Customer-centricity has become a key differentiator for businesses. Customer-centric companies are known to be 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t.
However, building a customer-centric brand in today’s connected world is not simple. Data silos have become a significant concern as companies add new channels frequently. Getting a 360-degree customer view has become difficult, leading to fragmented customer experience across different channels.
One way to overcome this challenge is by using the Customer Data Platform (CDP).
What Is CDP?
CDP is a type of software that helps companies gather customer data from different sources and channels and create a centralized customer database containing all those data. It contains all the required first-party data of the customer in one place. CDP eliminates data silos and creates a 360-degree customer view that enables marketing, sales, and customer support teams to understand the customer better and deliver a personalized experience to them.
Use Cases Of CDP
CDP is predominantly used by the marketing, sales, product management, and customer support teams to understand customer behavior, market trends, and make data-driven decisions.
Let’s look at how different industries can use them to provide customer-centric experiences.
Retail and eCommerce: Retail and eCommerce companies can use CDP to collect information about existing and new customers and use those insights to target them with personalized recommendations. They could also use it to extract information on abandoned carts and last viewed items and offer them special discounts and offers. By integrating CDP, customer support teams can view the customer’s data and complaints in real-time and address them quickly. Marketers can use it to conduct cross-channel marketing campaigns to target customers and improve conversion and retention rates.
Hospitality: Hospitality companies can use CDP to deliver personalized content and offer to customers on the website using the CDP data. Marketers can use the booking data to cross-sell and upsell exclusive transport and tourist places offers. The customer support teams can use it to personalize the guest check-in process. Marketers can also use the CDP data to drive repeat purchases through dynamic website homepages and personalized emails.
Healthcare: CDP can help drive patient engagement and improve outcomes through personalized care. Healthcare companies can use CDP to collect and store electronic health records from various sources and personalize patient experiences. They can also use it to send personalized reminders to patients to adhere to the medical regimen, book the next appointment, and improve telehealth experiences.
Financial services: Financial institutions use CDPs to centralize all the offline and online customer data in a single location. It helps them understand the customers’ financial health and recommend relevant products. It also helps the relationship manager to identify customers who could churn and connect with them to rebuild engagement.
Besides the above specific use cases, companies can use CDP to hyper-personalize experiences and content across all channels, generate and score new leads and sales, and improve customer service with detailed insights. Overall, it helps companies achieve customer-centricity, which builds customer loyalty and improves the bottom line.
How Is CDP Different From CDC?
Although SAP’s Customer Data Cloud (CDC) and Customer Data Platform (CDP) deal with data management, both are different objectives. SAP’s CDC offers a full suite of identity management solutions, such as customer identity and access management, allowing companies to collect and manage customer data across touchpoints. Customers can register, create an account, and manage their identity and preferences on the company’s website or app. It is more like a front-end solution that gives the customers the power to control their personal data and communication preferences.
CDP collects and unifies customer data from offline and online sources to provide a 360-degree customer view. It is more like a backend solution that helps marketing, sales, product, and service teams to understand customers and deliver personalized customer experiences.
CDC is one of CDP’s several customer data sources to get customers’ communication preferences and identity details. While they can be integrated to simplify data management, the solutions are different and can work independently without any dependency.
Available Integrations With CDP
You can integrate your Customer Data Platform with the following:
Commerce Cloud: Helps fetch and store customer data between the CDP and Commerce Cloud. Integration with Commerce Cloud will help marketers to listen to customer needs and complaints in real time and act on them to improve engagement. Industries like retail and eCommerce can use the integration to ingest orders from CDP to Commerce Cloud and offer customers complementary products based on their purchases.
Emarsys: Emarsys is a leading provider of omnichannel customer engagement platforms. By integrating the CDP with Emarsys, companies can create and update contacts within Emarsys using a one-way synchronization. They can directly trigger external events and generate or replace contact lists in Emarsys, increasing the chances of managing and engaging with customers more effectively.
Sales Cloud: The integration between CDP and Sales Cloud will help the sales team access customer data directly from the CRM platform and get a more comprehensive view. They can use this data to score leads and prioritize those with a high propensity to convert into sales. Integration with Sales Cloud will also enable the team to automate the sales process, create targeted sales campaigns, and send personalized communication based on customers’ behavior and preferences.
Service Cloud: The integration between CDP and Service Cloud is bi-directional. It ingests, calls, and stores customer data from Service Cloud and synchronizes that in the CDP. The integration can help the customer support team listen to customers, understand their needs, and respond in real-time to deliver next-level customer experience. It can help marketers stitch together the first, second, and third-party customer data to build a target audience and send them personalized cross-channel marketing campaigns. In case of new interactions, the company can reach customers in real-time and respond to them in context.
Conclusion
As more companies commit to becoming customer-centric, the demand for CDP will grow further. According to the MarketsandMarkets report, the Customer Data Platform market value will be $19.7 billion by 2027.
The right CDP, combined with the right integrations and strategy, can help companies deliver a seamless and superior customer experience across all channels and gain a competitive edge. It can help the company grow to the next level. Hence, make the most of this platform to engage customers and build trust and loyalty.