time. AWS Lambda (triggered by the Kinesis Data Streams) process the customer events data and ingests them in Amazon Personalize using an event tracker.
- Optionally, AWS Glue can process the historical customer events from Tealium DataAccess kept in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket to the Row Zone bucket. Then, AWS Glue applies the required transformation and places the formatted data in the Formatted Zone to process a batch import of customer events to Amazon Personalize.
- After importing the customer events to Amazon Personalize (using near real-time and batch streaming), it creates domain recommenders (for domain dataset groups) or custom resources (for custom dataset group) to train a model on your data. You use these resources to generate recommendations.
- AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway act as an API endpoint to provide near real-time recommendation directly to the customer experience frontend or to enrich a customer profile within the Tealium AudienceStream CDP.
- The customer experience frontend (such as the web and app) can consume directly the product recommendations and deliver them to the end customer.
- Optionally, you can get batch recommendations with an asynchronous batch flow. To get batch recommendations, you use a batch inference job. A batch inference job is a tool that imports your batch input data from an S3 bucket. It then uses your solution version to generate item recommendations, and exports the recommendations to an S3 bucket.
- Tealium AudienceStream enrich the customer profiles with the product recommendations using the near real-time recommendation API described in step 6. Optionally, you can use AWS Glue to transform the batch recommendations into a Tealium import compatible file format and ingest them in Tealium AudienceStream.
- Tealium AudienceStream CDP leverages Tealium Integrations Marketplace and Data Layer Enrichment to deliver product recommendations to the customer experience frontend such as the web and app or owned media activation (for example, marketing automation platforms).
Conclusion
Tealium Customer Data Hub can play a crucial role in personalization use cases by unifying customer data from various sources and providing a single, reliable view of the customer. This enables businesses to create highly targeted and relevant experiences for their customers across all touchpoints.
The integration between Tealium Customer Data Hub and Amazon Personalize unlocks a cross-channel personalization powered by a unified customer and a fully managed personalization engine. Leveraging this joint solution can reduce the time to market for product and development teams, enhance the customer experience—positively impacting conversation rates and reducing customer churn.
Together, Tealium and AWS enable customers to revolutionize their operations, accelerate innovation, and stay ahead of industry trends.
Check out more AWS Partners or contact an AWS Representative to know how we can help accelerate your business.