FAQ’S ABOUT A CDP—FOR THE CIO, VP SALES, AND CMO
You: "I have one or more CRM’s, an ERP, an ecommerce portal, a marketing automation solution, a data warehouse and I still get “jenky” reports from laboriously produced spreadsheet pivot tables that don’t let me truly understand my customers!"
If your business is 'there', or perhaps not properly connected to your customers because you can’t assign the right information to the proper marketplace interactors (prospects, consumers, resellers and partners), then you might need a Customer Data Platform (CDP).
What is that? A CDP a habitat that is designed to bring together big customer data over time such that all data intersects with the customer account record (and its hierarchical groups) so you have detailed, rich, actionable and predictive information about your customers on demand. This information can be aggregated and collated in many ways to support customer and marketplace decision-making, either at the 1-1 level in sell-time, or tactically at campaign time, or strategically at planning time.
Modern CDP’s are easy to use, affordable big data collection facilities and have UI tools to help define customer measures, segments and scoring models. They act as innovation centers of knowledge that can fine tune your business to full awareness about all things contributing to profitable revenue.
Even for the “best-equipped” businesses, the deployment of good, enterprise-class business operating systems that manage everyday revenue and customer interaction or business mechanics are able to deposit data, but unable to put it together in a coherent manner. In response to the need to cum it all up, some businesses try to jam all transactions into CRM or ERP. Others build expensive DW’s, which are fine, but always seem to miss the complete customer context in a single profile, and certainly don’t deliver that information in real time when needed.
Is a CDP a new technology? Well, no. the concept was born out of the DW alternatives from years ago, called the ODS, operational data store. These databases are used for data re-consumption vs. BI. DW’s are intended to function as data accumulators for BI. ODS is for data recirculation. The concept took flight in the last five years with digital-only cloud-enabled audience management systems that take information collected from anonymous browser interaction and instantly profile a user for the purpose of presenting digital ads. But what you want are those capabilities in a robust, fresh and fast cloud solution that serves all sales channels. Neither DW’s nor CRM’s are built for this purpose, and that is why you are missing out on this increasingly popular technology. See: https://www.ascendant-group.com/post/transcending-the-data-warehouse-for-marketing-insights
Is this cutting edge? No, but it’s hot. The real technologies to ingest, collate, articulate, rationalize, summarize, contain and recirculate this data to and from multiple business sources have only become cost-effective and accessible in the last few years. And this marketplace for cloud computing is growing fast. Only now can the concept of a customer-centric big data, AI-enabled solution be applied to all marketplace-facing channels for sales, marketing and customer service.
Ascendant Group offers a complete set of customer intelligence services to help you build and manage your CDP. We apply our Customer Science™ data services to Microsoft’s Dynamics Customer Insights platform. We reduce the time to stand this up from months and years to weeks. You are closer than you think.
How can I learn more? Connect with us to find out how to calculate ROI and begin to develop your CDP.
