Why is customer data platform gaining importance?

The competition is becoming intense on a daily basis. Every business has to be on its toes to stay ahead of the competition. The marketing campaign is the most significant aspect of the success of any business. Everything depends on the proper analysis of your customers as well as your competitors. It is why you see most of the companies relying on CRM for capturing and interpreting customer data. The objective is to make it easy for the customer to have a great shopping experience.

The CRM has been a practical analysis tool for a long time. Nowadays, you see the emergence of the customer data platform (CDP) as the most effective marketing tool in the industry. We shall now see what CDP is and why it is gaining in importance today.

What is the CDP?

Knowing your customer is paramount to success in business. It is vital to have a persistent unified customer database which is accessible to other systems. The CDP is such a market managed system.

The CDP enables the collection of data from all the corporate channels to channelise it towards a single platform for marketing and sales. The idea is to deliver a higher level of personalised service to your customers. You should have a 360⁰ view of the customer to ensure that. It involves the collection, assimilation, and analysis of a vast volume of data. This analysis provides real-time insights into the business thereby enabling it to take prompt action.

How do you ensure the collection of data?

In the ordinary course of marketing, the sales and the advertising teams have access to customer data from various sources. Some of them are call-centre interactions, social media, emails, product usage data, and mobile apps. The data collected from these sources enables the company to respond to the customer’s needs promptly.

Example of how CDP is useful

You can take the example of the German National Rail Company, the Deutsche Bahn. This rail company uses the CDP to cater to the immediate needs of the passengers. It offers an automatic and timely upgrade to their customers whenever it senses massive overcrowding in the trains. How do they manage to do that?

The Deutsche Ban uses the CDP to gain insights about the customer. It collects data on the customers who are travelling by their trains. It does not matter whether the customer books the tickets through their official mobile app or an online store. The system gathers information even when the customer gets his/her ticket from the railway station. The CDP links the personal data of the customer with the real-time data of the train and endeavours to offer a better experience.

The advantages of the CDP

The CGP can collect data from all the sources, be it the individual shop servers, a dedicated customer database, or even the data warehouse in the cloud.

· The CDP is a cloud-based platform.

· It is a centralised platform that manages the segmentation of the customers.

· The CDP is compatible with existing database management systems like the CRM.

· It provides access to complete and accurate information about the customer thereby helping the business offer the highest quality of services to the customer. It results in enhanced customer loyalty.

· The significant advantage of CDP is that you can link it to contextual events. The example of the Deutsche Bahn is a prime one.

Companies across the world are now concentrating on using the CDP to gain valuable insights into the customer. If one company does not do it, someone else will do it. The customer has a wide choice. Therefore, it is imperative for all businesses to use the CDP to improve their profitability. It explains the importance of the CDP.