What is a Customer Data Management Platform CDP?

According to its advocates, a CDP differs from customer relationship databases, data management platforms or most marketing platforms because it was designed specifically as a central location for customer data — profiles, personal identifiers, website visits, mobile app sessions, email responses, chat transcripts, audio recordings of customer service interactions, social media comments, purchase orders and so on — and was intended specifically for marketers. There’s no industrywide definition for CDPs, but they have three major attributes: CDPs are managed by marketers without technical backgrounds (as opposed to CRMs, which are operated by IT people), focused on companies’ first-party data and analyze companies’ known consumers, according to Adam Sarner, research vp at Gartner. If business-to-business marketers use CRMs, perhaps a good way to think of CDPs is they are CRMs for business-to-consumer marketers to manage direct customer relationships. A Customer Data Platform allows marketers to truly segment their data at deep levels. Superior customer segmentation means that the marketer can offer the most granular and targeted customer experience without having to continuously try and make customers fit into their predetermined molds. True customer segmentation is derived from the customer themselves. This means that marketers need a system that offers unified, and personalized data views. A customer data platform is the marketer’s solutions to true customer data segmentation. Customer data platforms (CDP) are used to consolidate and integrate customer data into one single database. These tools offer marketing teams relevant insights needed to run campaigns. A CDP can grab information from sources such as websites, mobile apps, and email platforms to offer a complete view of your customer. After retrieving this data, a CDP can then help organizations predict the optimum next move with a particular customer. This allows businesses to learn what needs to be done to retain specific customers. Typically this data is stored in silos, whether organizational or technological, making it very difficult for companies to provide consistent customer experiences across various channels and consumer devices. And the tools and solutions to accelerate CX development still need to be put into place. A majority of executives, 52%, report that while they are leveraging a variety of tools and technologies in functions or lines of business, there is little coordination and there’s a lack of the right tools. Only 19% report having a robust set of analytics tools and technology services supporting customer-data-driven decisions and campaigns. Customer data platforms are more broad-based than the traditional CRM systems that have been in place in many organizations for years. While CRM systems are designed to enable management and analysis of a particular customer channel, CDPs bring data from across corporate channels into a single platform. Although CRM and business intelligence solutions have provided some intelligence about customer trends, CDPs tie customer data directly to marketing and sales initiatives. A CDP isn’t the same thing as a CRM database, nor is it an ordinary marketing or data management platform. Designed with marketers in mind, a CDP is unique in that it focuses on creating a central location for all customer data, including everything from buyer personas to web and mobile browsing history, email, chat, and phone interactions with the brand, social media behavior (follows, comments, likes, etc.), and more. While other data-focused platforms, such as CRMs or social media analytics solutions, focus on aggregating data related to one particular channel, a CDP brings together the complete history of interactions and behaviors across all channels to provide a more robust, in-depth understanding of every individual prospect and customer.