Lexer Customer Data Platform Grows from Social Listening Roots

Customer Data Platform vendors come from many places, geographically and functionally. Lexer is unusual in both ways, having started in Australia as a social media listening platform. About two years ago the company refocused on building customer profiles with data from all sources. It quickly added clients among many of Australia’s largest consumer-facing brands including Qantas airlines and Westpac bank.

Social media is still a major focus for Lexer. The system gathers data from Facebook and Instagram public pages and from the Twitter follower lists of clients’ brands. It analyzes posts and follows to understand consumer interests, assigning people to “tribes” such as “beach lifestyle” and personas such as “sports and fitness”.  It supplements the social inputs with information from third party data sources, location history, and a clients’ own email, Web site, customer service, mobile apps, surveys, point of sale, and other systems. Matching is strictly deterministic, although links based on different matches can be chained together to unify identities across channels.  The system can also use third party data to add connections it can’t be made directly.

Lexer ingests data in near-real-time, making social media posts available to users within about five minutes. It can react to new data by moving customers into different tribes or personas and can send lists of those customers to external systems for targeting in social, email, or other channels.  There are standard integrations with Facebook, Twitter, and Google Adwords advertising campaigns. External systems can also use an API to read the Lexer data, which is stored in Amazon Elastic Search.

Unusally for a CDP, Lexer also provides a social engagement system that lets service agents engage directly with customers. This system displays the customer’s profile including a detailed interaction history and group memberships. Segment visualization is unusually colorful and attractive.

Lexer has about forty clients, nearly all in Australia. It is just entering the U.S. market and hasn’t set U.S. prices.