New cross-channel tool helps businesses understand customers

While it's easier than ever to collect information about customers, businesses often struggle to extract meaningful information from it in order to drive sales.

The latest tool from customer data platform Segment lets enterprises build a record of their entire relationship with a customer, and use it to create personalized experiences everywhere they interact with their users.

Called Personas, it allows a retail businesses to understand the complete history of each user across all channels, in one centralized record. These records can then be made available in tools that the company uses to interact with its customers.

For example, Personas can identify a customer's favorite categories and average order value. It can then automatically sync this data to tools for email, adverts, push notifications, site content and even in-store systems. This means the retailer can offer the right product recommendations at the right price to that customer on every channel. Personas reruns these calculations in real time each time a user interacts with the company so the profile is always kept up to date.

"Companies have struggled to get personalization right because it's a fundamentally difficult data and infrastructure problem," says Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of Segment. "At Segment, we've spent the last five years building customer data infrastructure with an ecosystem of hundreds of marketing and analytics tools. More than 15,000 companies use Segment to route, manage, and activate their customer data. By adding the ability to compute meaningful traits from customer behavior on top of that raw data, we’re best positioned to help companies understand their users and deliver customer-centric marketing and products."

Personas will be generally available in 2018 but in the meantime you can register an interest in the beta program on the Segment website.

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