Entering a brave new CDP world with Capgemini

In our constantly changing times, the relationship between a customer and a brand remains the most important, as new technologies are being introduced to connect these two. Amidst many technological advances, sometimes, it’s hard to build a trustful relationship that is manageable to maintain. Marketers get swamped with new technologies and CRM managers get overwhelmed with the amount of new data sources. That’s the moment when a tool that can unity data, customers, and marketing come in handy and that’s a Customer Data Platform.

What is a CDP?

The CDP Institute defines a CDP as “a packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.”

In other words, it is a tool that assembles and consolidates first-party customer data from multiple sources into a single view of each customer. The data sources may include:

• Behavioural data, for instance clients’ interactions with your website, app, live chat, or agents
• Transactional data, such as purchase information coming from your point-of-sales systems or e-Commerce
• Demographic data, such as the name, birth date and month, and address

How can your company benefit from a CDP?

In a single sentence, a CDP allows you to deliver personalized experiences at scale using data-driven insights, and without the real necessity of a third party. Taking a closer look, we can say that a CDP will empower you to:

1. Combine Data from different sources

   A CDP will ingest data from a variety of channels such as email, mobile applications, website, social media, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM or DMP systems, and many more, whether they are structured, unstructured, or semi-structured. Using business rules and machine learning, a CDP will create a single view of each customer, so you can understand the clients’ behaviour, perform segmentation, assign a scoring, or orchestrate a meaningfully customer journey.

2. Integrate with other MarTech tools

   CDPs are intended to easily integrate with other marketing tools, thanks to pre-built connectors or APIs. That way, a CDP can become the single centre of customer data, for your organization.

3. Democratize Data

   As a single source of truth, a CDP will allow your entire organization to use this data and personalize your communication with your clients in every touchpoint, whether it’s sales, marketing, customer service, support, and so on.

4. Marketing Activation and Personalization

   Once your team have all the customer data gather in a single place, structured in profiles and easily accessible, they can act on it by creating audience segments and personalizing the customer experience through the entire journey, in every channel.

Why would you need a CDP?

Many organizations have access to plenty of customer data, but they might struggle to gather, understand, and act upon it. They may wrestle with tracking the customer across their different platforms, make recommendations based on their past behaviour or missed an interaction after a website visit.

CDPs can help organizations to tackle many of their daily problems. How can you identify if your organization needs a CDP? These are the main signals your organisation may need one:

• Disorganized data

  As the number of data sources continues to increase, it becomes increasingly complex to understand your customer and creates significant connections. If you find yourself in this situation and your data is disconnected, a CDP will be able to structure your data to make sense of each communication.

• Customer identification

  If your team is struggling to link customer identities across different channels, a CDP can easily solve these inconveniences by bringing together data from multiple sources and creating a unified profile for each customer.

• Complex segmentation

  Your organization might have an organized data structure and is able to identify the client in every interaction, but the team might struggle to make use of that data by segmenting their audiences and personalizing the communications. A CDP will offer an intuitive playground to segment your audiences, suggest clusters and produce personalized engagement.

Briefly, a CDP, together with the right data strategy, will allow your team to create a unified view of individual customers across online and offline touchpoints, allowing for real-time insights and interactions at just the right moment.

Why adding another tool to the current stack

You might be wondering, why add yet another technology if you’re already using a CRM or a DMP or even both. Here’s a quick illustration of the main differences between these three platforms that will help you evaluate a CDP for your organization:

As you can see, CDP combines what’s missing in CRM and DMP and making the most use of the data your organization has.

How to choose a CDP that works for your organization

With the quick rise of popularity of CDPs many companies have introduced their platforms, so it might be hard to choose the right one for you in the current market. In this article, we’d like to give you an overview of the main players in the market.

Adobe CDP and Salesforce Data Cloud are two leading customer data platforms that help businesses collect, unify, and activate customer data for better marketing and customer experiences.

Adobe CDP is a cloud-based platform that enables businesses to collect data from various sources, create a unified customer profile, and activate those data across channels for personalized marketing. It’s best suited for mid-sized to large enterprises that are looking for a scalable and flexible solution to manage their customer data.

Salesforce Data Cloud, claims to be a first-ever real-time CRM. It allows businesses to access and leverage third-party data for targeted marketing and sales efforts. It offers a range of data solutions, including B2B and B2C data, audience segmentation, and data enrichment. It’s best suited for businesses of all sizes that are looking to augment their first-party data with third-party data to improve their marketing and sales efforts.

Overall, both Adobe CDP and Salesforce Data Cloud are powerful platforms that can help businesses improve their marketing and customer experiences through better data management and activation. The choice between the two will ultimately depend on a company’s specific needs and goals.

As you can see CDPs is the new word in the digital market and they’re here to stay. At CapGemini, we’re happy to provide you with the expertise on any kind of CDP and help your business to confidently step into the new world of the customer 360.  Let us know if you’d like to learn more about the Customer Data Platforms, and we’d be happy to answer any of your questions.