When researching and perusing through a daunting list of customer data platforms, you may be spoiled for choice.
Each platform looks much like the next one.
Perhaps you haven’t mapped out your needs first, which would help you match them to specific features.
Where should you actually start?
In this guide, we’ll explore various customer data platform requirements to help you choose the right one for your needs.
We’ll also highlight the number one customer data platform we recommend for businesses looking to centralize their customer data and personalize customer engagement.
TL;DR – Customer Data Platform (CDP) Requirements Checklist
Let’s start with a quick overview of the customer data platform features and capabilities to focus on for business growth.
- Data ingestion and unification
- Data quality, migration, and governance
- Audience targeting, personalization, and orchestration
- Analytics, insights, and reporting
- Usability, support, and cost-friendliness
While these are a great place to start when shopping around and combing through various CDP options, we can save you time with a compelling recommendation.
We are Microsoft-certified consultants focused on helping you up your customer engagement game through Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
You can use the CDP to unify customer data, personalize customer engagement across every touchpoint, and unite customer data with journeys.
Schedule an envisioning session with us at Coffee + Dunn to learn more about implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
What Is a Customer Data Platform and Why Do You Need One?
A customer data platform (CDP) is a software solution that consolidates customer data from multiple tools into a single, centralized database.
Depending on the vendor, CDPs usually feature a customer database, real-time interaction management, multi-channel campaign management, and marketing automation.
A CDP pulls all your customer data into one place, creating clear and consistent profiles for each person or group to help you understand them better.
Customer database platforms are becoming more prevalent every day, but are they really necessary? Are they just another hot piece of marketing technology?
Here’s why you need a customer data platform:
- Breaking Down Data Silos: A CDP eliminates fragmented data from different systems by bringing it all together into one centralized and coherent customer view.
- Enabling Personalization: The 360-degree customer view made possible by a CDP allows you to target and tailor marketing efforts and experiences.
- Desire to Understand Customers Better: CDPs help your business understand its customers better through insights into customer needs, preferences, and behavior.
- Improving Operational Efficiency: A CDP automates data collection and unification, which frees up your sales, marketing, and customer service staff to focus more on strategy and execution.
Customer Data Platform Requirements
Let’s discuss the key CDP requirements in greater detail.
1. Data Ingestion and Unification
Your CDP should be able to:
- Collect data from different online and offline sources, such as email marketing software, CRMs, and social media.
- Collect both structured and unstructured data, such as transaction details and social posts.
- Process and update data in real-time or near-real-time.
- Resolve or reconcile different identities like device ID, email, and cookies into a unified, consistent customer profile.
2. Data Quality, Migration, and Governance
Ensure your preferred CDP can do the following:
- Data Quality Checks: This includes validation, de-duplication, cleansing of poor data, and more.
- Data Importation and Migration: Pulling data from integrated tools and moving it into your CDP should be easy. You shouldn’t lose attributes or historical data while doing so.
- Data Governance and Compliance: A good CDP supports security measures, such as data encryption, audit trails, and access controls, to ensure you comply with regulatory protocols like the GDPR and HIPAA.
3. Audience Targeting, Personalization, and Orchestration
You’ll want to ensure your CDP offers the following:
- Ability to build audiences or segments using unified customer profiles.
- Ability to deliver personalized messaging or experiences across multiple channels.
- Ability to orchestrate omnichannel campaigns across triggers, workflows, and channels such as email, web apps, offline, and mobile apps.
4. Analytics, Insights, and Reporting
A good CDP should have the analytical and reporting capabilities below:
- Built-in analytics with user-level dashboards, metrics, and the ability to analyze both aggregated and individual-level data.
- Predictive analytics or forecasting for churn prediction and estimating customer lifetime value.
- Ability to create and modify custom KPIs or metrics relevant to your business.
5. Usability, Support, and Cost-Friendliness
Check for the following:
- Ease of use, with a focus on an intuitive interface for non-technical users, and the level of training or support the customer data platform vendor offers.
- Integration with your existing tech stack or third-party tools.
- Cost, including upfront, ongoing, and hidden fees, to ensure the licensing model fits your scale and growth stage.
Once you consider these requirements, it’s easier to find a CDP that fulfills your unique needs and goals. You’ll be able to centralize data, ensure compliance, and deliver personalized experiences to grow your business.
