A comprehensive guide to understanding a Customer Data Platform
“I was super excited about our 25th-anniversary celebrations. My wife and I divided the long invitee list by preference and started sending e-invites and phone messages. After a few messages, two of my friends who also are my wife’s friends sent me a response. It was embarrassing to read it. ‘We already received it from Tara. Thank You.’ It was a tongue-in-the-cheek instance.”
If simple event invitee lists can cause frustration and embarrassment, then it is bound to happen with large customer databases that multiply information each day. To eliminate these mishaps and do a lot more, Customer Data Platforms are coming to the rescue of a marketer, getting indispensable by each day!
According to Gartner, A CDP is a marketing system that unifies a company’s customer data from marketing and other channels to enable customer modeling and optimize the timing and targeting of messages and offers. Customer data platforms have evolved from a variety of mature markets, including multichannel campaign management, tag management and data integration [1].
While this statement provides an introduction to the definition of a Customer Data Platform (CDP), the scope and capabilities of a CDP are evolving multi-fold. It is emerging into being the central brain of all marketing systems of intelligence.
Thus, making it difficult to define something that is evolving. To make it simple, we have created a list of attributes and principles that would help you understand more about a CDP.
This is fast complementing CRMs, ERPs, DMPs, and other large enterprise tools that are coined to capture any kind of customer impulse or audience data.
So, What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?
A CDP is a marketer’s single platform that creates unique, unified customer identities across all marketing channels and sources of customer interactions to empower and automate omnichannel campaign management, segment customer cohorts, provides insights, and enriched actionable campaign targeted recommendations that lead to an increase in marketing efficiency.
What Exactly is a CDP Capable of Doing?
With the evolving nature of CDPs, the tool has challenged itself with better and new-age relevant capabilities. As the term seems obvious, a CDP is capable of managing your data from across multiple sources of marketing information and interactions. This includes both internal and external data systems and interfaces such as CRM, ERM, DMP, social media, email, ad campaigns, voice conversations, chatbots, and more. Apart from these basic essentials, a CDP can so a lot more.
Capabilities of a Customer Data Platform
Unified & Unique Customer Identities
Data flows in into your enterprise databases from all directions. But, they are stacked in silos. Duplication, missing information, limited processing abilities, abrupt process handovers, and so on are consequences of a poorly managed and disintegrated data system. A CDP draws customer data from across different sources, assimilates it, stores and archives it for immediate consumption of team members and subsequent processes. During this cycle, a CDP applies uniquification to create unique and unified customer identities with probabilistic data enrichment.
Auto-Segmentation & Cohort Management
These unique individual customer identities are segmented among cohorts defined by you. A smart and cognitive CDP, enabled by Artificial Intelligence, takes cues and inputs from different cohort behavior and response to recommend further segmentation. This automated process of cohort segmentation saves a lot of time and effort for marketers.
Omnichannel Campaign Management
A marketing campaign’s efficiency is determined by its relevance to the audience, consistent messaging and customer experience across different marketing channels, and campaign integration with the customer journey. A CDP ensures that the complex web of marketing activities, campaigns, and team collaboration runs in a seamless relay.
Insights & Recommendations Engine
Marketing Automation is a cogwheel that expands and contracts with gears of different problems. But, mere automation is no longer enough to gain a competitive edge with multiplied profitability. Automation of intuition is what empowers a marketer. A CDP is equipped with an Insights and recommendation engine that comes with a layer of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
How a CDP Can Benefit Your Organization?
CDPs have changed how marketers work and what they now need to focus on. They have enabled marketers to focus on the more intelligent and cognitive needs of an organization. Some values and benefits that a CDP brings forth are:
Benefits of a Customer Data Platform
A Single View Of Your Customers
Every customer is unique, and so is their behavior. The changing contexts across marketing channels, varying touchpoints of interactions, and the shifting roles of an individual customer make it extremely difficult for the marketer to identify her customers across the buying journey. The identity is either hidden or lost in this complex web. A CDP assigns a uniquified identity to each and every customer, eliminating the challenges mentioned earlier.
Consistent Customer Experiences
With the lack of uniquified customer identities, consistency in customer experience is impossible. Articulating the brand promise and marketing objective customized to a single customer is what a CDP achieves for you. By providing a single view of a customer, a CDP allows a marketer to maintain consistency across all marketing channels of customer interaction.
