Never before have marketing, sales, and customer service teams had as much customer data as they have now. Yet, many customers feel businesses understand them less.
The disconnect is because of one key problem: data remains fragmented in a vast array of siloed platforms, leaving customer-facing teams in a perpetual state of guesswork.
What if you could stop guessing and start giving your customers exactly what they want? That’s precisely the fundamental vision of CDPs.
In this post, we’ll explore how effective Customer Data Platform implementation with the help of a partner like Coffee+Dunn can bring this vision to life.
See how we can help you leverage technology to remove guesswork from customer engagement.
What Is a Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Why It Matters
Traditionally, businesses have operated with data silos.
You likely already house customer data in various systems like CRMs, marketing automation software, customer service tools, and e-commerce platforms.
Default setups don’t allow these platforms to talk to each other. The lack of synergy creates several problems because:
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- Each of your customer-facing teams has only a partial view of a customer’s journey.
- Therefore, personalization is based on assumptions rather than comprehensive data.
The only way forward is to build infrastructure to unify the data so you can truly know what your customers want. Customer Data Platforms provide such infrastructure.
A CDP collects customer data from all sources, organizes it, and resolves identities to create a single, unified profile for each of your customers. You’ll have a “single source of truth” that your teams can draw from to create consistent and connected customer experiences.
Benefits of Customer Data Platform Implementation
How will breaking data silos with the help of a CDP benefit your organisation?
Well, a CDP can transform your entire data strategy, impacting marketing, sales, and customer service. Here’s how:
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- A single source of truth: The foundational principle of a CDP is that it gives you a 360-degree view of each customer. The unified data is comprehensive and includes browsing history, purchases, support tickets, communication history, and other behavioral/transactional data.
- Marketing personalization: CDPs allow you to scale marketing personalization, including the ability to adjust advertising and engagement dynamically based on a customer’s real-time behavior. Further, some support omnichannel journey orchestration so you can actively guide customer journeys across different touchpoints.
- Empowering sales teams: A CDP gives your sales team a comprehensive view of each customer beyond the standard interaction journey to include valuable information like purchase and loyalty data. Granular purchase data, for instance, can tell a sales rep what product/service a customer has bought, the average order value, frequency of purchase, the sales reps they’ve bought from, etc.
- Empowering customer service teams: With CDP data integrated into your CRM, your CS agents can immediately pull up a customer’s complete profile when resolving tickets. Agents get more context, and customers don’t have to repeat themselves.
That said, a CDP’s impact can and should extend beyond marketing, sales, and customer service. The unified data gives you a holistic view of your business, making it possible to make informed, data-driven strategic management decisions.
Key Considerations Before CDP Implementation
“Garbage in, garbage out” isn’t just a cliché; it also applies to Customer Data Platform implementation.
The success of your CDP implementation is directly tied to the readiness, accuracy, and completeness of the data you feed it.
Because your CDP can’t magically fix flawed data, data quality/governance procedures should be key considerations before the implementation. Here’s how to ensure data quality:
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- Preliminary discovery: Catalog all the systems that hold customer data. For each source, assess the data quality based on accuracy, completeness, consistency, and timeliness.
- Clean and standardize data: Once you have a comprehensive view of the data you hold, cleanse and standardize it by eliminating duplication, merging similar sources, standardizing formats across all sources, and enriching it to fill in missing information.
Further, you want to ensure data quality assurance is an ongoing process. To this end, establish a robust data governance framework with clear rules for collection and maintenance.
CDP Implementation Strategy
Data quality is just one of the areas you need to consider to ensure a successful implementation. Let’s explore the other strategic bases you must cover to increase the likelihood of success.
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- Starting with a clear business strategy: You want to design the CDP to serve your business goals, not the other way around. It’s best to define measurable outcomes first so the CDP doesn’t end up dictating your overall strategy.
- Assembling the right team: A CDP implementation is a cross-departmental effort. Success depends on collaboration and data sharing. Get your marketing, sales, customer service, business intelligence, and IT teams on board.
- Choosing the right technology: Based on your goals, use cases, and data strategy, evaluate technology vendors and choose a Customer Data Platform that can dependably help you scale connected customer experiences
When evaluating technology providers, you should focus less on the raw list of features and more on how the platform can support your unique use cases.
At Coffee+Dunn, we prefer Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights because it supports a wide range of use cases across several industries. For instance, you can use D365 Customer Insights to:
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- Track and collect behavioral and transactional data for personalization efforts.
- Feed D365 Sales with contextual customer data to empower sales teams to close more deals.
- Deliver hyper-personalized marketing experiences across several channels using the unified data.
- Unify data from diverse sources, including other Microsoft applications, to create cohesive customer profiles.
- Feed D365 Customer Service with contextual data to give CS agents a 360-degree view of each customer, so customers don’t have to repeat themselves.
