Medibank has upgraded its customer data foundation to allow it to respond contextually in “near real-time” in scenarios such as if the customer is exploring cancelling their membership.
Medibank’s Leah Cassidy (centre) and Jon Goh (right).
The new data foundation, Salesforce Data Cloud, is also enabling the health insurer’s marketers to “orchestrate connected customer experiences” across engagement channels, according to orchestration lead Leah Cassidy.
Data Cloud acts as a kind of customer data platform that can work with Salesforce data, as well as data stored in third-party systems, to help with customer personalisation across channels.
It has uses both by the marketing department as well as by other functions within Medibank.
Medibank has used Salesforce technology for more than a decade.
Head of marketing technology and orchestration Jon Goh said Data Cloud “is the promise of where the Salesforce technology is headed”.
“It is at the centre of our marketing stack and marketing engine room,” he told a Salesforce Agentforce conference in Sydney. “Our marketers are able to see that single view of marketing.”
Medibank first adopted Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud to make member experiences more personalised several years ago.
According to Cassidy, the combination of Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud provides “enriched context” that enables “real-time” customer interaction.
Moreover, it has started to underpin and enable more sophisticated digital marketing efforts.
“Data Cloud is our foundation for being able to orchestrate connected customer experiences,” Cassidy said.
“Today, we still are somewhat focused on delivering campaigns and we do personalise across channels, but it’s not always consistent.
“Data Cloud is actually allowing us to shift our focus to delivering experiences. [What] is particularly powerful for our marketers is the insights it gives us into our marketing segmentation and our audiences. And this means that the marketers can use these insights to optimise existing experiences or build new ones.”
Additionally, the platform allows Medibank to create a “unified” customer profile that combines offline data with customers’ online behaviour.
This, Cassidy explained, can be used to act if a customer has, for example, looked at the ‘cancel my membership’ page on Medibank’s website.
“We can overlay this data with the members’ marketing segment in Data Cloud,” she said, adding that this helped the company speak to the customer based on their age, stage of life and other factors that may be pertinent in convincing them to stay.
Cassidy also said that existing members that browsed other insurance products but did not purchase could be “proactively retargeted” using that combined context from Data Cloud, assuming the member had consented to such contact.