Omnichannel Campaign Orchestration
A CDP is designed to manage levers of a campaign across all marketing channels and customize it to the behavior and needs of the respective audience. The changing behavior at each touchpoint is difficult to foresee and be imagined by the marketer. While the customer journey could be designed by the marketer, adjusting the campaign budgets, experience, communication, and so on in response to each action of a customer is complex. It requires a brain of mass-automation and round-the-clock monitoring. A CDP helps a marketer not only to build a customer journey, but also automate cross-channel campaigns and communication, and build an automated data repository for the cycle to be flawless.
Operational Excellence
Integrating every touchpoint and customizing solutions is a result of automation mastery. With rules and triggers configured, marketing campaigns can adjust to each customer’s stage in the funnel and expectations. Also, CDPs achieve systems to talk to each other while maintaining data privacy and security.
Data Democratization
“We have it all there, but we don’t know where it is.”, this is a most-heard statement in the context of data management. Though all the necessary data is available, they are stashed in silos. Extracting and accessing data at the appropriate time is an obvious feature of a CDP. CDPs can be connecting to both internal and external data and information systems. This data also automatically alters the insights for marketers. Data is truly made accessible anytime, anywhere!
Exponential Profitability
With the elimination of guesswork, risky experimentation, and dependencies, a CDP promotes multiplication of revenues with a no increase in costs. It removes the heavy infrastructure and resource costs that are otherwise consumed by bulky organizational databases, and umpteen other customer management software.
How is a Customer Data Platform Being Used?
A CDP is being used in more than a few known ways, dependant on the industry type and nature of the business. Following are a few ways in which a Customer Data Platform is already being used.
BFSI
Financial and banking marketers deal with a different set of products and lifecycles. CDPs play a crucial role in updating databases about time-sensitive facts such as loan lapses, mortgages, dematerialization accounts, credit score, and so on. This makes product creation a very fluid process in this industry. It is not just about marketing campaign personalization and customization, it also helps in customizing financial products such as allied financial services, tax-related products, insurance products, actuarial services and so on.
Machine Learning models infused into a CPD make your other information systems a lot more intelligent. With intelligence, cognitive CDPs are designed to adhere to privacy and confidentiality norms and keep financial interactions and data secure.
Manufacturing
Optimizing distribution networks with improved pricing strategies; managing inventory and logistics in tandem to the demand; circling back product ideas based on customer experience and vice versa; promoting products while improving the average sale price now can be visible to a marketer. A marketer is no longer lost in the ocean of logistics that matter most to ROI.
A manufacturing marketer can now talk back and forth to optimize her efforts both internally, within different Strategic business units, production houses and factories, and externally among distributors and customers.
Retail & CPG
Personalizing experiences and individualizing them is the new way of inspiring loyalty and bringing back your old customers. CDPs keep the process of data extraction and assimilation active even after the customer chooses to switch brands.
This continuous stream of data at different stages of the customer lifecycle infuses real-time information that is required for a marketer to run loyalty programs and retention campaigns. It adds to the ability to customize campaigns for each individual customer across channels which includes digital media, PoS, mobile, in-store, voice call, and more.
A CPD is fortunately not just customer-centric, it is audience-centric. Which means if your audience is sales personnel or store managers, you can use CDP to integrate campaigns during their interaction with customers.
Digital Media
Context is King in the Digital Business and media sectors. The context is different for each customer on each channel of communication. CDP brings the value of creating rich customer experiences in real-time. The updated information systems integrated to the CDP talk to each other to provide recommendations of customization.
With more and more channels being added to the digital universe, marketers tend to have more than one tool to solve a single problem. CDPs also pay attention to the current age of security and privacy. With GDPR and other regulations mounting their penalties, marketers need to rely on CDPs to keep security costs low.
Evolution Of Customer Data Platform (CDP)
arch 17, 2019 2 min read
Once upon a time, in the history of marketing, it all started with gathering Customer information and storing it. The customer data either was updated by an account manager into the Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM), or used a lead generation tool to bring data into it. But, the marketer now wants to talk to other teams. She wants her customers to talk directly with the other teams in her organization.
Marketers found a Data Management Platform (DMP) to store data and make it accessible to their entire organization. Data was only shelved in a DMP and the marketer’s intention to tie it to the campaigns and enrich cohorts still remained incomplete. This was because neither the CRM nor the DMP could identify who the customer really was. Moreover, DMPs were not managed by the marketer. They were controlled by the tech team.
Then, came the Customer Data Platform (CDP).
CDPs focus on customer data analytics that is used for better customer experience, whilst just being data aggregators.
