What is CDP? How to build Customer Data Ecosystem with Intelligence? (DXP Part-2)

Digital Experience Platform(DXP) is the more potential for every business digital transition. I have explained well enough about the DXP on previous blog with more details with components in the business implementation. In these blog, i like to explain and state the importance of data processing tool called Customer Data Platform.

Companies grabbing the information of customer from many places for many purpose. If you ask them, are they storing all the customer data in single place? Probably their answer would be no. Because practically it’s very tough to keep all the information of specific customer on single place as single profile view. That’s where the Customer Data Platform(CDP) is comes into a picture of connecting all the customer information on single view along with intelligence engine.

CDP is provides more extensive support on either B2B / B2C, this article will be more on B2C complete view and steps to evaluate the CDP to purchase the CDP engine. However B2B and B2C, it’s not too much different. But there are certain intelligence required specific to the business context.

What is CDP?

Customer Data Platform is packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.

By Customer Data Platform Institution

Data is the fuel to the digital advertising industry for the past two decades. The platform economy has enabled brand marketers to run on lean data hubs, while outsourcing to third party vendors to enhance their customer intelligence from across the web. Many of the companies are being equipped with more tools to track and understand the customer needs and their behaviour. But among all this companies only few them is been reached the customer through appropriate channels and catchy thoughts to engage the customer more and more. Why companies are failing to establish the great connect with customers? There would be 2 reason, companies not being success on customer retention. Either they are not implemented the right tool on right time OR Their tools are not connected well to understand their needs and interest.

Why CDP is more important now?

To fulfil the gap of companies not able to cover the huge number of customers. We have been came across huge number of difficulties on the manual process of running the business, all together it is a pain. Thats make people to think about CDP now.

Being in the competitive world, it’s more important on user engagement and retention. I have listed out few real needs where we really need CDP support to sustain and enhance the business,

1. Data’s are present in different place with disconnected identities
2. Data transfer between systems are slow, business need will not wait for it
3. Intelligence (AI/ML) is not integrated in single system, we are loosing the accuracy
4. Practical difficulties to follow data governance
5. Unable to provide direct access to granular and up-to-date customer data to business user
6. Disconnect between online & offline data as single customer view
7. Unable to build a customer engagement strategy by their data
8. We need to make 1to1 personalisation to customers
9. Enablement of omni-channel experience to business user
10. We need to optimise marketing spends and attribute accuracy
11. Data is activation is very slow, because of this we are loosing customer (Customer may be covered by competitor)
12. 100% relevant experience to customer engagement and their journey.

You many have few questions about CDP

1. Do i required any specialist roles in my organisation to purchase and use the CDP Tool? — Yes, there are certain specialist are important. But that is depends on your seriousness about CDP investment. To see the different roles on CDP activation, please read this blog until the end, you will understand.
2. Is there any specific constrains about source tools to integrate with CDP? — Yes, Integration with source tools (Google Analytics, Campaign management, etc …) depends on the CDP providers. Before you choose the CDP, make sure they are supporting with your data provider integration.
3. How long i need to connect with CDP to improve data retention? — There is no timeline limit on data retention. It is life long process as continuous improvement with intelligence
4. Is there any structure required to import data to CDP platform? — No, there is no specific structure to import data to CDP. In fact, some of CDP will not allow your import manual data, it will automatically take data from sources (After you authenticated)
5. Is the CDP platform’s are secured to handle my data protection? — It is very important question to answer, Because we are handling customer personal data. It is more important to keep the intelligence platform more secure. While we are choose the CDP engine, please make sure about their privacy and security policy (Most of the CDP engines will be trusted, however we are in business world. Be sure the security policies before you sign up account)

Technical View of the the CDP

It is more important to understand the technical view of the CDP to get the different features including infrastructure level. The below diagram will give you more aspect of CDP technical representation with platform ecosystem.

What are the types of Customer Data?

Customer Data have been segregated into different data’s sections like Personal / Demographic Data, Behavioural Data, Engagement Data and Identity Data. The below CDP System flow diagram, will give more insight about CDP workflow.

