The Future Of Business

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Today, all customers interact with businesses across more channels than ever before, making this previously simple relationship much more complicated. Customers are not only using your website, app, but live chatting to support, talking with your sales team via email, clicking on social channels ads, reading your blog, and so much more.

Businesses are expected to track all customer interactions, not just those associated with sales. Activity on your website and mobile apps, advertising channels, not to mention email, push notifications, payment systems, support tickets, are only a fraction of what a business needs to track, store, and unify.

Technology Advancements

Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a tool that helps you bring reliable data to every team. It helps with data collection, combining customer profiles, then provides data excavation to enhance the customer’s experience. A CDP helps enable companies to capture complete customer data from wherever your customers interact with your brand. Most importantly, it allows you to collect customer data from your servers for better reliability and accuracy.

This new generation of systems is designed to bring all customer data into a single intelligent environment and provide a synchronized, well-integrated customer view. The business goal of a CDP is to improve the decisions you make, your speed in delivery, and ultimately your customer experience.

Forbes recently surveyed marketing executives about their CDP usage. Some 78% of organizations either have or are developing a customer data platform. Over 53% said their CDPs help their teams understand and engage with their existing customer’s needs, increasing the likelihood that customers will become repeat customers.

Marketing and Beyond

CDP allows you to view all user activity, from any channel, online or offline, in one place. Using this technology makes it easier to connect all digital assets, from advertising campaigns to websites to email marketing. Marketing teams can build accurate advertising audiences, better understand attribution, and prove their direct impact.

As marketing technology consultant Fred Maurer recently put it: a CDP “can help forward-thinking marketers organize their data, enhance their audience segmentation and campaign planning, increase content engagement, streamline cross-channel marketing orchestration, and optimize analytics efforts. Strategy and cohesive technology solutions are vital to long-term success. With the right strategy and CDP solution, marketers can transform omnichannel complexity and uncertainty into competitive advantages and measurable results.”

Customer Satisfaction

CDP’s also make a difference to your customer. It will allow teams to react quicker to their preferences, help drive customer loyalty, and create better interactions, visibility, and measurement opportunities. Privacy is a huge concern among consumers. The right CDP will help your company improve data privacy by:

1. Helping you collect first-party data, which is the key to data privacy.
2. Monitor changes to your data inventory with real-time alerts.
3. Enforcing your company’s data privacy policies with privacy controls.
4. Give your company a single access point for data.
5. Keeping your data clean and accurate.

Finally, a CDP assists in applying common data standards to ensure the data you’re collecting is correct and compliant. This facilitates diagnosing data quality issues and gets it production-ready before you decide to implement it. David Raab, the founder of the Customer Data Platform Institute, has predicted that customer data platforms will be an apparent line item in technology budgets. He states, “2020 will be a pivotal year for the CDP industry as independent vendors face new competition from large enterprise software companies. We can expect even more confusion over the definition of CDP as new players promote their own vision for the category. With luck, a clearer understanding will emerge of the different functionalities that companies need to manage and use their customer data, and less debate over which particular combination should constitute a CDP.”

It is important to remember that not all CDPs are alike; they need to handle scale, security, and data variety because edge data is becoming a larger component of customer data. So take the time to research the best system for your business. With a CDP, executives can easily access data to fuel better outcomes, understand customer journeys, and make data-driven decisions. Elevate your company to the next level. Your executives, employees, and customers will all benefit. The future is now; jump into the next generation of software.