A Customer Data Platform is an API-driven marketing database that has evolved to integrate offline sources, works with various marketing technologies, and adapts to unique infrastructure. Choosing the right Customer Data Platform enables a business to leverage customer data more strategically, communicate with customers accurately and securely, and operate in a complex marketing environment with multiple channels. Customer Data Platforms facilitate businesses growing in volumes and complexity to run orchestrated marketing campaigns. They are a single reservoir to transform data and make it accessible to an expanding user base.
Before you choose Customer Data Platform, you must define your use case. Decide what you want to achieve, what was stopping you from achieving it till now, and whether the platform solves those pain areas.
Ten things you need to question before you choose the Customer Data Platform you’re considering:
1. What are your unmet needs?
You may have all the resources to collect data but are looking for something to unify and make data accessible. In comparison, some other businesses may not have the data, analytics, or an engine to create a campaign. Does your Customer Data Platform give what you need?
2. What are the strengths and challenges of the Customer Data Platform?
Some CDPs are exhaustive in increasing customer engagement but may not necessarily integrate with your CRM or gain compliance. Be careful to check the solution as well the problems of a Customer Data Platform to match yours.
3. Do you need a Customer Data Platform that’s tailored for your industry?
Industries like hospitality, healthcare or finance have vendors especially designing tools to meet their needs. Such platforms have pre-built connectors for an industry’s operational system, data models and functions.
4. How should a CDP communicate with your customers?
If you are an e-commerce brand, You may want to tailor message the customers for abandoned cart items or send offers relevant to a customer’s real-time context. You might demand timely communication to be flexible for a shortened delivery time window.
5. Is the Customer Data Platform as dynamic as you need?
A CDP must ingest, retain, store and convert customer data and make it available across channels in a unified manner. A static platform may not keep pace with a constantly shifting customer journey.
6. Is the Customer Data Platform capable of data enrichment?
Any CDP can absorb data, but the quality and depth of data can improve only with data enrichment. It adds details and provides a deeper understanding of primary data to deliver a personalized customer experience.
7. Can the Customer Data Platform match all identity resolutions?
Data collected from various sources for distinct purposes is complex, and therefore it needs both probabilistic and deterministic matching. Advanced identity resolution requires understanding, tracking and connecting the whole range of identity elements. Offline and online, anonymous and identified, shared and personal insights segment identities in the context of individual, family, organizational and changing preferences.
8. Can the Customer Data Platform convert data into individual records?
A CDP must be equipped to transform data into an extensive and approachable record of each customer. In addition to the identity graphs, the records must include data from structured and unstructured sources. The record must be streamlined in a way that all organisational touchpoints can use it for personalized engagement.
9. Does the CDP offer customer analytics?
A good Customer Data Platform should tell you why something happened the way it happened. It is impossible to humanely answer this question buried under the humongous marketing data your business may be dealing with. But the role of a CDP is to give you root causes to optimize campaigns by taking actions recommended by data analytics from the platform.
10. Can the Customer Data Platform offer personalized experiences?
The CDP must be able to deliver the experiences you envisioned while deciding to use a platform. Customers respond to experiences each time they interact with a brand. All the channels deployed by your brand should perform one-to-one personalization, whether it be through email, website, social media, SMS, personal mail or contact center.
The number of companies designing customer data platforms may be on the rise, but the design sensibilities to create an innovative, intuitive and integrative CDP rest only with a few. Neurotags delivers an excellent experience to brands through insights resulting in strengthened relationships with the customers and increased sales.
