Profile features: what’s new on the Batch platform (H1 2023)

The first half of 2023 is coming to an end and it’s time to share with you all the new Batch platform features since the start of the year.

With Batch’s new positioning as a 360 customer engagement platform, our teams divided these new features into three key areas: Profile, Engage, and Messaging.

To meet the omnichannel CRM requirements, we restructured our teams into dedicated multidisciplinary teams called squads.

This article covers all the new features in S1 2023 from the Profile Squad. Read on to find out about other major innovations on the Batch platform: new engage and messaging features.

Before going further, let’s remember the Profile Squad’s core mission: centralising all your customer data to enable personalised communications on each CRM channel.

For the first half of 2023, all the new Profiles features are:

• New omnichannel data model;
• New profiles concept;
• Profile view on the dashboard;
• Targeting for the email channel;
• Automatic deletion of inactive profiles

Batch's new data model, the cornerstone of our omnichannel platform

Before we walk you through all the new Profile features, let’s take a step back.

To make Batch’s omnichannel pivot strategy a reality, our tech and product teams had to completely overhaul our data model.

This model was incredibly relevant for our previous mobile-centric engagement platform as it established a clear separation between Android, iOS and web users, by storing their data in silos. But we had to completely transform this data model.

Integrating a new channel like emailing was not the only challenge we faced. We sought to break down these data silos, enabling unified user data exploitation, regardless of their collection source or the CRM channel.

And that is how we came up with the profile concept.

Profile to centralise all your user data

In the Batch platform, a profile is the compilation of user data and events from several sources (apps, websites, APIs) that is enriched and updated in real time.

Each profile also stores emails and email subscriptions associated with a user. Profiles thus enable the Batch platform to operate complex and cross-channel scenarios.

All user actions are consolidated within these profiles whether they come from a mobile phone, the back-end via our APIs, or from your other marketing tools via connectors.

Use cases and customer benefits

Concretely, our profiles enable you to:

• manage very large volumes of data in real time – from collection to activation through reconciliation and ingestion, meaning you can quickly react to events and user behaviours;
• create multi-touch user journeys. Let's take the abandoned cart scenario as an example. With Batch, if a customer adds an item to their online cart and doesn't purchase it immediately, you can schedule an email reminder two days later. However, if they buy the item on the web, mobile or in store in the meantime, our omnichannel data model automatically cancels the reminder. That means, only relevant reminders are sent.

Note 1: The very first Batch channel to benefit from this new feature is emailing.

Note 2: If you’re a Batch client and you have already sent us data via our APIs and/or SDKs to manage your push notification and in-app scenarios, this data feeds the profiles and can be used to manage your email scenarios.

New dashboard profile view

Our product and tech teams executed this major Profile innovation on the Batch dashboard with the dashboard profile view, the 360° view of these unique profiles.

The profile view includes:

• all user attributes;
• all information about a user’s email subscription status;
• all tracked event history for a user.

Email targeting

Reconciling all this data in the pursuit of one goal: empowering your marketing scenarios with automation and personalisation capabilities.

All attributes stored on profiles are available for email targeting.

You can already select an entry and exit event for email automation (see the new Engage features article).

You can now add one or more filters: subscription status, newsletter topic, loyalty points, etc.

Automatic deletion of inactive profiles

We can’t talk about data storage and activation without addressing data privacy and GDPR compliance.

Batch has always provided GDPR compliance tools via dedicated APIs, SDK methods or interfaces on the dashboard. In particular, these tools mean you can delete user data.

Data can be deleted at the explicit request of an end user, or when our clients consider that it’s no longer necessary to collect this data. Many of our clients have implemented a data purging process based on custom criteria determined with their technical teams.

Thanks to data centralisation (explained above), we have a holistic view of user activity. We want to make the most of this unified vision to facilitate the data purging process.

Our clients can simply put a period of inactivity after which a profile will be deleted from the Batch platform, without the need for any additional intervention from their technical teams.

This enables our clients to:

• retain profile data for a reasonable period;
• provide relevant statistics based on profiles.