You Know about CDPs, Right? Good, These Are the In Thing
April 28, 2021
A CDP is a customer data platform. The jargon embraces the idea of a customer list, information about those who are spending money and who might spend money, and the myriad software utilities which are desperate to reimagine themselves as digital tigers, not kitty cats.
Years ago, Vivisimo or another IBM entity, came up with the V idea. Big Data is fast which became velocity. Big data became big which morphed into volume. Big Data is a confection which variety. But three Vs were not enough. Former physical training majors combined with some art history grads and added value and veracity. Data quality became veracity. Yeah, got it.
Now the sales crowd is in the game with CDPs.
ZDNet discusses “The Five Vs of Customer Data Platforms.” Quite a coincidence to me. For the ZD professionals, this overlap with the Vs of Big Data is logical, possibly brilliant.
Research from CRM platform vendor Salesforce indicates customer data platforms were a high-priority investment for marketing executives last year. To describe the unique challenges of wrangling data from multiple channels for these systems, Writer Vala Afshar quotes from the book Customer Data Platforms by Martin Kihn and Salesforce’s Chris O’Hara:
“When it comes to marketing, customers expect the interactions they have on a company’s website to translate to their mobile app experiences and even in-store visits. The problem is that, for most companies, those environments operate off of different datasets—even though the customer is the same. Customers also expect their experiences as they move from channel to channel to be consistent, and ‘in the moment.’ Most customer journeys involve over three different channels (e.g., email, web, and mobile app), and customers tend to move seamlessly and quickly between these channels. Most companies, however, don’t have these data environments connected in real-time. The result is disconnected experiences for consumers and the lack of a single source of truth about customers for the marketer.”
Benefits of gathering all this data and putting it at the fingertips of customer service include more personalized interactions and the ability to prioritize calls from the most loyal buyers, for example. We learn:
“The good news is that this is happening today. Large enterprises with sophisticated IT departments, in-house developers, and large software budgets are connecting these systems to create such results. The bad news is that it’s very expensive, requires constant vigilance and development to keep it working, and its dependent upon licensing solutions from dozens of software vendors for data ingestion to data activation, and everything in between.”
This is where Afshar’s version of the five Vs comes in. For more insight into original thinking, please, see the write-up for his suggestions on how to use those as guidelines for more efficiently creating a comprehensive customer data platform.
Cynthia Murrell, April 28, 2021
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
