A customer data platform (CDP) can do double duty–creating a foundation for connected, hyper-personalized customer experiences and also benefitting your employees. Customer profiles in a CDP can help departments and business users amplify their abilities and simplify their day-to-day work. Also, by creating a customer profile strategy, a business can uncover pertinent customer information in a contextual view for the purpose of the business user.
The types of customer profiles can be based on sets of data related to different aspects of behavior. As you build your customer profile strategy, determining the types of data you want to include will help pave the road for future marketing and CX excellence. Three types of customer profile:
In many organizations, the marketing department is viewed as the owner of the customer experience. While a CDP goes far beyond a marketing platform now, initially they were seen as:
”A marketing system that unifies a company’s customer data from marketing and other channels to enable customer modeling and optimize the timing and targeting of messages and offers.” – Gartner, Digital Marketing Hype Cycle, July/2020
However, as seen in our buying a blender story, a CDP’s capabilities extend far beyond the marketing tech stack.
This solution gives marketers the holistic customer view they’re looking for. It can help understand customers’ behavior and intent, which improves segmentation and targeting. Yet this ability to activate the right customer data, based on its purpose, and deliver it to the right engagement systems in real-time for hyper-personalized engagements means a CDP can benefit everyone across the entire organization.
With a customer profile strategy, you can empower your customer service team to be an asset and differentiator for your business. A CDP can resolve issues proactively by providing contextual profile views that help your reps quickly do their job with ease and efficiency.
The challenge: Increased service efficiency
The resolution: Shorten resolution times and increase first-time fix rates by removing the need to scroll through irrelevant customer data or toggle between platforms to understand the customer journey or root of the customer issue.
The challenge: Making your customer service center a revenue stream
The resolution: Certain signals from one interaction can trigger prompts while your service reps are working with a customer to offer up-sell or cross-sell opportunities.
The challenge: Reduced costs and resource strain
The resolution: Simplify your reps’ visibility into the customer and give them access to the relevant data they need to deliver an exceptional experience.
Using the unified customer profile and the ability to measure customer insights with a customer data platform helps businesses deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences at scale.
As part of the customer profile strategy in a CDP solution, analytics can create unique, personalized shopping experiences. At the same time, signals can trigger prompts that help personalize every step of the customer’s buying journey. As a result, your enterprise can ensure transactions are completed at a higher rate. It can also grow revenue by increasing order values.
The challenge: Increase order value
The resolution: Provide relevant, context-driven experiences that are unique to your customer. This includes up-sell and cross-sell offers or personalized recommendations based on viewing habits.
The challenge: Abandoned cart rates
The resolution: Significantly reduce your abandoned cart rate by understanding the behavior leading to the abandonment and be proactive in helping complete the transaction.
The challenge: Seamless buying experiences
The resolution: Promote repeat business and drive a seamless check-out between the channels and devices your customer prefers.
A CDP does not replace a CRM. It works in tandem with it, giving it a boost. A CDP can fuel your CRM and can also pull CRM data to supercharge your other customer-facing platforms.
The challenge: CRM adoption by employees
The resolution: CDPs can provide even more context to help sales teams be proactive, close more deals, and build customer relationships based on data from the customer’s interactions with other lines of businesses in your organization.
The challenge: Integration
The resolution: CRM integration between all of your customer engagement technologies can be complex. A CDP provides a foundation that can unify CRM data along with data from disparate systems.
The challenge: Allowing other teams to contextually view CRM data
The resolution: Although CRMs are typically for sales teams, marketing and customer service teams may also rely on CRM data as a central customer information system. Instead of manually entered notes from client interactions, empower your employees by providing real-time, dynamic visibility into customer and account information from all systems in a view specific to the task of the business user.
Customer data platforms are a foundational customer experience solution that benefits your entire business, not just your marketing department. Since a CDP integrates with all customer engagement systems, your organization then becomes an interconnected ecosystem. A CDP can keep up with the volume and variety of data in real-time. Each customer interaction and engagement are ingested by the CDP, assigned to an identity, stored and organized in a repository, then is activated in the right context at the right time.
Each line of business grows its revenue and capabilities when powered by a CDP. The integrations, analytics, and contextual views relevant to the business user transform your organization’s operations and your customers’ experience.
Customers are in charge of their journey and own the customer experience, which is why companies are striving to put the customer at the center of their business. A CDP helps you achieve this, not by replacing any existing systems, but by ensuring your existing systems are integrated and providing pertinent, relevant information from unified customer profiles at the right time according to the task at hand.
