Essential Building Blocks of a Customer Data Platform

Customer data platforms (CDP) gather, link and expose online and offline data in a marketing and actionable way. It helps organizations manage the identity definition and segmentation of customers to provide targetable audiences towards various execution channels such as websites, social channels and mobile app.

CDP stitches the data collected from different sources to create a comprehensive customer profile. CDP has many capabilities and functions, including pulling data from multiple sources, cleaning it, and restructuring it in a way that makes it available to other marketing systems for personalized marketing activities. There can be additional features, such as advanced data analytics, content marketing, predictive capabilities, etc. To completely understand the various elements of CDP, it will be useful to study their building blocks, i.e. what are they made of:

Key Building Blocks of CDP:

The figure below illustrates the data flow in a typical CDP system.

Pic Credit: https://gunjan-aggarwal.medium.com/

The data flow comprises of three main aspects which are:

1. Customer Data Collection: The CDP captures critical data from multiple sources, enabling organizations to capture complete customer data whenever customers interact with the brand. Some of the sources include:

a. Web Behavior: This is data obtained from the company website, such as which pages the customer visits and purchasing.

b. Social conversations: This is data from social media to measure sentiments about the brand and product, measure campaign activity, and reactive the customer.

c. Past interactions in the CRM

d. Customer Demographics: What are the customer demographics as part of 3rd party data. This helps to get useful data which otherwise would be difficult.

e. Mobile Apps: Data from Mobile Apps regarding its usage and products brought.

f. Advertising channels

g. Transactional and POS data: Data from offline POS terminals regarding the products’ type and volume.

2. Customer Data Unification & Enrichment: Once the data is collected, in this stage, all the disparate strands of data are joined into unified customer profiles. However, before the data is unified, it is cleaned and enriched. Data validation is also performed, and inconsistent data sources are made consistent. This unification step is crucial as it enabled all data sources to be in one uniform format to be represented as a profile of a single user or a segment of users.

This ability to put individual customers into related groups is unique as it is called a Single Customer View. Here, one can see all the user’s activity, from any channel, online or offline, in one central location. A good CDP will also create “anonymous” (i.e. prospects who visit the website but you don’t know yet) customer profiles.

At this stage, common data standards are applied to check whether the data being collected is correct and compliant. This would ensure one can diagnose data quality issues before anyone decides to act on it.

Data Enrichment: The data enrichment involves analytics to understand customer behaviour and make business decisions related to marketing, product development, sales, and more. There are four main components to analytics: 1. Data collection, 2. Data sorting, 3. Data storage, and 4. Data analysis. The analytics in Data Enrichment stage utilizes AI/ML models for analytics and predictions.

AI/ML Models: AI/ML capabilities enables us to recognize patterns and make recommendations. Some of those recommended actions include: 1) Recommending next-best action for a customer based on predicted behaviour, 2) Real-Time analytics capabilities, 3) Having rules for activation real-time and for later use, 4) Stipulation Engine to process time related stipulations in business orders, 5) Models to decide the type of Marketing Mix.

Segmentation: Based on the analytics and other customer profiles, action can be taken to create audience segments that can be used across the rest of the marketing platforms and channels. Also, since the data is stored within CDP, organizations can look at the past data and create custom audiences as needed with much flexibility.

3. Customer Data Activation & Actions: A core competency of every CDP is its ability to efficiently route data to the tools you use every day across marketing platforms and channels. They are real-time activation tools that allow the CDP to take action immediately when a trigger occurs, such as when a past customer logs in again or a customer matches a particular customer segment.

On the trigger, the CDP data is accessible for use by other systems, and they connect with other Offer Management platforms and systems, providing data to support campaign management, marketing analysis, and business intelligence. This analysis can suggest the optimum next move the company should make to engage or retain a customer. One such critical system is Offer Management System. Some critical Offer Management Functions include: Offer Validation, Multi-Offer Management, Offer Mapping and Creating Attribution Models.

4. Other Building Blocks: There are always other building blocks that while not part of the data flow permeates all the stages of the CDP data flow. The CDP system should be built on a scalable architecture. It should have effective data governance capabilities and have centralized user access controls. For data protection, we can have cybersecurity to protect the data. The data should be auditable to ensure effective compliance. The service and support should be there to customize according to a particular organization needs and flexible enough to be changed as per convenience and data maturity. The workflow should be entirely automated to ensure no manual intervention.

REFERENCES:

1. https://segment.com/blog/customer-data-platform/#:~:text=A%20good%20CDP%20will%20also,into%20a%20single%20customer%20profile\

2. https://exponea.com/blog/customer-data-platform/

3. https://www.hgsdigital.com/white-papers/everything-you-need-to-know-about-customer-data-platform-cdp

4. https://www.element61.be/en/competence/customer-data-platform-cdp