What to look for in a CDP

(This blog is adapted from the white paper, Extending the Real-time CDP with AI-driven Personalization. To read the full white paper, click here.)

Customer Data Platform (CDP) adoption is on the rise worldwide and it’s easy to understand why. Marketers need comprehensive customer data to understand customer behaviors and deliver personalized customer experiences that build deeper engagement and lasting loyalty.

A CDP makes customer data usable, collecting it from disconnected systems and creating unified profiles that are available for any system or department that needs them.?Before CDPs, organizations struggled to build unified customer profiles and were forced to work with partial data available in disparate systems.

Selecting the right CDP for your organization, however, is daunting. There are so many options available with differing features and capabilities. Some CRMs and marketing campaign automation tools have incorporated CDP-like capabilities. Others meet all requirements established by the CDP Institute and are RealCDP? certified, and some CDPs extend even further to provide advanced customer analytics, hyper-personalization and real-time capabilities that build deeper customer engagements and drive loyalty as an outcome.

To make CDP selection a bit easier, look for the following key features in a modular solution that provides the ability to comprehensively orchestrate and coordinate with your existing technologies:

• Automated data unification: Automating data unification and ensuring teams and systems across the enterprise have access to clean, up to date customer profiles helps organizations increase operational efficiency.
• Embedded real-time AI and ML: An AI- and ML-driven CDP with real-time capabilities generates data-driven insights that help the business understand the relevance, impact, and trajectories of customer behaviors.
• Persona discovery and dynamic customer segmentation: Dynamic customer segmentation, anchored in analytics, helps businesses market to continuously optimize customer groups. A CDP with persona discovery and dynamic segmentation can help brands target their campaigns to achieve high conversion rates and lower costs.
• Next best offers and recommendations: Real-time customer analytics algorithms can leverage CDP data to surface next-best-actions and offers for each customer including recommended just for you (RJFY), frequently bought together (FBT), journey next best action recommendations (Journey NBA), and top trending products.
• Journey orchestration: Journey orchestration links what were once ad-hoc interactions into a connected series of frictionless interactions that lead the customer along an engaging journey no matter when and where they interact with your brand.

Each feature mentioned above yields incremental gain. When used in concert, they become a powerful engine for optimizing customer value and building deeper customer engagement.

Conclusion

A CDP can help brands use data-driven insights to deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences in real time to increase offer acceptance, cross-sell and upsell, loyalty, and CLV. Not all CDPs are alike, however. To build deeper customer engagement and drive loyalty as an outcome, look for a CDP that goes beyond RealCDP requirements and provides advanced customer analytics, hyper-personalization, and real-time capabilities.?

TCS Customer Intelligence & Insights? (CI&I) is an AI powered, real time CDP, customer analytics,?and loyalty management software solution that delivers actionable insights so brands can deliver hyper-personalized customer engagements in real time and drive loyalty as an outcome.???

CI&I collects, cleanses, unifies, and stores data from multiple sources into one location so business units across the enterprise can access a single, real-time view of the customer. CI&I leverages advanced AI-driven analytics to turn data into action enabling organizations to reach the right people with the right message at the right time, resulting in improved brand recognition, customer engagement, and higher conversion rates. ?

Unlike other CDPs, CI&I is built on an extensible platform with pre-built, industry-specific analytics use cases that speed time to value. In addition, the low code platform enables business users to easily configure and build business use cases to meet their unique needs. CI&I can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud based on data security and compliance needs. Its agile, micro-services architecture complements existing marketing technology investments.?

Click here to see the TCS Customer Intelligence & Insights? RealCDP certification from the Customer Data Platform Institute for more information about the TCS real-time CDP.