Many organizations are increasing customer touchpoints to increase visibility and improve customer experiences. Every touchpoint is an opportunity to build personalized experiences and connections that fuel growth.
However, if those experiences are fragmented and disconnected, it becomes a challenge rather than an opportunity. You must break down data silos so everyone on your team has a holistic view of each customer. This is where Customer Data Platform integration comes in.
At Coffee+Dunn, we help organizations implement customer engagement technologies that are expertly customized and integrated into the larger tech ecosystem. Schedule your free consultation with our team today.
What Is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?
You likely already understand the value of customer data when you want to personalize customer engagements. It’s probably also the case that your customer engagement goals aren’t hampered by a lack of data.
More often than not, businesses have the data, but it’s housed in fragmented systems. The siloed setup makes it difficult to get a comprehensive picture of each customer to deliver personalized experiences at every touchpoint.
Customer Data Platforms solve this problem. A CDP is a platform that unifies customer data from several sources to give you a 360-degree view of each customer. You’ll effectively have a “single source of truth” that every person and system in your business can plug into.
The Role of CDPs in the Modern Tech Stack
Business technologies have transformed how organizations do sales, marketing, and customer service. However, absent a cohesive data strategy, these tech services fall short, as you can’t really tell who your prospects/customers are and what they want.
CDPs don’t just centralize data; they bring on board customer data that you would traditionally miss. The scope of data you’ll find in a typical CDP includes:
- Behavioral data: Collected when customers interact with your digital assets. You’ll gain insights into web pages visited, emails opened, apps downloaded, etc. Also, you can collect data on the frequency and length of these engagements.
- Transactional data: You’ll have a complete record of your customers’ transactions with your business — e.g., purchases, signups, subscriptions, cancellations, payments, refunds, etc.
- Demographic data: Include gender, age, race, income bracket, education level, etc.
That said, data is only useful when it’s actionable, and that’s where CDPs excel.
After creating a single source of truth, a CDP facilitates the transfer of the data to your other tech tools, including sales, marketing, and customer service tools. The process requires you to integrate your key systems with the CDP for seamless data resolution and transfer.
Key Systems to Integrate with Your CDP
You will need to integrate your CDP with various business systems to source data to create a 360-degree view and use the unified data. Let’s explore some of these key systems.
- E-commerce platform: Your e-commerce platform can be a rich source of data. It contains nearly all transaction data for every customer. Also, once data is unified, you can deploy it to the platform for personalized product recommendations, upsells, etc.
- Data analytics tools: Web and mobile data analytics tools usually track how users interact with your digital properties. CDPs can resolve various identities (e.g., using cookies) to build rich behavioral profiles.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools: CRMs contain direct interaction data for sales and customer service teams. Adding CDP data gives these teams a better picture of each customer to serve them better.
- Marketing and sales systems: Marketing and sales teams turn cold audiences/leads into customers. They must understand prospects to communicate effectively or design offers that connect with your target audience. CDPs provide the data to personalize every marketing and sales engagement.
- Legacy business intelligence tools: Do you have business intelligence tools with useful data? You can integrate them with the CDP to import the data so you have complete historical data factored into the “single source of truth.”
Steps for Successful CDP Integration
Implementing and integrating a CDP effectively involves more than just installing software or toggling a switch. At Coffee+Dunn, we take a Plan > Build > Run implementation approach that recognizes that technology is only as good as the processes and people it supports.
You need a clear vision of your business goals and a comprehensive map of your processes. Here’s how you should go about implementing and integrating a CDP.
- Define key business processes: Instead of starting with a CDP, you should establish use cases first, then design your CDP to support them. Do you want to personalize web experiences and campaigns? Do you want to reduce churn? Do you want to improve customer service and reduce churn?
- Define key people: A CDP will be valuable to sales, marketing, and customer service teams. Product, data, and strategic management teams will also find it helpful.
- Understand your data landscape: Take an inventory of tools and systems within your business with data. Assess the quality of the data and develop a data governance plan.
- Data ingestion: Connect your data sources to the CDP, understanding that data quality is essential. As they say, ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ The CDP will then stitch data from these sources, resolve it, and create unified profiles.
- Integration to support use cases: You can then connect the CDP with various systems to support your priority use cases. For instance, you can connect your CDP to your email marketing tool, ad platform, or CRM.
How to Choose the Right CDP Integration Partner
Because a CDP isn’t an out-of-the-box solution, you will likely need specialized expertise to help with the extensive customization and integration required.
Such partners bring a wealth of experience that can help you maximize the business value and ROI of the platform.
