How Capillary Unlocks Customer Insights and Personalized Experiences for Businesses and Marketers

TL; DR: If you’re looking to harness AI while cultivating customer loyalty, you’re not alone. Thousands of business owners are seeking the same thing, and there is a solution. Capillary is an AI-powered customer data platform (CDP) designed to help businesses thrive by leveraging invaluable insights that foster brand loyalty and drive customer engagement. We sat down with Piyush Kumar, CTO of Capillary, to dive deeper into the revolutionary tool.

I have a favorite breakfast shop that I go to far too many times a week. When they opened up post-COVID, I was one of their first customers. Now, the owners know me by name and exactly what I like to order. When I try something new, we joke about how I’m mixing things up; when my favorite coffee flavor (hazelnut) is out, they upgrade my size as a gesture of goodwill; when I tell them about my weekend plans, they ask how it went the next time I stop in.

Moments like these turned me from a casual customer into a dedicated patron. When businesses treat their customers with a tailored experience, they’re more likely to return because they feel comfortable and, more importantly, seen. In an era where customer expectations are skyrocketing, businesses turn to innovative technologies to meet these demands.

Incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into daily operations has become a strategic tool for industries across the board: It allows businesses to streamline processes, automate tasks, and make data-driven decisions.

For customer-facing businesses, Capillary has the answer. Capillary is a B2B platform that provides a single layer where customer profiles, demographics, and activities are stored.

Just as blood vessels connect small arteries and veins in a network in the human body, Capillary empowers you to establish connections with your customers to unlock possibilities you may have never considered.

Capillary has several products that serve as comprehensive solutions, assisting business owners and marketers in three key areas: loyalty program creation, customer behavior analysis, and customer engagement.

By leveraging custom key performance indicators (KPIs) to analyze consumer behaviors, Capillary helps businesses deliver personalized experiences — ultimately driving growth, enhancing brand loyalty, and creating long-term success in today’s competitive market. Here’s how.

Step 1. Implement KPIs to Analyze Consumer Behaviors

Capillary uses KPIs to analyze, target, and measure customer engagement and behaviors. So, for example, Capillary’s CDP system may measure the following:

• Customer lifetime value tracks the total value a customer brings to a business over their entire relationship. Capillary’s products can target customers who buy more frequently to receive custom benefits and discounts.
• Customer engagement metrics track interactions, clicks, views, and time spent on touchpoints. Your company can create personalized offers and promotions based on the interactions.
• Customer retention rate measures the percentage of customers who continue using the product over a certain period. Loyalty programs can foster long-term dedication by offering rewards and early access to new products.
• Conversion rates measure the percentage of visitors taking end-of-journey actions, such as making a purchase or signing up for a loyalty program. You can better understand what works and, more importantly, what doesn’t.

Capillary measures these metrics and provides actionable business recommendations to enhance customer relationships. If a customer abandons a cart, you can offer a discount. Or if your consumers frequently buy one product, you can suggest related products they may like.

Step 2. Learn Data via the Customer Data Platform

Users can employ the Loyalty, Engage, and Insights products via Capillary’s in-house customer data platform (CDP) or the configurable eCommerce platform.

The CDP is a single layer storing your customers’ profiles, demographics, and primary activities. Then you can use the products (Loyalty+, Insights+, and Engage+) to get a consistent view of their behaviors in different avenues. Once the data is collected, it becomes fuel for business intelligence (BI) reporting so you can fine-tune your approaches and optimize your marketing efforts.

“These tools produce reports which help marketers understand the performance of various marketing activities. It also facilitates marketers and analysts to perform ad hoc queries and do further detailed analyses that aren’t available in out-of-the-box reports,” said Piyush. “Then they give you suggestions for what could be the next set of actions.”

While the platform enables brands to offer their customers a wide range of capabilities, it also provides native egress mechanisms to export data for integration with data lakes and ERP systems. Capillary’s CDP tool also supports data ingestion mechanisms, including APIs, files, events, and webhooks to bring data into the cloud warehouse.

