In this competitive era, businesses need to maintain the level of research to understand what their customers want, accept, and prefer for saving time and money.
Fortunately, there are tools like customer relationship management (CRM) programs that have made it easier to track into the company’s data. These tools even can help you connect the gaping holes in marketing teams that need better insight into customer data and customer journeys. It is not for sales figures and sales funnels.
Customer data platforms (CDPs) is a similar tool to fill in the dots with other data-rich systems so that sales and marketing teams can align work operations.
What Is a Customer Data Platform?
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A customer data platform (CDPs) is unlike traditional data management technologies, such as data collection warehouses, etc. This platform limits businesses in their ability to collect the right data that helps engage with the end consumers. CDPs are different from other tools because they can ingest and collect customer’s data at real-time speeds. By deploying a customer data platform can give you clean customer data within mere minutes or seconds.
It’s easy to ingest all types of data with CDPs, regardless of data location and source. This means a customer data platform allows streaming data from a single point of control that covers data from social media platforms, data management platforms, and all other data sources that can be integrated into a CDP.
This data integration makes a customer data platform the central data clearinghouse that is the key for better engagement. This improves visibility into the entire customer lifecycle with all the customer’s data in one place. So, with a CDP, companies are now prepared to know exactly the want of their customers in real-time.
Marketers can have a 360-degree view of their customer’s data and the information collected by CDPs. This helps bring businesses closer to their business goal. With CDPs most businesses will draw on the four following benefits of data:
1) Data Related to Customer Identify
The CDP foundation is a customer identity that allows businesses to identify unique customers and eliminate data duplications. This type of data includes:
Customer’s Name
Address
Email address
Phone number
Customer age, gender, and user IDs
Social media profile information
2) Data Related to Customer Behavior
Behavioral data or quantitative data is helpful for businesses to understand how customers are engaging with their company. This usually includes the transactional information, data through online engagements, and more. With this data the company can track the types of products and services that customers are buying, what they are returning, cart abandonment rate, purchase size, and more. Businesses can see their browsing history and time spent on your website along with the clicks can also be collected for use in data analysis.
3) Data Related to Customer Profiles
A CDP provides more relevant data for your customer profiles. You can get data for the context of what made them purchase and how they’d rate a product. This gives you better insight into their overall satisfaction with your product or service.
4) Data Related to Customer Personality
Personality data gives you data related to customer’s behaviors in detail, including their job type, family, eating habits, gym membership, and much more. This provides you a diverse set of data that will vary depending on your business goals.
How Are CDPs Different from CRM Software?
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There’s a bit of difference between customer data platforms (CDPs) and customer relationship management (CRM) software.
CDP vs CRM
Both platforms perform the collection of customer data and benefit your sales and marketing team. However, CDP is different from CRM. For example, CRM software focuses on data and interactions based on the customer’s intention. When a customer calls a salesperson, the customer support team will have to manually enter customer details into the CRM software unless it has automated tracking software. This means CRM software engages with customers and collects general customer data, rather than larger data sets from multiple touchpoints.
On the other hand, a CDP is designed specifically for collecting large data sets for marketing purposes. It works autonomously by collecting data based on customer’s insights, behavior, and personality that wouldn’t be found in a CRM system. The CDP works based on the customer’s actions, while a CRM is used for sales forecasting.
Perhaps the most notable difference is that CDPs collect data that is offline, whereas CRMs cannot give you offline data unless someone manually enters it. Data from a POS (point of sale) system can be automatically loaded into the CDP based on customer profile that wouldn’t be available on a CRM.
Points to Consider Before Committing to a CDP
This is vital to establish what you want the CDP to help you do. This can be established by writing and documenting your business needs and marketing requirements. You can put together your business expectations that will require some input from various departments. Requesting collaboration early on is actually a great step, such as you can contact the IT department, marketing team, and customer support team to collect your business needs.
List of top Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) for businesses:
Optimove – Optimove’s leverages AI to understand and impact customer behavior.
Arm Treasure Data – Translates millions of data from online, offline & from IoT devices.
Segment – A customer data platform that makes good data accessible for all teams.
Oktopost – Manage and track all of your brand social media activities.
Evergage – Uses machine learning technology to understand customer behavior.
Listrak – The platform for customer insights and cross-channel orchestration.
Tealium – Helps identify opportunities, and deliver incredible customer experiences.
Depending on the complexity of business operations and business needs, marketers today are opting for different kinds of CDPs such as a CDP for customer data management and a CDP for the customer interaction data.
Learn more about the process of CDP’s vendor selection by contacting our team Syncrasy Tech, a global IT solutions company,and Pimcore Gold Partner. If you have queries or questions, please tweet out your queries here.
Hi Tenjit, maybe I am a bit old school, but I doI think your words ‘CDP for show that a CDP actually is only a part of something bigger, a CRM strategy. At the end of the day a CDP is nothing but a system that collects transactional data around and with reference to a master data entity called customer, or business partner, if we make it a bit more generic. The perceived need for a CDP comes from the (wrong) confusion of SFA with CRM (after mistaking CRM for a technology rather than a strategy).
This data then is used to adequately engage with the customer/prospect …
At the end of the day this makes a CDP a part of every CRM system, actually a part of its foundation. Wise vendors would take this route instead of trying to artificially separate these acronyms into different (types of) systems.