A GUIDE TO CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORMS
In our Guide to Customer Data Platforms pick up everything you need to know about the role and value of Customer Data Platforms.
A background to customer data platforms
The Age of the Customer
The fastest-growing businesses today are customer-obsessed. They know in meticulous detail what makes their customers tick. And they achieve this through harvesting data insights and analyzing them.
According to analyst firm Forrester, the FIVE imperatives to becoming a customer obsessed enterprise are to:
1. Drive revenue with great customer experience
2 Maximize the business value of technology
3 Build an insights-driven organization
4 Excel at customer-obsessed marketing
5 Differentiate with digital
Insights driven businesses
‘A new kind of company — we call them insights-driven businesses — has formed. They are growing at an average of more than 30% annually and are on track to earn $1.8 trillion by 2021. These customer-obsessed firms systematically harness insights across their organization and implement them to create competitive advantage through software.’
Source: James McCormick, Principal Analyst Forrester
Sourcing Data to Make Decisions
Simple customer interviews and research methods can go a long way to develop customer understanding. Often, the richest insights are those that expose the intersect between a company’s capabilities, and the customer value they serve up.
Businesses that rely on a blend of IT systems and operational departments to deliver their customer value find it extremely difficult to gain a holistic picture of customers through their data interactions.
Sales, service, accounts, support, parts, and other departments will each have their own customer touch-points to deal with. Only when all of these reference points are combined can a true picture be formed.
‘The vast majority of firms are still on their journey to becoming insights-driven. Fewer than 1 in 10 businesses are advanced with insights.’
Source: Forrester, 2018
What are Customer Insights?
Every business understands the impact of outstanding customer experience.
Think of businesses like Amazon, whose singular purpose is Customer Fanaticism; placing the customer at the heart of everything it does.
Even shareholders were taken aback when its founder Jeff Bezos explained that he was prepared to forego short-term profitability in exchange for an unbeatable customer experience.
Like Amazon, if you want to delight customers with personalized offers then you will need to be world-class at capturing and making sense of lots of data about the customers you serve.
Customer data is anything that identifies a customer, or indeed any associated data that results from customer interactions including purchases, transactions, and customer service communications. It’s the knowledge you need to make decisions to improve how you deliver value.
Interested to read on?
Customer data is anything that identifies a customer, or indeed any associated data that results from customer interactions including purchases, transactions and customer service communications.
A CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORM (CDP) is an enterprise computer processing platform used to harvest, aggregate, cleanse, manage, process, analyze and output customer associated data.
Data is pulled from multiple sources, cleaned and combined to create a single customer profile. This structured data is then made available to other marketing systems. Unlike a Customer Database, a Customer Data Platform extends its functionality to all aspects of the customer lifecycle.
READ THIS GUIDE TO CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORMS TO LEARN HOW TO GAIN A SINGLE VIEW OF YOUR CUSTOMERS BY IMPLEMENTING A CDP.
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