Why CRMs or DMPs are not Enough?
During the evolving times of MarTech, CRMs and DMPs have come in handy to marketers. The potential of a marketer’s success was multiplied with technology that was customer-driven. However, there were gaps in what marketer intended to achieve and what could be achieved in reality. It still takes marketers too much time to analyze and draw conclusions about the success of a marketing campaign or a change to the customer experience — 47% say it takes more than a week, while another 47% say it takes three to five days [1] . Here are some of the reasons why CRMs or DMPs are not enough for a Cognitive Marketer of this age.
Fractured Customer Identities
There is little coordination among internal teams, marketing channels, and different intelligent systems that drive an enterprise. The lack of integration across data hubs, people, and information system is creating cascading effects that cause error both in the raw data and prediction. The vicious gaps have led to fractured customer identities despite the availability of data across the enterprise.
Centralized Data Banks and Siloed Structures
Datahubs were centralized and siloed to the extent that they were no longer accessible to the marketer. The increased duration of retrieving the information in-time to roll out relevant campaigns and implement personalization handicapped a marketer in realizing the full potential. This is where CRMs and DMPs were unable to support a marketer’s needs fully. A marketer needed more control over the data and information systems. A CDPs integration capability solves this problem for a marketer.
Mass Customization
Combined capabilities of DMPs, CRMs, and ERPs have helped the marketer customize customer experience, communication and marketing campaigns. However, that is not enough. Today, the consumer demands personal attention. And, that can be achieved only with Personalization. The mature marketers are relying on CDPs to not just personalize, but to go a step closer to individualize the entire brand-customer experience.
Marginal ROI
A better ROI is something that every marketer strives for. CRMs and DMPs have provided a marginal increase to ROI. But, CDPs have been able to achieve huge returns at none or a nominal increase in cost.
Over time, CDPs in themselves have evolved from being mere data assembly lines, or analytical tools. Now, the new-age CDP enriches the customer experience, adding value to the marketing ROI. This brings us to understand what are the different types of CDP available in the market. The next section of this series takes you through the variety of CDPs and which of these offers the most marketing ROI.
Customer Data Platforms are now being central to the marketing technology ecosystem of any enterprise. They are being chosen to transform customer experience at every touchpoint. Learn more about how CDPs are being used in the article ‘Different Types of CDP’ .
Customer Data Platform Landscape: Different Types of CDP
March 21, 2019 3 min read
Data Ingestion and Identity is the winning feature of a Customer Data Platform (CDP). It didn’t stop there. Marketers need swift information distillation and processing for cutting-edge insights and recommendations. It requires a universal configuration of heterogeneous data into comprehensible formats. It needs to meet the goals of a customer experience strategy.
A CDP, with evolution, can bring more onto the table than what a marketer thinks it can. That drives you to understand the different types of CDPs available in the market and what each one means to your business.
Marketer’s Notes: Some CDP vendors provide solutions only for a few specific needs. However, the FirstHive platform allows you to choose for either a few of your specific needs such as data ingestion, or a combination of data and analytics, auto-segmentation, campaign management, budget management, and automated recommendation.
Different Types of Customer Data Platform
Data Assembly Line
Imagine this!
Car sensors, home appliances, credit card purchases, mobile transactions and aircraft flight systems, loyalty coupons, chatbot interactions, FMCG line extension product offers for new launches, distributor and retailer margins, email signups, in-store heatmaps, and the list can go on. A marketer deals with more complexity than what you see in the prior statement. These varied data sources generate volumes of events.
The volume only increases data velocity to support automated or augmented systems. All this put together poses a single problem for a marketer. And 33% of elite marketers believe that the solution to this is to have the right technologies for data collection and analysis that is the primer and essential to understanding customers.
Beyond mere collection, all of these should communicate with each other on one platform — data hubs, information systems, sources of marketing interactions, and third-party sources.
The end result is that CDPs create unified customer identities, unique to each customer in your database.
Data Ingestion with Analytics
“What do you mean when you say systems need to talk to each other?”
Here is what CDPs do. Collecting data from different sources and storing them in consumable formats is the first step. But, CDPs also let this data be consumed by not just the marketing teams, but also other teams across the enterprise. They are available to be translated to a customer too.
Moreover, data needs to evolve and be enriched over time. Such data fuels machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics. It indicates the next steps, red flags, opportunities, and more. It makes not only your marketing systems but the entire enterprise into a large intelligent system.
