A groundbreaking approach to creating and delivering complete customer profiles

When you power your business with reliable, complete customer profiles, the sky’s the limit. You can achieve accurate attribution, dramatically reduce churn, and enable advanced personalization. But without complete customer profiles, your efforts to turn customer data into competitive advantage will never deliver the results you hope for. Every use case will be limited, and many will be blocked altogether.

But identity resolution – the foundational ingredient for complete profiles – is a hard problem to solve. Every data team struggles with it, and most companies live with the pain of incomplete, maintenance-heavy profiles. Known issues, such as overcounting key metrics, are commonplace, and aspirations to roll out cohesive, personalized experiences across platforms are out of reach.

Traditional solutions to solve identity resolution and produce a Customer 360 miss the target. SaaS solutions can’t access every data point and impose rigid data models, so they create incomplete profiles with limited downstream effectiveness. DIY builds can deliver completeness and flexibility, but they’re resource-intensive and notoriously difficult to maintain and scale.

RudderStack Profiles introduces a groundbreaking approach to the problem. It enables every data team to power their business with reliable, complete customer profiles. Here’s how.

The fundamental philosophy behind RudderStack Profiles

It all starts with the convictions that drive our product strategy for Profiles:

• We believe the data team should create and own the Customer 360 to ensure it’s complete and reliable.
• We believe the Customer 360 belongs in your data warehouse or data lake where it can be established as a single source of truth for your entire business.
• We believe downstream teams should be able to easily explore the Customer 360 and get complete customer profiles into their products and tools for activation.
• We believe it shouldn’t be so hard for data teams to turn customer data into competitive advantage, so we’re building tools that eliminate expensive data wrangling and allow you to focus on high-value projects.

Profiles embodies these convictions, empowering data and business teams to drive better business outcomes cooperatively. Its power starts with a simple concept.

Solving identity resolution at the root

Without a proper foundation, you can’t create a comprehensive Customer 360 that scales and easily adapts to changing business requirements. That foundation is your identity graph – the model that stitches every unique identifier together and maps them to a universal identifier.

To create an actionable Customer 360, though, you need to combine your identity graph with the user features required to enable downstream use cases. The order of operations is critical. It’s tempting to build the identity graph in parallel to your features, but solving identity resolution as you go causes major problems at scale because the queries for individual features, and the related components that handle identity resolution, become increasingly complex as data changes and new sources are added.

RudderStack Profiles provides a workflow that ensures you solve identity resolution at the root, building the identity graph first so you can quickly add features on top and respond to changing business and data needs with speed and agility.

What makes RudderStack Profiles different?

Profiles is the only Customer 360 product that solves identity resolution at the root with an efficient workflow. Its cutting-edge approach enables you to rapidly model complete customer profiles in your data warehouse or data lake that every team can use to deliver powerful customer experiences.

On the DIY – SaaS solution spectrum, Profiles sits closer to DIY. It delivers the reliability, flexibility, and control you’d get from building your own solution but utilizes a declarative approach that elegantly handles maintenance and scalability issues for you. It’s designed around data team needs and workflows to get the job done where other solutions come up short. Here’s what you get from Profiles that other options don’t provide:

• Comprehensive data — Because Profiles runs on the warehouse, it doesn’t limit you to RudderStack event data. It enables you to build customer profiles with every relevant data point.
• Velocity and agility — As part of RudderStack’s platform, Profiles makes it easy for you to get started, providing a baseline Customer 360 out of the box. Its declarative modeling allows you to quickly add new data sources and build features to augment your Customer 360 and respond to changing business needs.
• Reliability, performance, and transparency — Profiles generates neatly structured, highly performant SQL code, ensuring your entire company can use and trust the Customer 360 for the long haul. And it’s not a black box. All of the jobs run in your warehouse or data lake, and the code produced is transparent, auditable, and portable.
• Efficient, collaborative workflows — Profiles CLI allows you to integrate Customer 360 work into your existing dev workflow, take advantage of git-based version control, and unlock advanced use cases. Its UI provides a jumpstart, compliments the CLI, and gives business users a place to explore and activate the Customer 360.

With Profiles, you create and own the Customer 360 in your data warehouse, ensuring completeness and reliability, but its advantage doesn’t end once you produce the Customer 360. RudderStack makes your Customer 360 table available in real-time via API to personalize product experiences, and it makes it easy for business users to explore the Customer 360, create audiences, and then sync them directly to their tools for activation.

How it works

Profiles delivers a workflow that simplifies Customer 360 data modeling through elegant abstraction, and it gives you the tools you need to power use cases for every team.

Model complete customer profiles

As we mentioned above, we believe the data team should create and maintain the Customer 360 to ensure its completeness and reliability. Profiles makes this easier.

