Much has been written about how rapidly growing companies with interesting business models are disrupting established giants. But what is often less well understood is how much customer data and predictive analytics can contribute to the meteoric rise of such companies–and how central it should be to their business plans.
That’s certainly the case for healthy prepared-meals company Trifecta Nutrition, according to the Sacramento-based company’s founder and CEO Greg Connolly, who sees the company’s Treasure Data Enterprise Customer Data Platform (CDP) as a key competitive growth advantage. The delivered-meals company is also a disruptor, with a data-driven business plan that competes, in part, with retailers that sell one-size-fits-all prepared meals to health-conscious people.
“Having lots of high-quality data is incredibly valuable to direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands—and there’s a rising tide of those, right now—from Warby Parker to Trifecta. We’re all using extremely fine-grained data now as a central piece of our business models,” says Connolly.
Customer Data & the Sales Value of a Single Customer View
The value of quick access to customer data–so that the company’s fitness consultants can work with customers to select great meals and effective fitness and training plans–was an unusual insight. And it has paid off well, despite bucking up against the idea that customer data platforms are more for mature, usually global companies.
But martech platforms and data sources have proliferated so much in recent years that even a young growing company like Trifecta had managed to accumulate 14 different marketing and sales platforms, with data that needed to be integrated to give a full picture of each individual customer. That, and Treasure Data’s ability to provide a solution that worked immediately and could scale for growth, drove Trifecta to select Treasure Data Enterprise CDP relatively early in the company’s development.
“Greg, our CEO, was really adamant that we needed a solution that would work when our company was young, but that could scale up massively as needed,” says Kyle Pate, senior product analyst at Trifecta.
“I wasn’t sure if Treasure Data was too large-scale or too much power for us, but it turned out to be just right at every step of our growth,” says Pate.
But the ability of the Treasure Data CDP to integrate customer data from all of Trifecta’s platforms and data feeds has been pivotal–in everything from understanding who the company’s best customers are, to showing detailed profiles of actual customers to investors, to give additional weight and evidence that the company’s focus and tactics were the right moves.
How Customer Data Helps Woo Investors, Guide Sales & Personalized CX
Having detailed single customer views (SCVs) has also been a big help in the company’s growth, conclusively demonstrating to investors the power of Trifecta’s data-driven approach, and allowing the company to use the workout plans and logs and other customer data to provide highly personalized customer experiences. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the company’s strategic use of the company’s single-customer-views (SCVs) of each customer.
These customer profiles were originally created to help inform marketing and sales strategy and build results customer by customer. But the single customer views (SCVs) have helped Connolly and Tessa Bicard, the company’s VP of Marketing at the time, to tell a compelling, data-driven story about the revenue-generating power of both its current customers and its ability to sustain and accelerate growth over the long haul–a factor credited with playing a significant role in securing a new round of investor funding.
The ‘Wow Factor’ of Single Customer Views for Investors
Investors could actually see specific, detailed profiles, including actual pictures from Facebook and everything from their fitness progress to how they felt about their program, their successes, their failures, and their lives in general. The profiles literally put a face on the data.
The “wow factor” of the profiles was a significant plus in these successful discussions, Connolly and Bicard agree. It reinforced a message that the investment community is also receiving on many other channels: the power of customer data, AI, and machine learning to perform as a powerful, revenue-generating trifecta.
“Having Treasure Data CDP and access to real-time data is incredibly important to us—as it is to all DTC brands. We can now connect with the end consumer on a much deeper level than retailers,” says Connolly.
The fast, easy availability of customer data has also enabled and fit in well with the company’s corporate culture emphasizing experimentation and the “art of the possible.” Tessa Bicard summarizes this critical element of Trifecta’s corporate culture: “Treasure Data CDP is now our playground to understand our customers and do things like better targeting and segmentation, and predictive analytics, says VPM Bicard.
“It’s also our single source of truth for the whole company, which is just what we needed,” she says.
SCVs Also Help Customer-facing Nutrition and Fitness Consultants
But investors are not the only people who benefit from single customer views. The company’s fitness experts can use CDP-generated customer profiles to understand how best to help their customers to stick with their plans–avoiding customer churn–and achieve their fitness goals.
Being able to see each person’s health and fitness histories, complete with workout and lifestyle data and objectives has helped Trifecta keep its customers on the right track. So when a customer seems to be at risk for going off of their plan, experts can invite customers to a quick call, sometimes with a pep talk or an adjustment to their meal plans. Customers often appreciate the personalized customer experience and the empathy that the nutrition consultants demonstrate, which comes from a detailed understanding of the full person.
It’s an increasingly common strategy: using CDP-integrated customer data to produce SCVs that help contact center personnel or clienteling experts to personalize customer experiences. Connolly says that eventually, he envisions more of the customer journey becoming more automated, using customer data, machine learning, and AI to get people to eat healthier food. And for Trifecta, the strategy has amounted to healthy business growth as well.
To learn more about the relationship between rapid growth and using customer data to market more effectively, check out the full Trifecta case study or visit treasuredata.com.