How to Choose a CDP
Here’s how to select the right customer data platform for your business:
- Start with Your Use Cases: Clearly define the CDP use cases you need to accomplish. These can include unified customer profiles, customer segmentation, and real-time personalization.
- Ensure Seamless Integration: The right CDP should integrate easily with your other software, including marketing automation tools, CRM, and analytics platforms.
- Prioritize Segment Portability and Activation: Look for a CDP that can export customer segments directly to other tools for real-time campaign orchestration.
- Evaluate Data Accessibility and Control: Ensure your marketing, customer support, and sales teams can access and use the customer data without relying too much on IT.
- Prioritize Scalability and Compliance: Choose a CDP that scales as your business grows and data volume increases. Ensure the platform has built-in security, data governance, and consent management for compliance.
The right customer data platform works seamlessly with other tools, such as marketing automation platforms. At Coffee + Dunn, we work with businesses looking to use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights as their preferred CDP.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights combines Customer Insights – Data and Customer Insights – Journeys into one powerful platform that allows direct data activation.
For example, CI – Data lets you create segments that you can use directly in Customer Insights – Journeys through regular syncing.
Reach out to us at Coffee + Dunn to learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and its ability to grow your business.
Future-Proofing Your CDP Requirements
Besides current considerations, you must think long-term when choosing a CDP.
Let’s check out some ways to ensure your CDP requirements are future-proof.
- Choose an Open and Extensible Architecture: Go for a platform with robust SDKs, APIs, and CDP integration flexibility to ensure it grows with your tech stack and evolving business needs.
- Invest in Scalability from Day One: Ensure the CDP can handle increasing data volumes, team members, sources, and general complexity as your customer base grows.
- Prioritize AI Readiness: Look for a platform that already includes native AI solutions like lead scoring models or allows easy integration with external AI solutions.
- Think Omnichannel and Real-Time: Go for a future-ready CDP that supports real-time data ingestion, segmentation, and activation across all your key channels.
- Empower Non-Technical Users: A future-proof CDP should have intuitive tools that enable marketers, customer support staff, analysts, and other non-technical teams to create segments, execute campaigns, and understand insights. They should be able to do all these and more without relying on developers, which will boost agility and faster time-to-value.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Let’s end today’s customer data platform guide with answers to commonly asked questions.
What Are the Signs That a Company Needs a CDP?
You can tell you need a CDP if you struggle with:
- Tracking customer lifecycle.
- Integrating and unifying customer data from different sources.
- Over-reliance on IT support to build customer segments and profiles.
- Poor personalization or a lack of consistency in marketing campaigns, sales, and customer service.
- Real-time engagement due to delays in triggering campaigns or customer actions based on real-time behavioural data.
- Data quality problems such as duplicate records, outdated customer profiles, and inconsistent customer identifiers.
- Complying with data privacy regulations like managing consent, tracking data lineage, and honoring data deletion requests.
How Often Should a CDP Be Audited or Updated?
It’s best to update or audit a CDP on a need-by-need basis, focusing on real-time data integration, ongoing quality assurance monitoring, and actionable insights.
A strict weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual schedule is also ideal, but it may not align with the constantly changing nature of customer data. With such a schedule, you may struggle to maintain an accurate and up-to-date single source of truth for personalized customer engagement.
How Do CDPs Support Omnichannel Marketing?
CDPs support omnichannel marketing through creating unified customer profiles that enable personalized messaging across channels such as web, email, and social media.
They enable cross-channel activation, which makes data accessible to other marketing platforms, including display ads.
What Is the Difference Between CRM and Customer Data Platform?
While they work together, CRMs and CDPs are different.
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) manages and improves direct customer interactions, sales, and customer service. The focus is on individual customer engagement and managing specific customer relationships.
A CDP creates unified and persistent customer profiles after collecting, syncing, analyzing, and organizing data from multiple tools.
CDPs focus on analyzing overall customer behavior, spotting customer trends, and orchestrating personalized marketing messages and experiences across multiple channels.
Next Steps
The right customer data platform can help you grow your business through personalized customer engagement across various sales, marketing, and customer service touchpoints.
Without knowing the top data platform requirements to consider, you can struggle to pick the best option from a crowded market.
We make it easy for you to implement Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, our preferred customer data platform for businesses looking for an advanced customer engagement tool.
Book your free envisioning today to learn more about transforming your business with Dynamics 365 CDP.