Instead of writing complex code, you define your model spec in straightforward config files. Profiles takes the config and uses its powerful semantic models to produce a Customer 360 in your warehouse.

First, you define your input sources and entities and Profiles takes care of identity resolution for you, producing a comprehensive identity graph in your warehouse. With the ID graph in place, you then use Profiles to build features on top and produce your Customer 360 table.

The Customer 360 is a table in your warehouse with one row per customer (or entity) and columns for everything you know about them, including known attributes, computed features, and even predictive features.

Once you create your initial project with Profiles, adding data sources and building new features is as easy as updating the config file. You can easily scale the Customer 360 as your business grows and requirements change, but Profiles isn’t just about building the Customer 360, it’s about powering your business with complete, reliable customer profiles.

Power use cases for every team

Creating the Customer 360 is the hard part, but unless you get the profiles into the hands and tools of business users, all of that work is functionally worthless. RudderStack Profiles makes this tedious last-mile work easier too. The Profiles UI provides a safe way to give business users unparalleled access to explore and activate Customer 360 data themselves so they can use it to drive powerful customer experiences. RudderStack makes it easy to create audiences and sync them directly to business tools. It even makes the Customer 360 table available in real-time via API to personalize product experiences.

How reliable, complete customer profiles drive business value

With reliable, complete customer profiles powering your business, every team’s ability to create competitive advantage increases exponentially. New use cases get unlocked, and current efforts become more potent. At a high level, use cases fall into a few buckets.

More accurate attribution

Marketing attribution gets easier and more accurate when you can consolidate all customer touchpoints into a single view and reliably match your conversions back to these profiles. StatPearls increased their paid spend by 3.8X with positive ROAS thanks to RudderStack Profiles.

Churn reduction

Once you have complete customer profiles, you can predict churn likelihood accurately – using all the right data points – so marketing, product, and customer teams can execute campaigns to retain customers and increase LTV. Wynn Slots used RudderStack to increase player revenues by 25% and raise their retention rate to 80%.

Advanced personalization

Combine complete customer profiles with RudderStack’s suite of activation options, and you can move beyond basic personalization to begin executing sophisticated campaigns in real-time, just like Phantom – a multichain crypto and NFT wallet – did with their JUP token Airdrop campaign.

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AI/ML initiatives

With clean data, a reliable Customer 360, and the ability to quickly build new features, you can ship powerful AI/ML initiatives with velocity. Wyze enabled their Marketing team to ship 3X more ML-driven campaigns.

Is Profiles the right tool for me?

If the fundamental philosophy we shared at the beginning of this post resonated with you, and you’re ready to begin powering your business with reliable, complete customer profiles, you won’t find a better Customer 360 solution than RudderStack Profiles.

No other bought or built solution enables you to create reliable, complete customer profiles with speed and agility while maintaining the level of transparency and versatility afforded by Profiles.

Profiles makes Customer 360 data modeling significantly easier for data analysts and analytics engineers. It also removes much of the last mile burden from data engineering because Business Intelligence, Data Science, and even business users can safely access, explore, and activate the Customer 360 themselves.

If your team is struggling with identity resolution challenges across various datasets and identifiers – especially when it comes to resolving identities across online and offline sources (clickstream data, batch data from SaaS tools, and data from payment/transaction systems) – Profiles can help you eliminate much of the expensive data wrangling and free your team up to do their best work. For Ricardo at Phantom, it was an obvious choice:

Getting started

You can begin building your Customer 360 quickly with Profiles. A simple workflow in the UI helps you kickstart your project. If you’re using RudderStack Event Stream, you’ll get a baseline Customer 360 right out of the box. From there you can use the CLI to integrate Customer 360 work into your existing dev workflows.

What about the modeling you’ve already done in dbt?
Profiles complements the existing modeling work you’ve done with your customer data. In fact, most of our customers running Profiles use it in tandem with dbt. They use dbt for baseline data modeling, then leverage Profiles on top of the dbt work to handle identity resolution and build features.

Interactive demo: RudderStack Profiles

Check out the interactive demo below to see RudderStack Profiles in action.

Power your business with reliable, complete customer profiles

When you solve identity resolution at the root, you can create value faster. If you’re running up against the limits of SaaS solutions or the maintenance and scale challenges that come with modeling your Customer 360 using basic modeling tools, reach out to us to learn more about Profiles today.

With RudderStack Profiles you’ll finally be able to establish a single source of truth that combines every data point for every user and deliver complete customer profiles to power use cases for every team. Profiles enables you to turn customer data into competitive advantage with velocity, and you don’t have to sacrifice flexibility or reliability.