Customer Data Platform — What features makes for a great CDP
CDPs, Customer data platform is a term that is being thrown around a lot these days, without many people genuinely understanding what they do. There exists an abundance of solutions on the market which each tackle different aspects, but typically CDPs tend to varying degrees the same five principal axes:
- Identity
- Data Cleansing, Transformation and Enrichment
- Data Centralization
- Audience and Segmentation
- Data Integration & Analytics
Identity:
CDPs build this customer profile around a concept of identity. An identity strategy shapes how data is linked or merge together. When looking at identity strategies, there usually is four central axis to look at:
- Deterministic vs. Probabilistic
- Hard vs. Soft Merge
- Gold attributes
- Treatment of historical data
Deterministic vs. Probabilistic: Most CDPs out there handle deterministic matching, meaning that they would match customers when there is some explicit identifier such as a customer id, email, name, or phone number being used that allow for the customers’ records to be linked together with an exact match. Some CDPs…
