Build your Customer 360 on Databricks with RudderStack Profiles

RudderStack Profiles introduces a groundbreaking approach to creating and delivering complete customer profiles. The technical challenges behind creating a single customer view have long plagued data teams and hampered business teams as unresolved identities silently undermine efforts to turn customer data into competitive advantage.

Throwing black box SaaS tools at the problem creates another data silo and ultimately makes the problem worse. Taking the DIY route is time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult to scale. There’s no silver bullet to solve Customer 360 from end-to-end, but RudderStack Profiles marks a giant leap forward for data teams that are striving to power their businesses with reliable, complete customer profiles, and it now supports the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.

Profiles solves the core data problem around identities, enabling you to rapidly model complete customer profiles in your lakehouse. As part of RudderStack, its value extends beyond unification in both directions. RudderStack solves your behavioral data collection challenges and makes it easy to deliver complete profiles downstream for activation. It’s designed around data team needs and workflows to get the job done where other solutions come up short.

A groundbreaking approach

No other bought or built Customer 360 solution enables you to create reliable, complete customer profiles with speed and agility while maintaining the level of transparency and versatility afforded by Profiles. Here’s what you get from Profiles that other options don’t provide:

• Comprehensive data — Because Profiles runs on the lakehouse, 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.

How to model complete customer profiles in Databricks

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

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 quickly 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.

Cohorts and activations

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 unprecedented access to explore and activate Customer 360 data themselves so they can use it to drive powerful customer experiences. Plus, it enables them to create and sync audiences directly to business tools. It even makes the Customer 360 table available in real-time via API to personalize product experiences.

• Cohorts – Enables data teams to define core customer segments in the warehouse, which serve as a starting point for audience creation.
• Activations – Allows non-technical users to explore the customer 360, filter core cohorts into audiences, and sync them directly to their tools for tactical activation.

With Cohorts and Activations, you establish core customer segments in the warehouse, and you have a safe way to provide business users with unprecedented access to Customer 360 so they can explore the data, build audiences for their use cases, and self-serve the exact data they want in their own tools.

Start building your customer 360 on Databricks

The data lakehouse's open, scalable architecture makes it a natural fit for the customer data stack. With RudderStack, you can now make the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform the foundation of your CDP, powering every team and every use case with reliable, complete customer profiles.

Getting started is easy. 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. Reach out to our team to get a demo today.