Accor, a world-leading hospitality group offering experiences across more than 110 countries in 5,500 properties, 10,000 food & beverage venues, wellness facilities or flexible workspaces, relies on its more than 45 hotel brands from luxury to economy and its most awarded traveler loyalty program to connect deeply with customers and increase their lifetime value. With a rich store of data centralized in Snowflake, the team set out to enable their marketing and business teams with a platform that would allow them to autonomously deliver hyper-personalized experiences and campaigns.

Join the session to learn about Accor’s CDP journey and how Hightouch, as their Composable CDP, helps them drive customer engagement, loyalty, and revenue.

Summary

The customer data platform is a category of services that was developed early in the evolution of the current era of cloud services for data processing. When it was difficult to wire together the event collection, data modeling, reporting, and activation it made sense to buy monolithic products that handled every stage of the customer data lifecycle. Now that the data warehouse has taken center stage a new approach of composable customer data platforms is emerging. In this episode Darren Haken is joined by Tejas Manohar to discuss how Autotrader UK is addressing their customer data needs by building on top of their existing data stack.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their extensive library of integrations enable you to automatically send data to hundreds of downstream tools. Sign up free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstack Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Darren Haken and Tejas Manohar about building a composable CDP and how you can start adopting it incrementally

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what you mean by a "composable CDP"?

What are some of the key ways that it differs from the ways that we think of a CDP today?

What are the problems that you were focused on addressing at Autotrader that are solved by a CDP? One of the promises of the first generation CDP was an opinionated way to model your data so that non-technical teams could own this responsibility. What do you see as the risks/tradeoffs of moving CDP functionality into the same data stack as the rest of the organization?

What about companies that don't have the capacity to run a full data infrastructure?

Beyond the core technology of the data warehouse, what are the other evolutions/innovations that allow for a CDP experience to be built on top of the core data stack? added burden on core data teams to generate event-driven data models When iterating toward a CDP on top of the core investment of the infrastructure to feed and manage a data warehouse, what are the typical first steps?

What are some of the components in the ecosystem that help to speed up the time to adoption? (e.g. pre-built dbt packages for common transformations, etc.)

What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen CDPs implemented? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on CDP related functionality? When is a CDP (composable or monolithic) the wrong choice? What do you have planned for the future of the CDP stack?

Contact Info

Darren

LinkedIn @DarrenHaken on Twitter

Tejas

LinkedIn @tejasmanohar on Twitter

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Closing Announcements

Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. Podcast.init covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. The Machine Learning Podcast helps you go from idea to production with machine learning. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you've learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email [email protected]) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends and co-workers

Links

Autotrader Hightouch

Customer Studio

CDP == Customer Data Platform Segment

Podcast Episode

mPar

Summary The precursor to widespread adoption of cloud data warehouses was the creation of customer data platforms. Acting as a centralized repository of information about how your customers interact with your organization they drove a wave of analytics about how to improve products based on actual usage data. A natural outgrowth of that capability is the more recent growth of reverse ETL systems that use those analytics to feed back into the operational systems used to engage with the customer. In this episode Tejas Manohar and Rachel Bradley-Haas share the story of their own careers and experiences coinciding with these trends. They also discuss the current state of the market for these technological patterns and how to take advantage of them in your own work.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Struggling with broken pipelines? Stale dashboards? Missing data? If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Data engineers struggling with unreliable data need look no further than Monte Carlo, the world’s first end-to-end, fully automated Data Observability Platform! In the same way that application performance monitoring ensures reliable software and keeps application downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data pipelines. Monte Carlo monitors and alerts for data issues across your data warehouses, data lakes, ETL, and business intelligence, reducing time to detection and resolution from weeks or days to just minutes. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/montecarlo and start trusting your data with Monte Carlo today! Are you bored with writing scripts to move data into SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, or Facebook Ads? Hightouch is the easiest way to sync data into the platforms that your business teams rely on. The data you’re looking for is already in your data warehouse and BI tools. Connect your warehouse to Hightouch, paste a SQL query, and use their visual mapper to specify how data should appear in your SaaS systems. No more scripts, just SQL. Supercharge your business teams with customer data using Hightouch for Reverse ETL today. Get started for free at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hightouch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Rachel Bradley-Haas and Tejas Manohar about the combination of operational analytics and the customer data platform

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can we start by discussing what it means to have a "customer data platform"? What are the challenges that organizations face in establishing a unified view of their customer interactions?

How do the presence of multiple product lines impact the ability to understand the relationship with the customer?

We have been building data warehouses and business intelligence systems for decades. How does the idea of a CDP differ from the approaches of those previous generations? A recent outgrowth of the focus on creating a CDP is the introduction of "operational analytics", which was initially termed "reverse ETL". What are your opinions on the semantics and importance of these names?

What is the relationship between a CDP and operational analytics? (can you have one without the other?)

How have the capabilities