How to implement a Customer Data Platform (CDP)
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You’ve made the decision to add a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to the foundation of your martech stack because you want to capture, unify, and activate omnichannel customer data. The “smart” part of a Smart Hub CDP manages decisioning by providing predictive insights about your customers. One of the key steps in your Smart Hub CDP implementation plan will be understanding the range of use cases the CDP can support and seeing which ones align best to current business needs. Consider these five phases to get the most out of your solution: Pave the way for broader adoption: As you evaluate and share progress from the first use case(s) in your CDP program, decide what you want to adjust as you add the next scenario.
You’ve made the decision to add a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to the foundation of your martech stack because you want to capture, unify, and activate omnichannel customer data. Now, it’s time to plan for a successful implementation, so that you’ll maximize the ROI of your investment in this digital transformation. We’ll provide insights into the key decisions you’ll need to make to become an exceptionally customer-focused and data-driven organization.
As digital touchpoints for marketing, commerce, and support proliferate, customer data has become inevitably fragmented. Information ends up sprinkled across so many different channels and trapped in organizational silos. CDPs make sense of the chaos by merging customer data into a set of unique profiles that every business function can share.
In building the business case for your CDP, we share how a CDP begins by collecting and cleaning up all the available data in an organization, whether it’s from first-, second-, or third-party sources. Once the facts have been rationalized into one complete profile for each customer, a smart CDP can activate your data and recommend the next-best action to take in just about any business situation.
CDP technology has advanced at a fast pace in recent years, and you want to make sure to choose one that will meet the needs of your data teams, as well as business decision-makers across the company. Leading solutions provide intuitive ways to get data into and out of the system. The solution should allow you to upload a data plan that gets applied to vast stores of customer data and then download reports in whatever formats each department requires.
A Smart Hub CDP goes even further, consisting of three specific parts: The “CDP” part owns your customer profiles, resolves identity conflicts, and groups similar customers into segments or target audiences. The “smart” part of a Smart Hub CDP manages decisioning by providing predictive insights about your customers. And the “hub” part helps you orchestrate campaigns and content in ways that are highly personalized to drive audience engagement.
One of the key steps in your Smart Hub CDP implementation plan will be understanding the range of use cases the CDP can support and seeing which ones align best to current business needs. Here are a few of the most common CDP use cases that are proven to drive meaningful results:
As with any strategic initiative, the decision to integrate a CDP requires thoughtful planning. Consider these five phases to get the most out of your solution:
What can you expect from a well-planned CDP implementation? Within a few months, most companies start to see reduced costs and increased revenue through a combination of improvements. For example, you may notice these types of changes:
For a real-world CDP implementation success story, read how Emirates integrated customer surveys and personalization with Sitecore CDP to improve the customer experience for travelers around the world.