Integration partners aren’t created equal, though. Here are some key benchmarks you need to evaluate them against.
- Technical capacity to ensure sound data strategy and governance, identify resolution approaches, and seamless integrations
- Proven expertise and experience implementing CDP in varied industries
- Knowledge of your industry and the various customer journeys
- Ability to customize the CDP to suit your specific needs
- Presence of an official partnership with the CDP vendor
- Post-implementation support
Also, CDP implementation and integration aren’t one-off exercises. It’s an ongoing process, and you need to choose a partner willing to stay along for the ride. At Coffee+Dunn, we understand this reality and provide ongoing support.
Also, our preferred customer data platform is Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. The CDP is just one of the offerings under Microsoft’s suite of intelligent business applications, which also include CRM and ERP solutions.
The strength of Microsoft’s approach is that the apps integrate seamlessly, and you can use them individually or together to create connected, personalized customer experiences.
Microsoft offers them modularly, so you can buy only the apps you need when you need them.
We are Microsoft-certified consultants and architects. See how we can help you integrate customer engagement solutions with your existing stack.
Advanced Strategies for Maximizing CDP Benefits
Many businesses use CDP data to personalize email campaigns, product recommendations, and other routine customer interactions. You must take a step further to gain a true competitive advantage.
Let’s explore some advanced strategies we have helped companies deploy with CDP.
- Customer journey orchestration: You can use behavioral and transactional data to understand exactly where your customer is in the buyer journey and actively provide a personalized experience in real-time. Moreover, you can do this on multiple touchpoints to execute an omnichannel marketing strategy.
- Predictive Analytics and AI-powered segmentation: One of the reasons we love D365 Customer Insights is that it has built-in AI and predictive capabilities. You can effectively predict a customer’s next action before they take it and nudge them in a direction consistent with your business goals.
- Providing additional context to customer service agents: You can integrate CDP with your customer service tool or CRM. Instead of your agents just having direct interaction data, they’ll also get a 360-degree view of the customer with their full behavioral and transactional data included. The result is a more responsive, personalized customer service.
Also, with CDPs, you can take ad personalization a step further by suppressing irrelevant messaging.
Because you have unified data and can resolve identities, you can optimize marketing spend by excluding people who have taken a particular action. For instance, you can exclude current paying customers from a particular campaign.
Common CDP Integration Challenges and How to Overcome Them
With adequate planning, CDP implementation and integration will likely be a success. However, some challenges are to be expected.
Here are some of the common issues you should look out for.
- Data quality problems: The popular phrase ‘garbage in, garbage out’ applies here, too. Data inconsistency, duplication, inaccuracy, or incompleteness can be a problem. You should do a comprehensive data audit, iron out all inconsistencies, and establish clear data governance structures before CDP Integration.
- Key people and resistance to change: Breaking data silos is a significant undertaking. If key teams aren’t on board with the change in strategy, CDP implementation and integration will fail. You must get buy-in from your management, sales, marketing, and customer service teams from the onset.
- Technical complexity: You need technical expertise to effectively orchestrate campaigns and journeys. Working with a provider like Coffee+Dunn allows you to borrow the expertise of vendor partners who understand industry best practices.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Let’s now answer some of the common questions we get about customer data platforms.
Can a CDP Replace My Existing Marketing Stack?
A CDP is designed to support your marketing tools, not replace them. It collects and unifies data to create a single comprehensive profile. Your marketing stack draws from this unified data to execute more targeted campaigns.
How Long Does CDP Integration Typically Take?
Because CDP implementation and integration are not a one-and-done exercise, it helps to view it as a phased process. The initial implementation could take weeks or a couple of months, but continued optimization, expansion, and integration could be a multi-year endeavor.
What Is the Cost of Integrating a CDP?
The cost of Integrating CDP varies depending on the vendor and the partner helping you implement it.
For instance, if you go with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, expect to pay $1,700 per tenant per month, paid yearly. You should also budget for the Microsoft Partner that’ll help you integrate it.
Next Steps
You now appreciate how incredibly valuable having a unified data strategy is. Customer Data Platform integration is essential to achieving such a strategy, as it breaks down data silos to facilitate unified customer views and the activation of the said data.
Also, as we mentioned earlier, a successful CDP integration and implementation isn’t a one-and-done exercise. To truly unlock the power of CDP, you need a partner that’ll walk the journey with you from planning to building and running the customer engagement machine.
Schedule a free consultation with us today to see how a partnership with Coffee+Dunn can transform your business through connected experiences.
