Zurich, July 26, 2023
Merkle teams up with AWS to overcome challenges of brands to create and integrate cohesive customer experiences
Today, Merkle – a dentsu company, focusing on customer experience management (CXM), announced an expanded collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer their clients entity resolution within their customer data solutions.
AWS Entity Resolution helps organizations match and link customer interactions across different touchpoints into a single view using deterministic and probabilistic matching techniques. This new AWS service, combined with Merkle’s expertise on hyper-personalized marketing strategies and cloud-based data architectures, will enable brands to provide their customers with the best possible customer experience across all touchpoints - online and offline. Merkle participated in early service experimentation and was able to easily and successfully leverage AWS Entity Resolution in combination with other AWS services, such as Amazon Redshift and Amazon SageMaker, to aggregate, manage and activate all relevant data from different functions in a single 360-degree customer view.
The retail industry is changing fast and online channels are rapidly evolving and gaining relevance worldwide. Brands whose customer experience was previously mainly characterized by exclusive brick-and-mortar boutique visits, or whose offline and online experiences were not integrated, were at risk of falling behind. Chief Marketing Officers aspire to create a seemless set of intimate, personal and meaningful experiences across every customer touchpoint, however struggle to find ways to fully harness their data to innovate and meet the extraordinarily demanding expectations of their audiences. Furthermore, they often have to deal with complexity such as disjointed technologies, disparate datasets and a lack of internal capabilities.
Merkle has an ability to design and implement AWS-based architectures to manage a wide array of data and activate it for a broad set of use cases, including but not limited to those for Finance, Product, Sales and Supply Chain. Furthermore, enriching this with second-party data, with use of AWS Entity Resolution, empowers brands with a deeper understanding of their customers, enabling initiatives for improved customer experience. Along with Merkle’s pre-trained algorithms, state-of-the-art ML models and automatic micro-segmentation to identify an individual customer’s next-best-experience, Merkle will help companies to further improve solutions to optimize customer acquisition costs, increase customer lifetime value (CLV), and implement new and exclusive customer experiences.
Oscar Wooley, Head of Data Solutions at Merkle DACH
"We have successfully used AWS Entity Resolution to perform both deterministic and probabilistic matching of users across multiple datasets and with high match-rates, allowing us to maximise identification of individual consumers at the point of interaction and with more complete views of their profiles. Moreover, we are now able to drastically improve the level of automation for our clients, allowing them to focus on data activation and insights rather than being caught up on data preparation.”
Davor Golac, General Manager - Engineering and Product Leader at AWS
“As real-time engagement becomes more important, the need for accurate and sustainable first-party data is rapidly increasing. With AWS Entity Resolution, organizations are able to easily match and resolve disparate records to improve their data quality, create 360-degree views of customers, and deliver more relevant and timely experiences. As a customer of AWS Entity Resolution, Merkle will be able to match and link millions of interactions at scale and achieve higher match rates to help marketers streamline data preparation, allowing them to generate better insights and maximize the value of their data.”
The collaboration between Merkle and AWS has the ultimate mission to help brands create integrated, cohesive customer experiences across the end-to-end customer journey - from awareness to aftersales and servicing.
