Get started with enriching data

  • 4 minutes

Organizations can benefit from enriching their customer data in multiple ways. They can identify customer affinities based on people who resemble them demographically (such as age, gender, and location). For example, in countries or regions that receive snow, brands and interests that relate to ice fishing, snowmobiling, and skiing are more likely to be popular. However, customers who live near large bodies of water might have brand affinities to specific manufacturers, personal watercraft, or water sports. By having that information available, organizations can more effectively create marketing promotions and drive sales activities based on interests.

The previous example represents only one type of enrichment that's possible with Customer Insights - Data.

Customer Insights - Data provides multiple enrichment options that use Microsoft and partner-offered services.

Two types of enrichment that Customer Insights - Data supports are:

  • Data source enrichment - Allows you to enrich data from the data source before data unification. This type helps you produce higher data completeness and quality that can help achieve better results after you unify your data. For example, by using a normalized and standardized format for addresses, you can increase the quality of the match results.
  • Unified profile enrichment - Allows you to enrich data after you create the unified profile. Several extra enrichment options are available when you enrich from the unified profile.

Data source enrichment

Data source enrichments help you produce higher data completeness and quality that can help achieve better results after you unify your data. For example, by using a normalized and standardized format for customer addresses, you can increase the quality of match results during the unification process.

Currently, the following enrichments are available for data sources:

  • Enhanced addresses - Enriches your customer profile data by correcting, supplementing, and standardizing the format of your customer address data.
  • Identify provided by LiveRamp - Provides deterministic, offline identity resolution and consolidation of customer data.

You can enrich a data source by going to Data sources, selecting the data source that you want to enrich, and then selecting Enrich.

Screenshot of selecting the data source that you want to enrich.

Unified data enrichment

Data source enrichment runs on your actual data sources that are ingested. However, with unified data enrichment, after you create a unified customer profile, you can use enrichments on the profile data. The following enrichments are available for the unified profile:

  • Brands Affinities and Interest Affinities by Microsoft - Enrich your customer profile data with brand affinities and interests from people in a similar demographic to your customers.
  • Enhanced addresses - Enriches your customer profile data by correcting, supplementing, and standardizing the format of your customer address data.
  • Demographics by Experian - Enriches your data by including demographic information from Experian, such as household size, income, and more.
  • Custom data – The system provides custom data through Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). This enrichment allows you to import data that doesn't need to go through the process of data unification.
  • Microsoft Azure Maps - Provides location-centric data and services to deliver experiences based on geospatial data with built-in location intelligence.
  • Location by HERE Technologies - Enriches your customer data to include location information, such as addresses, latitude, longitude, and more.
  • Identify by LiveRamp - Provides deterministic offline identity resolution and consolidation of customer data.

You can turn on and configure the data enrichment option by selecting My enrichments under the Data area of the application. On the Discover tab, you can configure the previously mentioned enrichments.

Important

Because the demographics, location, and company data enrichments rely on external services, you need to ensure that you have valid licensing for the service that you want to use in addition to Customer Insights - Data licensing.

After you configure an enrichment, you can view and manage it from the My enrichments tab, where you can complete the following actions:

  • View enrichment details with the number of enriched customer profiles.
  • Edit the enrichment configuration.
  • Run the enrichment to update customer profiles with the latest data.
  • Deactivate an existing enrichment to stop it from refreshing automatically with every scheduled refresh. Data from the last successful refresh continues to be available.
  • Delete an enrichment.

You can run or deactivate multiple enrichments at once by selecting them in the list. View and edit options aren't available as bulk actions, and they only work for one enrichment at a time.

Now that you've learned how to get to and work with enrichments, your next task is to examine the process of configuring some of the available options.