The constant deluge of economic, regulatory, and technology disruptions has had the unfortunate side effect of jeopardizing customer experience. The truth is, with so much going on, organizations are having a tough time driving productive customer interactions and fruitful engagements.
As the number of channels, devices, and touchpoints proliferates, there is now a widespread need to collect data about customers, their preferences, and interactions to unify them and unearth actionable insights that can drive enhanced customer experiences.
Customer data platforms are, therefore, becoming immensely popular. Customer data platforms, CDPs, allow organizations to get a single, unified view of their customers. That enables them to curate personalized campaigns and interactions and reach new audiences intelligently and effectively.
Top benefits of a customer data platform
As the appetite for unparalleled customer experiences grows, customer data platforms help capture data from different customer sources, create individual profiles of customers, and provide insights for better engagement and satisfaction. By collecting, cleansing, and unifying customer data, these systems offer features specifically designed for use by marketing and advertising departments, allowing them to carry out sophisticated data modeling to unearth correlations, spot trends, and build connections.
Today, customer data platforms deliver a bunch of benefits. They:
- Collate data from different sources in different formats and present it via easy-to-digest visualizations for quick and accurate decision-making
- Deliver insights to enable precise journey mapping, audience segmentation, and predictive modeling
- Share the good insights with suitable engagement systems for improved customer acquisition, retention, and loyalty.
- Enable orchestration for personalized messaging, dynamic interactions, and accurate product/content recommendations
- Achieve enterprise-wide customer centricity to fuel personalized engagements across different touchpoints
- Ensure around-the-clock compliance with the evolving industry, region, and global data regulations
Top tips for choosing a customer data platform
Choosing a customer data platform that is fit for purpose and enables you to make accurate, evidence-based decisions is extremely important. Therefore, when seeking a platform from the many available markets, it is critical to look out for specific features and capabilities. The right choice will ensure you can unearth insightful analytics, drive greater budget control, and get exceptional marketing results and ROI. Here are the top tips to keep in mind while picking a customer data platform:
- Built-in data analytics: As data becomes the new fuel powering businesses, selecting a customer data platform with built-in data analytics and data ingesting capabilities. This can enable organizations to constantly process the data collected about customers and deliver insights in the form of powerful visualizations for immediate and accurate decision-making – without having to fall back on the IT team. Such advanced analytics can stitch together data to create customer profiles while setting new transparency, flexibility, and control standards and delivering immeasurable visibility into data, metrics, and actionable insights.
- Personalization: A customer data platform that enables a high level of personalization is also essential to deliver unmatched customer experiences. Using proprietary data management technologies and in-built segments that aid targeting, such a platform can help organizations sort, analyze, and manage information in new ways, allowing them to create a personalized approach and tailored experiences to win consumers. Offering modern tools and resources, such a platform can equip organizations for better targeting, insightful analytics, and enhanced attribution – boosting channel value, optimizing investments, and enhancing conversions.
- Orchestration: Choosing a customer data platform with orchestration capabilities is also essential to streamline campaign management and enable personalized messaging, dynamic content recommendations, and targeted campaigns. By automating data management and the creation and distribution of customer segments to external systems and platforms, organizations can deliver targeted content to customers – based on their profiles and journeys – thus enabling the right level of governance for data-driven decision-making.
- SaaS-based: In today’s cloud era, investing in a SaaS-based customer data platform can open the doors to many advanced capabilities and benefits. SaaS-based technology not only brings cost efficiencies through simple, subscription fee-based pricing; it also delivers consistency and transparency and enables a positive impact on ROI. Such a platform is also easily scalable, allowing organizations to keep up with new users and new demands – while keeping customer experience consistent. Moreover, with a SaaS-based platform, organizations can focus on delivering on their core objectives without worrying about the day-to-day management and upkeep of the underlying technology elements – thus enhancing their revenue and profits.
- Plug and play: Modern customer data platforms offer an array of innovative features that perfectly meet the needs of different organizations. But not all features that are offered necessarily make sense for every organization. Given that every organization has different needs, offers various products, and caters to different audiences with other preferences, choosing a customizable service platform with plug and play capabilities is a great way to fulfill unique use cases. Plug-and-play services backed by futuristic technology can enable organizations to add or remove features as required and better meet individual needs.
As the pressure to deliver unmatched customer experiences grows, customer data platforms are highly demanded. These platforms enable organizations to collect, unify, and process customer data from different sources and create unique customer profiles for better targeting. While choosing a customer data platform, it is vital to pick one with advanced data analytics, personalization, and orchestration features, so you can build custom audiences, enable transparency, and make the right decisions to win consumers most cost-effectively. Let us help you choose the right CDP.
