Customer Data Platforms On the Rise

Welcome to the Dove Direct Print and Marketing Blog. Today's post, "Customer Data Platforms On the Rise," examines what many are referencing as the next iteration in Big Data collection and management. Customer Data Platforms (CDP) have been around for some time; now, however, CDP platforms are reportedly making inroads into the scope of data types that can be manipulated.

Marketers are keenly aware of how data collection and manipulation can impact a brand, a campaign's success, including the ability to better manage overall marketing communications strategies, customer retention, and relationship building.  In fact, over the past few years, Big Data and CRM usage have become interchangeable terms, in that Big Data was thought to be next to impossible to orchestrate without a CRM component. CDP platforms are now on the rise due to their ability to capture and manipulate more types of customer data.



What is a Customer Data Platform? 



An excerpt from TrustRadius states: "A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a customer database from which complete, accurate customer profiles can be built. The profiles support segmentation and building targeted marketing campaigns. The CDP is primarily a data store and not a campaign execution tool."

What can a Customer Data Platform Do?


According to Techopedia: "A customer data platform, or CDP, is a kind of customer database that tries to aggregate as much data as possible, including phone numbers, where customers navigate on a website and transcripts of conversations with customer service representatives over email and web chat sessions."


The range of data collection a CDP can garner is more inclusive. For example, live chat platforms, which are also on the rise, are great tools for engaging prospects and customers in real-time on a website. Live chat programs offer a dashboard that records the time, name, email address, conversations, and the results of the interaction. However, that live chat data information would need to be entered into a database platform where other types of customer data reside, such as inside a CRM.
  Let's examine the differences between DRMs, SCVs, and DMPs.


The Differences Among DRMs, SCVs, and DMPs


CRMs, SCVs, and DMPs have been around for quite a while, and all continue to serve particular processes involving data collection and manipulation. It is essential to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. Celerity's white paper outlines these variances; however, it is always wise to invest resources on this topic to ensure any data collection schema meets your organization's requirements. At any rate, the following excerpts are from Celerity:


CRM - Customer Relation Management


"CRM systems were always designed to enable a business to engage with their customers over various channels and keep an up-to-date profile of those customers. However, that data is restricted to the managed customer data and will never incorporate the depth and breadth of other interactions a customer could have with your business on a website or in-store."

SCV - Single Customer View

"The 'traditional' single customer view approach to marketing data can bring together large numbers of data sources and does provide a good level of segmentation capabilities based on a wide range of customer interactions. The disadvantage compared with a CDP is that this data can be hard for marketers to leverage without some kind of technical or coding ability. Alternatively a third party interface could sit on top of this Data Warehouse but this gives further overheads to
the marketing team."


DMP - Data Management Platform


"Data Management Platform, or DMP, is commonly compared to a CDP due to their similar data access capabilities. A DMP generally will rely on browsing or cookie-based information to segment customers. This works really well for display as retargeting communications but is limited by cookie expiry information and lack of an actual customer profile when it comes to using the data beyond this.

A CDP can act on this same kind of data but also brings in the 'known' element of a customer and enables real-time actions based on facts as well
as derivations."

CDP is All-Encompassing

According to Celerity, "CDP is an environment that enables the collation of data from any data source to form a clear customer profile based on any interaction across all available touchpoints. Whether its web browsing behavior, in-store transactions, customer satisfaction surveys, or mobile app actions, a CDP will build a customer profile and enable a marketer to understand and react to customer interactions in real-time.


The marketing technology landscape has become vast (and continues to grow), and as such, a wide variety of technologies and data silos are becoming quite common within organizations. Naturally, this means that the amount of data available increases but the right data isn't always in the right place to leverage, leaving marketers unable to act in the best way possible for a customer or having to rely on guesswork. A CDP generally has a software agnostic approach to data collation, as well as the technology used to action any segments or audiences identified within the platform."


Moving Forward


Regardless of the size of your organization, data collection and manipulation is the deal-breaker. Flying by the seat of one's pants, or marketing strictly by intuition greatly diminishes opportunities for success in the sales world. These days, it is critical to understand who your customers are, where they engage, how they engage, what their pain points are, and their wish lists.

In short, you can think of data platforms such as CRM, SVC, and DMP as musicians in an orchestra. CDP's tour-de-force is that it consists of an entire orchestra and the musicians contained therein.


How to Choose the Best CDP

Choosing a CDP platform will require some research. However, while most of them appear to share similarities, various use-case emphases can make them quite divergent under the hood.

The Best CDP will be the one that demonstrates use cases, and customer profiles that address your budget, locale, and risk tolerances.


The Net-Net

2020 will be more demanding when it comes to brand differentiation, prospect, and customer engagement destinations, including live micro-moment communications. If nothing else, we recommend that organizations invest in data collection at some level. Live chat is one data collection method whereby brands can communicate with visitors in real-time, thereby fulfilling the communication immediacy challenge that most customers crave. At any rate, the CDP platforms are becoming more mainstream, and organizations should begin to review which versions can integrate with their data management platforms. Happy Holidays and thanks for reading "Customer Data Platforms On the Rise."

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