A Customer Preference Center (CPC) is a centralized place on a brand’s website where customers can manage the information they choose to share with the brand. Through CPC’s, customers can adjust their communication preferences over time, fostering engagement, trust, and loyalty.
This empowers consumers to govern their data and tailor their interactions and in it’s turn, enhances data quality for the brand. In alignment with the Pretectum philosophy around zero-party-data (ZPD), this is an emphasis on voluntarily provided data over purchased or inferred data. For brands, this means that they can reap numerous benefits. The concept of the CPC offers users the flexibility to personalize their marketing communication preferences, including email, SMS, and push notifications, as well as controlling frequency, content, and data sharing.
A CPC is integral to permission-based (consent) marketing, ensuring compliance with data protection regulations and enhancing user experiences across various channels. For those considering implementing a CPC, exploring best practices like those offered by Pretectum CMDM can help optimize the personalization strategy that a brand might have in mind.
Brands and organizations that should care
The CPC is particularly advantageous for organizations that engage with customers across multiple channels and want to provide a consistent and aligned communications dialog. There are several industry segments where this might be particularly of interest.
- In ECommerce, businesses often disseminate promotional emails, newsletters, and product updates. When E-commerce Enterprises implement the CPC concept, they empower customers to select the content type and frequency they prefer to receive and would be able to suggest their preferences across all three channels, leveraging a unified customer identifier to sustain a consistent interaction experience.
- Digital Print, Video, Audio, and Interactive Media Companies can consider the utilization of CPC to support subscribers in specifying their interests and preferences, thereby customizing the newsletters, portal, media player, and event-related content or calls for engagement that they might receive.
- Not-for-profit organizations, social societies, membership clubs, and charities can employ a CPC to support donors, advocates, and supporters to indicate their preferences for contact methods, and the kinds of updates they want to receive.
- Schools, universities, and organizations in the Education sector, are well-positioned to leverage CPC to communicate more effectively and efficiently with students, parents, and alumni. This ensures relevant information reaches these intended audiences consistently and in an aligned and curated manner. This in turn yields stronger support for institutions.
- In healthcare, particularly in healthcare facilities, the implementation of CPC helps with better patient, member, or attendant engagement regarding appointments, health-related tips, and pertinent updates. This could include clinics, hospitals, outpatient care centers, nursing homes, primary healthcare services, dental and oral hygiene practices, Intermediate and Long Term Care (ILTC), traditional, naturopathic, and homeopathic medicine facilities and practices, or medical lab services. This could be in the private, semi-private, and public health sectors.
Dring specific business value
It should be clear then, that any organization prioritizing customer engagement, data protection, and personalized communication stands to gain from integrating a customer preference center into its operations. Such organizations will do this by establishing their CPC with a focus on some specific outcomes:
- Definitions of the range of preferences to offer customers, covering interaction channels (e.g., app, kiosk, POS, home delivery, email, SMS, various push notifications), communication frequency, preferences, content types, and data sharing options.
- By supporting consumers in articulating their own preferences, customers receive tailored and relevant content, thereby enriching their engagement with the brand.
- Customers will want to be able to select their preferred communication channels and frequency, fostering more satisfactory interactions with the organization and brand. Through precise preference adjustments, customers avoid unwanted communications.
- Intuitive and discoverable consumer-grade user-friendly user interfaces for interaction with the CPC via API. Aligning this with the visual identity of the brand or institution and clearly communicating the benefits participants, members, subscribers, and customers will receive for each type of personalization subscription.
- Support of more seamless and consistent integration and experience transitions of the CPC with back office systems to uphold customer preferences and engagement in all interactions. Integration with other systems and platforms via API and the data syndication approach ensures a seamless experience for customers, enabling consistent preferences across all touchpoints.
- Align and meet data protection and privacy obligations as imposed by regulations by obtaining explicit consent from users before initiating marketing messages or collecting data.
- When customers have control over their personal data, they can determine what information they wish to share with your organization. CPC tend to foster trust by demonstrating responsible data usage and providing customers with control over their data, thereby strengthening the relationship with the customers.
- Continuously monitor the performance and adoption of the CPC post-launch, adjusting it based on engagement levels, subscription maintenance, and customer, member or partner feedback to enhance overall effectiveness. By analyzing the data collected via the CPC, an organization has an advantage over its peers and competitors and can gain valuable insights into preferences, behaviors, and trends, informing future strategies and innovative efforts.
Where a CMDM fits
When using the Pretectum CMDM with its flexible schemas, the support of meshed data organizations, and data-quality needs as well as the other built-in capabilities of the platform, you can streamline your CPC creation.
With the Pretectum CMDM you can prioritize the placement of customer control of their own data in their hands and support the ability to personalize their experiences, thereby enhancing overall data quality for organizations and brands as a whole.
Some final thoughts for you to consider. A CPC-based strategy serves to assist with meeting compliance obligations with data protection regulations, reassuring the customer that information is handled in accordance with legal requirements. From the NPS perspective, they can also serve as a platform for customers to provide feedback on their experiences, allowing brands to continually refine offerings and communications. Controlling what they receive, consumers can use the CPC to facilitate easy opt-out mechanisms, this conveys respect for customers’ decisions to disengage from certain communications, something you don’t get when working with third-party data.