You will need to know your customer profiles properly in order to create a more personalized experience. You will need to have broader activation of the customer data platform or CDP which ideally is the hardest challenge that most businesses are facing today.
In theory, however, the CDP will allow you as a marketer to amalgamate all your customer data across your organization including those known user data. This will, in turn, enable you to deliver more reliable experiences across all the available channels.
On the other hand, in practice, all these tasks are not as simple as it seems. A few things when known will make things easier for you.
Ideally, the term ‘Customer Data Platform’ will generally refer to a specific point solution. This solution will be designed to bring all of the customer data together so that it can be accessed and assessed by other systems.
The CDP is much different and distinct from the most common Data Management Platforms or DMPs. This is because:
- CDPs can store known data such as phone numbers and email
- It can surpass the CRM systems in its ability to activate customer data in real-time
- It can also aggregate data together in one single place and
- It can connect with other applications so as to activate a larger set of audiences across different and broader ecosystems.
It is true that you will get a number of point solutions just as the CDP and may even claim to resolve the use case CDPs are designed to solve.
However, the reality is that the separate point solutions will actually not be able to deal with the complex, intricate and nuanced technological challenges that are associated with the unification of data and activating it across different channels.
Understanding the CDP landscape
This is a real challenge because the CDP use cases need to be addressed and marketed using a better solution and a team. In fact, the Customer Data Platform landscape especially the existing point may not be the ideal solution that the teams need. There is a number of reasons for that.
- First, there is a lot of confusion regarding what a CDP is and what exactly it can do for an Adobe customer.
- Secondly, there is a considerable amount of doubt, especially among the analyst firms as to whether the most basic form of CDP can actually take businesses all the way to reach the customer experience bottom line.
The reason for such doubts is that CDPs lack crucial capabilities especially when it comes to solving identity resolution, orchestration of different channels, and data hygiene. Another significant reason is that the analysts have found that the CDP typically overpromises and underdelivers, especially to the B2C marketers.
In a recent report of Forrester, it is said that:
- The CDPs downright fail to reach the expectations of the B2C marketers without these capabilities.
- They also say that it is, therefore, unable to provide more personalized and targeted engagement from the customers as well.
There is another significant reason for the failure of the point CDPs. It is the complexity that they add to the tech stack of a company. This is something that cannot be avoided because CDPs are no islands. These have to work in combination with other technologies.
Getting the value of CDP
It is always a challenging task for any company that adopts a new technology into the stack. This is because the cost of it as well as its complexity of it can become unmanageable very quickly when that tech is needed to integrate with the existing functionality.
It is for this reason that the experts say that the highest competitive threat to CDPs is the marketing clouds such as adobe.
Adobe is ideally ingrained already in the marketing tech stacks of most organizations.
- This has enabled them to invest and focus on capabilities that are far more sophisticated and useful than the CDPs.
- It has also enabled businesses to get more value from a CDP without a point CDP.
Adobe has enabled businesses to represent their specific issues and resolve them easily with the help of the anonymous data that they can gain from several cookies and devices. These are the several known user data obtained from emails, CRMs, and more.
Creating a personalized customer experience
However, none of these alone has the ability to help a marketer to create a more personalized and consistent customer experience across different channels. This is because in reality, creating a more personalized and real-time experience needs more work to do rather than just unifying the data.
- You will need to understand your customers well to create a diverse customer profile so that you can create a profile for each customer
- You will need to really act on the data ion a more strategic way and focus more on other areas than just on the sum of the data that goes into creating that specific and personalized customer profile.
Since all data will not be created equal, you cannot just use it equally to create any and every customer profile. As such, if you really want to succeed with the CDP use case, you will need to go beyond enclosing data into a more centralized data location.
Focus on functionality
When you create a personalized customer experience, Adobe will help you to focus and retain the functionality as well. This includes:
- An average taxonomy across the data so that you can deliver your integrated customer profile
- Real-Time Integration of the technologies with the existing infrastructure
- Machine learning and artificial intelligence
- A data science framework
- Privacy, control, and better governance of data.
It is the extensible, real-time, and open platform that will not only del with the data but will also look into the real value that the businesses are looking for. With the better use of the data, the technology will solve the CDP oriented use case needs.
This will, in fact, solve the bigger issues of delivering better customer experiences and meeting their expectations.