Microsoft Customer Insights holds a significant advantage over other competing platforms. Microsoft offers deep integration within its ecosystem, making collaboration between teams using different Microsoft apps seamless.
Moreover, AI and Copilot integration allow you to interact with the apps using natural language. For instance, when you want to create an audience segment within D365 Customer Insights, you can describe it, and Copilot will build it for you.
CDP Implementation Phases
With a sound data strategy in place and having chosen the right technology vendor, how should you approach the actual implementation process?
At Coffee+Dunn, we’ve seen several CDP implementations across several industries and found that a phased implementation process works best.
Nonetheless, our phased implementation philosophy won’t be at odds with those who would want systems to go live all at once. Our proven methodology is covered in three verbs: Plan > Build > Run.
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- Plan: We’ll comprehensively assess your processes and existing technology, evaluate your customer engagement business goals, and develop a CDP implementation strategy that can efficiently achieve those goals.
- Build: With a solid plan in place, our team gets to work to marry your business goals with technology. Our extensive experience allows us to expertly integrate the CDP with your other tech systems so that every relevant stakeholder can leverage the unified customer data.
- Run: We’ll then roll out the new implementation. However, our work isn’t done yet. We exist as an extension of your core team, continuously helping you optimize processes, campaigns, funnels, etc., to ensure you meet your goals.
Ultimately, technology is only as good as the implementation. You need an implementation partner that gets it. See how we can help you scale customer engagement with our Plan > Build > Run implementation approach.
Post-Implementation Best Practices
A CDP implementation shouldn’t end at the “Build” phase. You need ongoing support systems in place to ensure you derive maximum business value from the new technology.
Here are some of the post-implementation best practices we consider essential:
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- Ongoing data quality assurance: You cleaned up your data before the implementation. You must now ensure that the data in the CDP remains accurate, relevant, and complete. Conduct regular audits and have your teams stick to all data collection/entry rules.
- Continuous improvement and optimization: For every use case you deploy a CDP, you must identify strategies that are working and those that aren’t, and continuously optimize them. Further, new business needs will emerge, and you should find ways to use the CDP to meet them.
- Ongoing training and enablement: You need good documentation as well as ongoing personalized training sessions for key stakeholders. Coffee+Dunn provides ongoing training and support that’s aligned with your strategic business goals.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Implementing a CDP
With an experienced partner like Coffee+Dunn, you’ll sidestep most common mistakes in Customer Data Platform implementation.
However, you still need to know what these potential blunders are so you can plan for them. Here are some:
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- Buying a CDP without establishing priority use cases first.
- Underestimating how important data quality and governance are.
- Treating CDP implementation as a marketing and IT function rather than as an organization-wide effort.
- Viewing Customer Data Platform implementation as a one-and-done exercise instead of an ongoing process.
- Failing to provide adequate training before and after implementation.
- Not managing change effectively, causing resistance.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Let’s now answer some of the common questions we get about CDPs and their implementation.
What Are the Core Features Every CDP Should Have?
Every CDP should come with the following features:
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- Identity resolution capability
- Reporting and analytics features
- Real-time data ingestion capabilities
- Data activation features so you can actually use the data
- Ability to integrate with other tech systems, especially sales and marketing software
- No-code segmentation supported with AI, like Microsoft does with Copilot for Customer Insights – Data
How Long Does It Typically Take to Implement a CDP?
The implementation duration will mostly depend on your business’s size, the amount of data to be connected, the use cases you want to support, and how long it takes key stakeholders to get up to speed with the new systems.
That said, with a solid partner like Coffee+Dunn, you can accelerate several aspects of the implementation, completing tasks that would have taken months in just a few weeks.
What Types of Data Sources Can Be Integrated with a CDP?
If you are to truly break down data silos, then you want every possible customer data source integrated with the CDP. A CDP should be able to handle these data types:
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- Behavioral data from mobile, website, email, app, and social media analytics
- Behavioral data from ad platforms like Meta Ads, Google Ads, and programmatic ad networks
- Transactional data from e-commerce platforms, POS systems, subscription systems, and even in-app purchases
- Customer support history — tickets, chat transcripts, common issues, sentiment, etc.
- Demographic data such as age, gender, income level, etc.
How Secure Is Customer Data within a CDP?
Enterprise-grade CDPs like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Insights come with robust data security features as standard. For added security, you should also institute and enforce your own organization-wide data governance policies.
Looking Forward
An effective Customer Data Platform implementation can empower your marketing, sales, and customer service teams to deliver seamless, personalized customer experiences at scale.
It’s time to stop guessing what your customers want and give it to them. The journey begins with finding an implementation partner that will meet you where you are with your unique data challenges and business goals.
Schedule a free consultation with our team today to see how we implement tailored strategies for end-to-end personalized customer experiences.
