A customer data platform (CDP) is a type of packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems. Data is pulled from multiple sources, cleaned, and combined to create a single customer profile. This structured data is then made available to other marketing systems.
So how can a CDP help a company looking to increase customer loyalty via real-time personalization, retaining customers with a superior, tailored experience?
Teradata approaches CDPs as marketer-managed systems that:
- Deliver the previously elusive 360-degree view of the customer
- Help enterprises sense and react to a multitude of customer pain points and opportunities
- Reduce the friction that can occur when moving from insights to actions
Benefits of a customer data platform
A 360-degree customer view
A CDP system integrates and rationalizes customer data from multiple online and offline sources. Using a customer data platform eliminates the redundancies and inconsistencies that lead to increased costs and a disjointed customer experience.
From customer data to insights
Data is meaningless if it can’t be turned into insights. CDPs use a variety of analytics, such as machine learning (ML), statistics, sentiment analysis, journey pathing, graphs, and others to make sense of data that leads to actionable insights.
Activating customer insights
CDPs facilitate the transition from insights to actions. Enterprises have a variety of campaigns at any given time, and a CDP can orchestrate marketing efforts across multiple channels. CDPs blend real-time and integrated, historical data and machine learning to hyper-personalize communications at the moment of truth.
Designed for the marketer and customer experience (CX) professional
Unlike a traditional data warehouse, setup, maintenance, and usage don't require technical expertise. A CDP democratizes customer data access and eliminates information technology (IT) bottlenecks.
CDP use cases
A CDP can help businesses in various industries create more personalized customer experiences and strengthen customer relationships. Here are some specific examples.
Marketing
A CDP helps marketers create personalized, data-driven marketing campaigns that can improve customer engagement, increase conversion rates, and drive more brand loyalty. They also provide insight into specific customer journeys in order to help optimize touchpoints and ensure consistent, seamless brand experiences. In addition, CDPs can leverage predictive analytics to help marketing organizations better forecast customer behaviors and identify upselling or cross-selling opportunities.
Telecommunications
By analyzing comprehensive customer interactions, preferences, and behaviors, CDPs can accelerate customer support resolution by more quickly routing users to the most appropriate support channels. They can also analyze data to identify at-risk customers to help reduce churn. And a CDP can collect data on network performance, helping providers identify and address issues in real time to enable more reliable and consistent service.
Technology
CDPs unlock valuable feedback on how customers use technology products. These insights can guide more efficient product development and feature enhancements. Technology companies can also use CDPs to conduct A/B testing to assess product changes and user interface adjustments. Plus, CDPs can help manage customer consent, permissions, and data privacy to ensure that technology companies comply with data protection regulations.
Social media
Social media companies can use CDPs to analyze engagement and interactions to deliver more tailored content and improve user experiences. A CDP can also quickly flag inappropriate or harmful content. And it can manage user consent and permissions to help social media platforms comply with regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Pharmaceuticals
CDPs can help identify potential participants for clinical trials by analyzing patient data and making the recruitment process more efficient. Pharmaceutical companies can also leverage a CDP to develop patient-centric solutions, patient support programs, and personalized treatment recommendations. Plus, CDPs can provide insights into market trends to accelerate research, product development, and the launch of new medications.
What is the difference between a CDP and a CRM?
While CDP and customer relationship management (CRM) software both deal with customer data, they’re designed to meet different needs within an organization. CDPs are focused on unifying and analyzing all customer data and behavior from various sources to support and enhance marketing and personalization.
CRMs manage individual customer interactions and transactions with your brand from specific accounts, particularly to identify prospective customers and nurture customer relationships. They track unique customer data, like names and contact information, to facilitate one-to-one communications. CRMs are especially useful for sales, marketing, and customer service organizations to advance prospects through the sales cycle and provide personalized customer support.
Some organizations use both CRMs and CDPs to maximize customer data management across departments.
CDPs and CX
CDPs enable the creation of real-time, unified customer profiles by giving marketers control of data. Teradata VantageCloud, for example, provides a single source of all customer data and best-in-class analytics capabilities. This enables seamless, personalized, and scalable customer experiences at every step.
With VantageCloud in particular, marketers can also:
- Maximize existing marketing technology (martech) stack investments
- Unify multiple disparate datasets to unlock customer insights faster
- Enable more relevant CX with reliable, accessible customer profiles
- Stay compliant with best-in-class governance, security, and privacy capabilities