Customer Experience At The Core
“Conversions and Better ROI is what concerns every marketer.”
Data collection and insight processing are implemented for a consequence. The subsequent outcome is to improve customer experience with targeted messaging, micro-campaign management, and customer lifecycle management. To truly enhance the customer experience a CDP equips a marketer with auto-segmentation and cohort management, single view of a customer across all touchpoints, seamless omnichannel customer journey orchestration, and more than obvious support systems for security and privacy.
Apart from these CDPs are also weighed for B2B and B2C marketers.
Customer Data Platforms for The B2B Marketers
To know exactly whom to target accomplishes half of the goal for a marketer. But to consistently achieve it over a large scale is extremely challenging. Especially when B2B marketers need to implement Account-Based Marketing (ABM) CDPs play a crucial role in creating a single view of customer behavior. The fragmented set of tools that come together to orchestrate an ABM campaign need to be managed over a single platform. The platform that successfully accomplishes this goal is a Customer Data Platform.
Customer Data Platforms for The B2C Marketers
Though B2C marketers promote products for highly individualized customers, their immediate mediators and influencers are the distributors, retailers, and wholesalers. So, for a B2C marketer, it is rather another round of marketing to the intermediaries. So, technically there are in charge of B2B2C marketing!
CDPs help in auto-segmenting the intermediary influencers are corresponding to their individual customers. This helps in promoting your product to only those who help you achieve a high ROI.
FirstHive, An Intelligent Customer Experience CDP
All marketers do not need everything. But, some need it all.
FirstHive is an Intelligent Customer Data Platform (CDP) that is helping Enterprises experience almost 6X times increase in Marketing ROI metrics. This testifies our passion to drive better customer experiences.
We are the world’s first CDP to imbibe Machine Learning to build unified customer identities, enriched by actionable campaign targeting recommendations which contribute to the large increase in ROI.
Leading enterprises across BFSI, FMCG, Manufacturing, and Digital industry sectors have used our platform to build unique Customer Identities on unified customer data sets. This rich data is used to orchestrate cross-channel campaigns.
Across over 30 Indo-Pacific customer deployments, we have helped them with data ingestion from all sources of their customer interactions and transaction such as ERP, CRM, Website, Social, PoS, Mobile App, Customer Care, and more to name. More and more businesses come to trust FirstHive as our platform is privacy by design, and GDPR compliant.
Today, CDP is essential and indispensable to a marketer. In the next section, we elaborate on how a cognitive marketer is fast-adopting a CDP as the central brain of the intelligent marketing systems.
Apart from this, Forrester also classifies Customer Data Platform as basic Data Platforms, Standalone CDP, and Embedded CDP. Read the complete report here to understand what type of CDP suits your enterprise needs the best.
Why A Customer Data Platform Is A Marketer’s Central Brain?
March 29, 2019 2 min read
CDPs have been able to lead a marketer by principles that revolve around enhancing customer experience, adding business intelligence, ease to scale up with increasing data, eliminate time-consuming and information-blocking dependencies, automate multiple systems and get them to talk to each other.
Here’s why you will agree that a Customer Data Platform is a marketer’s central brain of all marketing systems of intelligence.
The only system to get access to ALL data
A CDP is the only system that gets access to all data of an enterprise that is relevant to the marketer, viz. Data from all the systems of interaction, systems of engagement, or systems of record that the brand might be using. In addition, if the CDP is able to intelligently use Machine Learning to uniquely identify customers across the disparate datasets, then the brand marketer now gets enhanced access to the customer’s behavior across channels and in various contexts. This obviously becomes a treasure trove of information around customer behavior and enables the first principles of marketing, that the brand can expect a better response to their campaigns if they are able to be relevant and contextual in their messaging to the customer.
Eliminate Guesswork & Risky Experimentation
CDPs extract, assemble and organize data from all marketing sources of information and interaction to enrich customer identities. Assimilating first-hand information to identify each and every customer across the marketing universe of channel interaction eliminates guesswork in the process of creating a hypothesis. Experimentation for a marketer, in such a scenario, would be led by validated information of first-hand and real customer interactions. Intelligent CDPs also make their way through to include offline touchpoints, apart from the digital ones.
Eliminate Dependencies Of A Marketer
CDP is in literal terms a sigh of relief to the marketer. This is because marketers get rid of many bottlenecks and dependencies that cause the delay in executing or optimizing a campaign, or providing a better experience to the customer in real-time.
