Someone asked me the other day for a list of reasons someone would buy a CDP and what they’d get.  The results seemed worth sharing.  Here they are.

Signs You Need a CDP

• Your existing customer-facing systems capture useful data about your customers, but you can’t collect it all in a single place.

• You can collect customer data from multiple systems but can’t enhance it with data from external sources.

• You can collect customer data from multiple systems but can’t connect items that refer to the same individual to create a Single Customer View.

• You can build a Single Customer View but only have access to predefined summary information, such as segment assignments, and not underlying details such as details of transactions or Web page views.

• You can build a Single Customer View with detailed data but can’t analyze it, build predictive models, or run machine learning algorithms against it.

• You can build and analyze a detailed Single Customer View, but the data isn’t available to systems that create outbound marketing campaigns (e.g. email or advertising audiences) or real time interactions (e.g. Web site personalization)

• Your IT department has promised to provide a Single Customer View but they haven’t said when it will be available, what it will cost, or what it will actually do. Or they’ve made promises and failed to deliver.

• Your marketing cloud vendor has promised to provide a Single Customer View but they haven’t said when it will be available, what it will cost, or what it will actually do. Or they’ve made promises and failed to deliver.

• You have a detailed, actionable Single Customer View but it’s hard to add new data sources or change how data is processed.

• You have a detailed, actionable Single Customer View but it’s hard to connect it to new systems so they can use its data.

• You have a detailed, actionable Single Customer View but the data is days or weeks out of date.

• You have a detailed, actionable Single Customer View but it costs a fortune to operate.

• You have customers in the European Union and can’t meet the requirements of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and ePrivacy to capture permissions, track usage, respond to data access and removal requests, etc.

Benefits You Can Get from a CDP

• Uncover data quality problems and inconsistencies by comparing data from different systems about the same customer

• Create a ‘golden record’ containing the most accurate information about each customer across all systems.

• See patterns in customer behavior across large numbers of customers.

• Analyze customer journeys based on detailed data.

• Compare behaviors of customers from different sources, with different attributes, who saw different marketing campaigns, who bought different products, etc.

• Calculate value of customers, in aggregate and by customer segment (based on source, attributes, etc.)

• Identify segments of customers with similar attributes and behaviors.

• Automatically assign customers to standard segments and use these segments in marketing campaigns.

• Build predictive models based on detailed customer data

• Calculate the value and predict behaviors of individual customers based on their personal history

• Find the best treatment for each customer in each situation, based on their personal history and other relevant information (product inventory, local weather conditions, competitive activities, etc.)

• Use customer data in personalized messages (and be sure it’s correct).

• Coordinate customer treatments across channels based on a shared view of their data.

• Synchronize customer data with other systems such as CRM and DMP.