The answer to that question depends on two things:
How Fragmented Are You? How many data sources do you have that can provide pieces to the data puzzle?
Who Are You? What is your role and mission at your business? What are your needs?
The more distributed your data the less likely you have instant access to a complete picture of your prospects and customers. This means, the more consistently used applications that store data about your marketplace participants, the more difficult it is to pull it all together. Perhaps you tried plumbing everything into ERP, CRM or DW, and you now see that does not provide the 1-1 holistic and fresh knowledge needed for the data to be useful. These everyday business transactional systems are simply not intended for use as a customer profiling solution.
What causes data fragmentation?
Experience suggests these 4 things
• Federated business applications due to semi-autonomous business units using their chosen systems. It’s hard enough to get them all on one major application. So, while your still trying to rationalize these applications, consider a meta-database layer that can compile and serve the data on demand API style.
• Regional (horizontal) and disciplinary (vertical) work groups need specialized apps to meet their needs. Marketing, Key Accounts, Ecommerce, Advertising, Channel, Social, B0B sales, B-B sales, and customer service groups all have unique needs, and each must have their own content, process and data. There is no single solution that can satisfy them. Many of these are on silo’d cloud platforms. Modern platforms are happy to share back out (well, not Facebook, LinkedIn and Google…but, you know what I mean 😊). Most of them allow data transport outside their palace walls. The work to normalize and circulate these records is daunting. The data is big. So the data usually stays silo'd.
• Democratization of applications. The business can and should specify the apps that suit them best. They are the stakeholders and sometimes they are directly paying for the software/service. IT is the referee. The desire to keep the solutions in an ecosystem or served from a monolithic suite is not always convincing. We live in a best of breed world. The challenge gets bigger when partners and vendors touch or create data for you as well.
• I’m gonna be too honest with this last one: some departments don’t want to share data because they know knowledge is power and loss of data can lead to loss of power. OK I said it. 😉
What are your needs?
Here’s what a CDP can do for you:
Sales
‣ Validate leads (calls, emails, or web inquiries) as coming from a customer or prospect; enrich, pre-qualify, and score the lead; assisting with proper assignment, care, custody, and journey mapping.
‣ Contact Center CTI: Not just a CRM screen pop, but a complete profile pop with propensity and next-action suggestions
‣ Offer and Pricing Management: the more you know about the target, the more you can fine tune your value proposition in a quote or opportunity, at the time you need it to gain competitive advantage.
Marketing Communications
‣ Add anonymous and PII predecessor data to the profile so you can create dynamic segments that allow you to choose your messaging assets: message, graphics, offer, and process to fine tune your outbound email, direct mail or social messaging strategy.
‣ Speed reaction time by improving on-demand confident knowledge, so response management is appropriate and compelling in the moment. Speed to marketing.
‣ Preference management along with propensity scoring. A single place to be sure you are opting out and into the right channels without over-suppressing.
‣ Omnichannel, simultaneous message delivery from a single point of understanding.
Advertising
‣ Determine all-channel data points that suggest ad placement and messaging. This knowledge is better than dependence on channel specific DMP knowledge alone.
‣ More data points for deeper analysis of impressions and digital behaviors. Trend analysis at the customer level can enable better promotions
‣ Track affinity to competitive brands and target accordingly
Customer Service
‣ Call Center CTI with all customer application identifiers and integration to your unified desktop so all apps can open, and the CDP can synthesize all KPI’s from relevant databases in real time.
‣ Sentiment analysis from an understanding of multiple communication sources; helps you extend special services and offers to maintain customer satisfaction.
‣ Swap profile data with partners without exchanging all the details. It’s your data; only share what is needed to let the external service help you.
‣ Get not just the context of the caller, but of the entire business, org or household.
Strategic Decision Support
‣ Planning campaign spend?
‣ Looking for key account opportunities?
‣ Considering M&A impacts?
‣ Considering new brands and products?
With CDP, you came to the right place. You can look across segments and at individual profiles with all the 1st party data, 3rd party data, transactions and behaviors that let your rainmakers analyze and test important business decisions. It’s all in one place, current, relevant, and ready for your BI tool to surface insights.
For more information, a chat, a presentation, a demo, a POC, or your next project, please contact us!