No IT dependency
Technology is far too often dealt with the tech teams within an organization. Technology configurations, platform integrations are determined by the availability of tech support and resources. A CDP is powered to implement quick integrations and provides services for seamless custom configurations. This makes the marketing team more independent while adding technologies that add to enhance customer experience.
No Data dependency
Data teams use bulky technologies to support different data needs of multiple departments and teams within the organization. Marketing teams need to adhere to the organization’s priorities while extracting data. Data arriving through this route is not always first-hand and in-time to support the dynamic campaigns led by a marketer.
CDPs empower marketers to extract data from all known and unknown sources of information and first-hand interaction of customer from across all marketing channels. This helps the marketer not lose a single detail, hence, enabling them to deliver better communication, personalize the experience through the journey, and build better customer relationships even at a large scale.
Seamless Automation
Marketing campaign automation is not new to a marketer. Automation of personalization using triggers and rules has added advantage to a marketer’s charm. A CDP brings the capability to automate in both contexts. But, the beauty lies in automating the unthought. Intelligent and Cognitive CDPs can also automate customer segmentation, customer identification, cohort management, predictions, and more.
Better Customer Relationships
The heart behind the existence of a CDP is to build better customer relationships despite the existence of scattered points-of-interactions, and fragmented cohorts. Scale and speed do not stifle the performance of a CDP. Stating which, the core of your business that matters to higher LTV and ROI — your customer relationships are taken care of.
Read further about the marketing challenges faced by an Enterprise and how a CDP can solve it.
Marketing Challenges of an Enterprise and Role of CDP
“The engagement rates showcase positive response, but my paid campaigns targeted at those audiences do not reflect high conversions. I am unable to focus on those important few who are truly loyal to the brand and leave out the rest. Some channels work well for older customer groups, While others work best for new and recent ones. I am unable to grasp the data in entirety in a single view. Designing exclusive campaigns for the high-converting groups is a challenge.”
Do you also go through a similar marketing experience? Such scenarios are not just a matter of frustration but lose of opportunity where marketers are six times more likely to increase profits (45 percent vs. 7 percent), and are five times more likely to achieve a competitive advantage in customer retention (74 percent vs. 13 percent) [1]
Many marketers who strive to create a great customer experience stumble upon similar problems related to customer data, integration and security. But, the early adopters of Intelligent Customer Data Platforms have been able to solve these problems.
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) allows a marketer to work in tandem with other data hubs within an enterprise and comprehend insights in unison with the rest of the enterprise. In short, only a CDP can help in creating personalized and yet, consistent customer experience across all touchpoints that interact with the brand.
It gets more obvious that a CDP is a most sought after tool into a marketer’s toolbox to maintain better customer relationships. While a CDP’s importance is apparent, we have set out to answer how exactly does a CDP solve different problems of a marketer, both at the levls of strategy and implementation.
A marketer’s problems are directed towards Data, Systems, and the Customers.
Marketing Challenges of an Enterprise and Role of CDP
Data
Data Structure
How data is stored, archived, and retrieved within an organization is the beginning of a marketer’s obstacle lane.
Marketer’s Problem
Fractured data structures is not a recent challenge, it is an age-old maze that marketers struggle to stitch together. Siloed data across the organization fails a marketer to execute her top operational priority — analyze data to automate insight generation for its own team and for the sales personnel. Even though there is a quick response to this problem with the emergence of advanced predictive analytics, the real problem stays with the traditional methods applied to access data. 80% of marketer’s operational work involved is acquiring and preparing data [2].
The CDP’s Role
The emergence of CDP has relieved marketers from accessing siloed data. A CDP ingests first-hand data coming from all data sources, which includes internal, external, and third-party sources. Even if any of the existing software vendors demand a data lock-in, such data could be ingested into your system of CDP. This simply means, a CDP can ingest both streaming and batch data.
A CDP uses this data to organize it for further use such as cohort management, cohort segmentation, campaign management, analysis and insight creation, and so on. The privacy of data is secured within a CDP that is designed to comply with data regulations.
Data Control and Accessibility
Though data exists within the organization, it is seldom at easy reach of a marketer. A marketer needs to travel through systems, processes, and people to access relevant data, and that means a loss in time.
Marketer’s Problem
Data has to change hands and a marketer fails to receive data in-time. Data accessibility and a marketer’s control do not, unfortunately, scale with the growth of the organization. A marketer faces political challenges in the data retrieval process. These cost money which lower ROIs.
