CDP trends: Customer data platforms enter a new era
When first-party data overtook cookies as the top currency for marketers, we entered the CDP era. Discover CDP trends like CIAM that are rising.
Ever since Gartner coined the three Vs of big data back in 2001, there have been endless iterations and attempts to define the terms of engagement. The core three characteristics were always volume, velocity, and variety. Now there’s consensus around at least two more: veracity and value.
These five Vs serve as a framework for a broader discussion around managing customer data today:- Volume – The ability to manage ever increasing amount of data
- Velocity – Collect and activate data in real-time at the speed of the modern consumer
- Variety – Manage increasingly diverse types of data
- Veracity – Understand the truth inside of data to make it relevant
- Value – Make data actionable in the various endpoints that impact business
Managing customer data: Quality over quantity
Managing data at scale has always been a challenge, but I don’t think even the most forward thinkers in 2001 could envision the truly massive growth in customer data. The internet of things continues to create and make available massive amounts of highly granular data that can be used to improve customer experience.
The data used for marketing today increasingly come from contextual and behavioral signals – many of which need to be consumed and activated in real-time to be useful. Another element of volume that would have been hard to foresee was the maturity in machine learning as a method of extracting value from these massive data sets.
Why did Google make TensorFlow – arguably one of the world’s best library of ML models – free to any developer in Silicon Valley? Simply put, it’s not the algorithms that create value, but rather the volume, scale, and fidelity of the data they need to run against. In short, more data means better results. And not just more, but more valuable.
As a result, volume is only as important as the quality and fidelity in the data. Yes, they need to be unified at the customer profile level, but the attributes also need to be connected to the business, beyond marketing and advertising inputs.
For example, I could attach petabytes of data related to online advertising interactions at my customer data platform, but is the processing and storage of such ephemeral data worth the expense? Are there more valuable attributes that can contribute to enterprise data volume?
To manage customer data effectively, we need to consider that better data is greater than more data. Better data is data that’s connected to the business, and creates better outcomes in endpoints like sales, service, commerce and marketing.
Use real-time customer insights to understand and solve pain points
The key to building lasting customer relationships? Learn how to unlock real-time customer insights and pain points based on data with a CDP.
The missing piece in the customer data puzzle: ERP
When it comes to leveraging data to drive customer experience, we’re just in the first inning. There are so many possibilities for unleashing data on modern CX challenges: Loyalty, commerce, and marketing are just the tip of the iceberg. Going a step further, imagine in-store purchase data, call center data, and social data combining to provision a truly rich, 360-degree view of customers. With such a profile, a smart marketer could do practically anything.
The ugly truth is that most marketers use relatively tiny amounts of CRM and email data for personalization. While some advanced marketers have managed to combine commerce, loyalty, and marketing interaction data at scale to drive better CX, many are stuck in the closed loop of using data to drive marketing use cases and activating that data in channels such as display media and email.
Another truth is that ERP data is hardly used, which misses a huge opportunity. Enterprise resource planning systems are the foundational systems that store the real data tied to business outcomes that directly impact customers. Is the product in stock? How much does it really cost to manufacture and ship it? How soon can I get it there?
ERP systems – and supply chain management in general – offer the missing variety that can power truly impactful CX.
You could argue that the foundational data layer of customer experience starts a layer below with ERP — and connecting ERP and CRM through data is where the magic of CX might happen.
2022 commerce trends show CX needs a reboot
2022 commerce and e-commerce trends revolve around tech stacks, customer data, customer service, supply and demand, and overall CX.
Managing customer data and driving business agility
When we think about the velocity of data, it’s tempting to focus on real-time engagement use cases that require a CDP profile — for example, personalizing real-time journeys across text and e-mail, or website/app personalization based on behavior. There’s a ton of low-hanging ROI with fast personalization.
Usually, when brands have new products, they configure their outbound marketing plans to reach customers on the channels they’re engaged with. New sneakers are promoted in broad national campaigns, with each channel slightly optimized for personalization. Makes complete sense: What brands market is directly related to what they try to sell in campaigns.
The hidden layer when it comes to delivering meaningful velocity in customer data management is data that can drive true business agility. Instead of answering the “what do I market” question based on products alone, businesses need to add some additional context. What’s in my actual inventory, and how many of each SKU can I actually sell (supply chain)?
Also, what’s my potential profit if I’m successful (finance)? To whom can I sell, based on their permission (identity)? And, where can customers buy it, and how quickly can orders be fulfilled (commerce)?
How customer data management can unlock growth and power revenue
When you go beyond identity and descriptive data, and get into more qualitative or attitudinal data, you can learn a lot about what’s important to your customers. Good customer data management lets you do just that.
The new world of zero-party data
CDPs have put a laser-like focus on the importance of unified data. Whether you call it customer 360, a single source of truth, or the fabled “golden record,” enterprises have a mandate to connect as much data to a universal ID or profile as possible.
Obviously, that eliminates the problem of stitching people together with their many different postal, email, and pseudonymous IDs – and creates value in terms of unifying data for cleaner analytics. At it’s core, getting to veracity or truth behind the data is an identity challenge.
If you think about how most non-technical folks think of identity in the context of customer experience, the term has taken on a decidedly marketing flavor. Back when third-party cookies were in vogue, identity meant cross-device identity — stitching cookies and device IDs to the universal identifier. Or identity was thought of as data onboarding — matching hashed e-mail addresses to an active cookie ID. These tactics still have a place, but we need to broaden our thinking.
Now that third-party cookies cannot easily be shared, and first party-data must be collected with consumer-driven permission, it’s clear that the top-down approach to identity must change. We need to shift from buying identity services from companies that capture data to a bottoms-up approach of using tools that give consumers the ability to grant permission to use their data.
We have entered the CIAM era of identity management, and the new token of value is “zero-party” (permission-based) data. In this new world of customer data management, zero is everything.
The bottom line
Finally, as we think about the value delivered through modern customer data management, trends are becoming readily apparent. CDPs that are good at personalizing online experience – mostly marketing, advertising, or loyalty experiences – are shrinking, and enterprise-scale CDPs that go beyond marketing to offer personalization in channels like sales, service, and commerce are on the rise.
This makes sense, especially considering how much more meaningful real-life touchpoints are to consumers. I’d rather you got my name right and knew my order number when I call your 800 number than get just the right ad in Instagram.
This trend isn’t going away. Big CRM companies will continue to expand their data offerings with connections to customer experience delivery. But for every use case that can be delivered by connecting marketing and call center data, there are dozens of opportunities to go deeper and connect real enterprise data to CX.
