Delivering Unified Customer Experience Using the Customer Data Platform

Most marketers today will tell you that delivering a unified customer experience isn't easy. Only a handful of businesses have managed to make a complete integration while the rest are struggling with strategy, budgets, technology, skills, etc.

Nevertheless, customers don't care about these issues. All they care about is that brands fulfill their wants and needs. If not,  they’ll look for a different brand that will. Traditionally, marketers have turned to their CRM or DMPs to address this issue as best they could. The Customer Data Platform (CDP), on the other hand, does. This new type of technology stack will provide a unified CX across all channels and touchpoints. 

What is a Customer Data Platform?

CDP is a system that's able to combine all of a company's customer data to improve and optimize all marketing processes. In other words, it gathers and analyzes data coming in from all touchpoints to provide a comprehensive view of each individual customer. And while this might seem like something that a CRM or DMP might do, a CDP will deal only with first-party customer data collected by the brand. This includes data coming in from social media, recorded calls, website cookies, etc. 

The CDP will combine all of this information into an easy-to-read customer profile. This customer profile will be used to create a unified customer experience for every individual, providing them with a consistent and contextualized customer experience across all channels. 

In doing so, however, CDPs also need to be marketer-friendly, have a web-based interface for data collection, unification, segmentation, and utilization.

The Potential of a Customer Data Platform

When using a customer data platform to create a unified customer experience, certain benefits can be expected. For starters, you will experience an increase of data-gathering speed which will be able to match your digital decision making. It will provide better situation awareness through real-time contextualized data.

You will also be able to better understand the customer journey, both within the organization as well as outside of it. By leveraging location data, for instance, you get a deeper insight into intent at the businesses moment, while IoT can inform you on the final stages for a deeper connection with the customer on product usage. The CDP will allow you to join the different touchpoints across all channels and optimize an engaging customer journey at every step of the process. 

Furthermore, customers today are inclined to tune out mass marketing initiatives, due in large part to a phenomenon which is known as ad fatigue. Personalized messaging will remind them that you treat them as an individual, rather than just a statistic in your database. In other words, a targeted message from a CDP is far more likely to get their attention and appeal, resulting in a conversation.  

With traditional systems, marketers spend too much time dissecting and analyzing data to identify trends. And by the time they get an understanding and take action, the moment has passed. Real-time personalization, however, builds customer relationships and generates sales at the critical moment. It comes at a time when more than 64% of consumers and 80% of business buyers expect companies to respond to and interact with them in real time.

If you want to learn more about the customer data platform and the use of unified customer experience, let's connect!