The CDP’s Role
A marketer does not have to wait for exclusive access with the use of CDP. A CDP provides complete control to retrieve relevant data in time. Further, data-crunching and processing are also automated to the extent of insight creation. The processed data can be put to use anytime to kickstart responsive campaigns, draw quick insights, and action other processes that add up to the bottom line. There is no dependency on technological or data specialists to execute these tasks.
Systems
Real-Time Response
With far-fetching data reach, real-time response to customer and real-time data availability is a challenge to every marketer. 43% marketers agree that they are not lacking data; they are missing the ability to transform data into real-time action [3].
Marketer’s Problem
With traditional forms of data access, marketers use and upload data using a batch cadence. There is no single system to anchor the data streaming activity for the entire organization. The customer stays away from the marketer and the brand for the same reasons. The time decay results in poor response and customer experience. Apart from this, adulterated, duplicated data cascades to create a poor quality of data bank within your organization.
The CDP’s Role
A CDP ingests data in real-time. There is no lag time that curbs the marketer from using data to respond to a customer. The response could be via a chatbot, an amendment to an ad campaign, revision to an on-ground offer, or an SMS. Automated triggers, auto-cohort segmentation powered by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning helps a marketer to make prompt revisions to the existing plan.
Marketing System Integration
Data silos also limit different marketing systems from talking to each other as well as with other systems within the organization. Data heterogeneity complicates further data management.
Marketer’s Problem
Identifying a customer or a high-value cohort is as good as owning a gold mine. With changing customer behavior across different marketing channels, predicting a path is very complex and expensive. To avoid complexity and high-cost, marketers settle with a generic persona or identity that helps them execute campaigns seamlessly. However, the lack of identity kills their ability to personalize customer experience, hence, hurting the marketing ROI.
The CDP’s Role
A CDP integrates data from across different systems and creates a unique customer identity that is unified throughout several touchpoints. Every customer identity is enriched with each new action and interaction with the brand. The algorithm used to update each identity considers other factors that influence a customer’s journey and decision to purchase. These are demographic, geographic, campaign-specific, channel-exclusive, device-specific, behavioral, product-specific, and other similar factors.
Customer
Consistent Customer Experience
The number of marketing channels continues to expand, increasing the importance of highly personalized and relevant messages and offers [4]. The same number also throws the challenge to a marketer of mapping the touchpoints to maximize a personalized experience for each customer.
Marketer’s Problem
A customer expects different stimuli to purchase in each marketing channel. Each customer’s interaction is different on each channel. This leaves the marketer with so many permutations and combinations to design a campaign that is consistent across multiple marketing channels. Though a marketer achieves in doing so, the dynamic trends that have constant influence of a buyer’s journey distort the navigation that is determined by the marketer. The sheer number and increasing complexity constraints a marketer to bring out a consistent customer experience for every customer.
The CDP’s Role
The unique and unified customer identification that is generated by a CDP helps a marketer to tweak the experience for every individual customer. A layer of Artificial Intelligence stitched into the system allows a marketer to automate changes using stimuli as triggers and rules that generate the response to each interaction. It indicates the necessary changes in communication and budget that would be required to achieve a better customer experience for a high-value multi-channel campaign or a single-channel promotion. The single view of a customer that is inherent to and is provided by a CDP helps in retaining a consistent customer experience at any scale.
Diluted Customer Relationships
Either B2B or B2C, when ‘scale’ steps in, maintaining a strong and personal relationship with each customer is almost impossible for the brand. With personalization, names could be used, but marketers want to do more to ensure that relationships with customers are not diluted.
Marketer’s Problem
Marketers need to often fill the vacuum between the data management strategy and customer experience strategy. This means finding answers to scenarios such as “What exactly is the Customer looking for?”, “Predicting customer behavior”, “Identifying triggers that bind a customer community”, and many other abstract matters.
This needs a human eye and intelligence. The emotional connect that mere data lack has to be compensated in the larger canvas of customer experience by the marketer. intends to create. If these systems that drive the two critical strategies do not talk to each other, the marketer needs to manually instill intelligence which adds to the complexity of building better customer relationships.
The CDP’s Role
A CDP behaves like a central system of intelligence that empowers other systems to interact in a unified manner. It eliminates the cumbersome activity of lengthy configurations, interpretations, and insight generation. In fact, a CDP plays the roles of a seamless Insights Engine that brings Intelligence to the network of systems within an organization.
While this answers about the role of CDP in an organization, you can read further about its Strategic Value to a Marketing Plan.
Reading & References