There is no denying that artificial intelligence has become omnipresent in our lives. We interact with it sometimes unknowingly every time we use our phone’s maps app, search for something on Google, or type into chatbots while awaiting customer support.

And yet the use of AI in our everyday lives feels new — perhaps due to the recent explosion of ChatGPT. But Capillary has been toying with AI for the past half-decade to analyze consumer behaviors and make every user’s experience 100% customizable.

“We’ve been trying out different technologies in the AI and Machine Learning space for a while, but more recently, we’ve been investing a lot in the space to understand the behavioral attributes of customers,” said Piyush. “Our CDP analyzes one customer’s behavior and looks at similar customers’ behaviors to predict their preferences.”

Capillary’s platform uses AI to analyze customer behaviors, predict preferences, and determine propensities (expected behaviors). The insights can identify customer cohorts (a set of consumers who share similar behaviors), personalize experiences, automate customer journeys, and suggest the next best actions for your team.

For example, a Domino’s Pizza store in Indonesia used the Insights+ and Engage+ products to enhance user engagement and encourage repeat visitors. This Domino’s saw great outcomes, including a 4x increase in ROI thanks to personalized campaigns and a 3% decline in one-time customers.

But Capillary can be used anywhere. Its CDP flexibility allows it to adapt to different verticals and provide consistent data models and AI capabilities across hospitality, aviation, and retail industries.

“You can use these behaviors to identify customers for which you can run marketing campaigns or set it to customers with a higher propensity to buy a particular category or product,” explained Piyush.

Companies also use these insights to entice customers to join loyalty programs by suggesting personalized recommendations, exclusive offers and discounts, gamification elements, and early access opportunities. Think of Sephora’s Beauty Insider program, which allows members early access to new product launches, or Amazon Prime, which gives its members a 30-minute head start on Lightning Deals.

“For the loyalty programs, we use AI to analyze a bunch of KPIs across different segments of customers and evaluate what they’re more likely to do. Then, in turn, your team can decide the kind of loyalty activities and promotions you should be doing for different segments of customers,” said Piyush.

Capillary is introducing a unique solution that allows marketers to automate a customer’s buying journey based on their behavior. Insights-led Journeys, an upcoming tool, can personalize user experience

“Every customer is different, their purchase behaviors are different, and their preferences are different,” said Piyush. “These Journeys are so much more powerful because you don’t create the same path for every customer. You can see what paths are performing well and what aren’t automatically.”

The Journeys tool is based on past behaviors, allowing marketers to map out this journey and define actions or messages to be delivered at different stages. For example, if users abandon a cart, they may receive a discount in their email. Or if a user interacts with a particular product, they may see related products pop up below.

This probably sounds familiar if you’ve ever bought anything online and browsed an eCommerce site. That’s because insights tools are used by many marketing giants — including streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Say a streaming service called StreamFlix used Capillary’s Journeys product: It would start by collecting data on each subscriber’s viewing history, genre preferences, and watch patterns. Then, the tool would analyze this data to gain insights into the interests and habits of its users so it can send reminders for upcoming episodes of favorite shows or recommendations based on trending content. And if a user hasn’t watched anything in a while, the product could prompt an automated email suggesting popular shows they might like.

The AI-driven Insight-led Journeys product could also nudge customers into loyalty programs.

“We can use it to look at what a brand’s customers are more likely to do,” explained Piyush. “We also look at what kind of loyalty activities the brand should be doing, what kind of promotion you could be running, what kind of tweaks you should be doing to a program to engage with your customers better.”

And to further its AI-powered services, Capillary is also in the early stages of introducing its very own AI research assistant that marketers can chat with and get suggestions. Piyush is optimistic about how it can transform the way marketers interact with their services: “It’s still in the early days — but it’s something very powerful in terms of being able to suggest this to marketers.”

Learn more about how Capillary can wow your customers and create greater brand loyalty.