1. Personal and Demographic Data — This will have your customer information like name, phone, email and address
2. Behavioural Data — Customer behaviour on the website/app like page views, more visited pages, frequently visited category of information, etc…
3. Engagement Data — Customer spent time in website, customer journey data, etc …
4. Transaction Data — This type of data’s are highly sensitive by nature. If this type data is not used by proper people on proper place, it will leads to create lot security issues.
5. Identity Data — It important because helps to connect with different system to get the single point of view

List of Customer Data Platform providers

Based on my research about customer data platform, i have found below CDP providers in digital world,

1. Acquia
2. Action IQ
3. Amperity
4. Adobe Experience Platform
5. Appier
6. Audiens
7. Blueconic
8. Cendyn
9. Cheetah Digital
10. Commanders Act
11. Cordial
12. Cross Engage
13. D&B Lattice
14. Data Talks
15. Epsilon
16. Everrise
17. FirstHive
18. Informatica
19. Leadspace
20. Lemnisk
21. Lexer
22. Lytics
23. Meiro
24. Microsoft Dynamics 360
25. mParticle
26. Netcore Smartech
27. NGDATA
28. Omeda
29. Ometria
30. Openprise
31. Optimove
32. Oracle
33. QuickPivot
34. Redpoint Global
35. Relay42
36. Resulticks
37. Revinate
38. Salesforce Interaction Studio
39. SAS
40. Scal-e
41. Simon Data
42. Tealium
43. Teavaro
44. Terragon
45. Treasure Data
46. Twilio Segment
47. Upland BlueVenn
48. Wondaris
49. Zeotap

How can i choose the right Customer Data Platform for my business?

It is quite interesting process to find the right CDP to your business context. I would recommend to go as below steps to find the well suit vendor for you problem and business context

How can i prepare my team on CDP implementation and maintenance?

1. Project Lead — Maintains the project Goals and requirements
2. Architect — He/She will helps to find the right tech stack to implement your experience platform, document the requirements and draw the implementation architecture with different touch points including CDP integration on digital experience
3. Data Architect — They have to architect all the data into schema to build the experience model, these people will have interaction with different system owners to build the schema consistent and connectivity across organisation with identity
4. Data Engineers — They will create the dataset for the schema, which is created by Data Architects. Those data will be sent to CDP. Data Engineer has different specialisation roles like specialist in javascript or mobile implementations, other engineer have been specialised API methods.
5. Data Stewards — Data Architects will collaborate with Stewards to create the governance model like DULE Labels, Data usage policies, Access controls for different roles and consent management. Data Stewards will be connected to roles of companies like Controller, Chief Privacy Officer, Privacy Analyst and Legal Counsel.
6. Marketers — The marketers will configure the RTCDP, Journey Orchestration and Customer AI. Also they will also hands on Target, Audience Manager, Campaign and AD Cloud tools.
7. Data Analysts — Analysts will configure the Customer Journey Analytics, Attributes AI and Business Intelligence tools
8. Data Scientists — Most of the time involves in the Muti channel and Muti-platform analysis on Query services with Data Science workspace. Collaborating with marketer will help them to improve the business value.
9. Application Developers — Usually application developers will come into the place to fill the manual work load gaps. Example, they will help to extract the data from 3rd party system and will upload them into the CDP with scripts support. They will also integrate the data’s to UI Personalisation by guidance of data engineer and data architect.

There are couple of realtime use cases, which i am exploring to get the realtime view of CDP. Once i am confident to post on public, about the accuracy, will showcase as another blog post. Let’s wait for it :-)

After CDP integration, How do i evaluate the efficiency of it?

Generally Innovation and Transformations are difficult to quantify the outcome, But in this context there are certain aspects, we can quantify the CDP efficiency like,

1. Customer Profitability
2. Team effectiveness ratio
3. Time it takes to launch a particular campaigns
4. Automations efficiency compare to manual process
5. Ticket volumes has been resolved
6. Improvements of social engagements
7. Customer review and testimonials
8. Customer Retention
9. Conversion Rate
10. Year-over-Year Revenue Growth
11. ROI of customer centric initiatives

What is the future of CDP?

CDP continues to innovate the AI capabilities. By the way industry is changing into different perspective every year. From the CDP, we can see some of branches starts expand. For example, Customer Journey Platform(CJP) will even more advance on customer data through journey prediction of customer (Not even different disconnected entities :-) ). However data platform has huge demand in the market and will have demand in any of the business to grow on the right direction. CDP definitely will have another shape within few years.

Thanks for reading this article. Will catch you soon with another interesting topic in few weeks. Please post your comment on my email developersnacks@gmail.com