What is a Customer Data Platform?
According to Gartner, the demand for information on customer data platforms (CDP) skyrocketed 91% between 2020 and 2021. The pattern among all these searches? They were queries from top company leaders. This means the interest in bundling your data is not just a concern between your data and analytics teams, it’s a sparking genuine interest among c-suite executives, too.
What can a customer data platform do?
A customer data platform (CDP) is a software that collects, combines, and organizes all your customer data into one place. Utilizing a CDP, you can easily store, see and manage all your customer information in real time. This all-in-one access includes data on your multi-channel campaigns, transaction histories, and all sales/marketing touchpoints with customers.
What does a CDP solve?
It’s no secret that today’s commerce market has left vulnerabilities in the physical and digital customer journey. Customers can interact with your brand through social media, paid ad campaigns, walking into your store, reading your content online and chatting with your brand via customer service. The limitless touchpoints can disconnect your brand’s cohesion of service to the customer and lose them, and their potential conversion, completely.
There’s also an aspect of customer data security that comes into question when all your data collections are happening across multiple fronts. With everything in one unified platform, you’ll be able to comply with today’s strict data protection and privacy laws. Main examples include the European Union implementing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which allows customers to have access to, revoke and rectify any information a company may have on file for them and the US’s California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) which allows customers to opt out of their data on file to be used or sold by 3rd parties. With more and more customers wanting to take control of their data, more and more countries are adopting similar legislatures. So, what happens if someone wants to opt out and their data is floating in your systems? You’ll have to abide by the request.
Having a CDP allows you to not only streamline better customer experiences, but it also keeps all their information organized and easy to navigate. In cases where you’d have to retract or edit customer information, the process is cut down from tracking down a single user in your multitude of databases to just scanning one.
Why are CDPs more efficient?
More than 90% of advanced customer data organizations agree that their customer data integration efforts resulted in a measurable positive ROI. As of right now, if you are not utilizing a CDP, your data is most likely siloed across multiple departments. This means multiple platforms, software and tools full of data that are spread across various teams and stunting your company’s growth. Utilizing a CDP allows you to integrate all the above together and create a 360-degree view of your customer profiles.
There are four main types of customer data that can be collected during the customer journey: basic data, interaction data, behavioral data and attitudinal data.
- Basic Data is the raw breakdown of your main audience persona. The building block for basic data is a piece of gateway information that you can create a whole profile from. Think about when you sign up for a loyalty program at a store or fill out a form for a webinar. (Ex. phone number, email address, name, occupation, industry)
- Interaction Data is how your customer corresponds with your business. What are their habits? What categories are they most interested in? Here, you’ll be looking for engagement metrics such as website visits, CPC, CTR, comments, shares, likes, most viewed categories, the workflows triggered etc. It’ll also help you paint a picture of their lifestyle.
- Behavioral Data is all about past information you’ve collected on the user to predict their actions in the future. This data can include shopping habits in-person and online, where they’re coming from, how long they’re considering a product until a conversion is made and average order value (AOV).
- Attitudinal Data is a direct line to the customer and opinions/insights of your brand from their perspective. This could mean customer reviews, survey results such as product satisfaction (PSAT), customer satisfaction (CSAT) or net promoter (NPS) scores, focus group feedback, or support ticket comments or suggestions.
With a full view of your customer’s brand experience; a CDP makes it easier for your team to learn, customize and cater to a customer’s preferences more accurately.
What to look for in a CDP
There’s a ton of CDP software’s out there, most notably, Salesforce, Oracle and Klaviyo. Every business has a different objective for their CDP. Make sure to start from the top and solidify what your primary use of your CDP will be for and what problems you want it to solve. As far as trying to assess which one works best for you, it’s important to consider the following:
- Predictive insights & user-specific behavioral data - Can you your CDP build off the data you already have? Does it take into account your customer’s behavioral trends and likeliness to convert?
- Ease of use – Does it integrate with other applications that you’re using and planning to use? Does it display visuals and dashboards that your whole team can understand? Does it work for your developer team?
- Real time data – How much time is it taking for your platform to go from “crawling” to creating/testing to running campaigns? Ensure your CDP is constantly updating and you can access all that information within seconds.
How IDX can help
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