There is a lot of excitement about customer data platforms (CDPs), but there are still many challenges to overcome before CDPs can be truly transformative. To understand the state of CDP adoption, we conducted a survey of respondents in the retail, financial services and telecommunications industries. We found that the top two challenges facing companies adopting CDPs are making sense of customer data and integrating a CDP into their systems.
Making sense of customer data
As customers’ demands and expectations have evolved, so have the needs of CDPs. The datasets they use are getting bigger and more complex. According to the Adobe Acrobat’s experts, “Having your customer data in different systems can make it difficult for you to understand your customers and provide them with a personalized, consistent experience.”
In addition to data from multiple sources, there’s often a need to integrate data into one customer view. And that’s just the beginning: depending on your industry, you may also need to combine information about customers with their financial transactions or other company data (such as product sales).
The amount of data being collected by companies today is mind-boggling. Some industries
collect thousands of customer interactions each day; others may consume millions of rows daily in a single database table alone! That’s why it’s important for a CDP system to be able to make sense of this mass amount of information—and quickly deliver key insights that can help businesses better serve their customers (and save them money).
Integrating a CDP
Integrating a CDP into existing workflows, processes, and systems can be challenging. A CDP solution should be able to integrate with any system or cloud-based service that is necessary for running your business. If you are using multiple CDPs in your bank, it may make sense to integrate them seamlessly so that the data from one system can be used by another without manual intervention. For example, if you’re using one platform for marketing automation and another for financial planning, your customers should not have to manually export their data out of one platform before importing it into another.
Enabling real-time messaging
Real-time messaging is a key component of a CDP. It enables real-time interactions between customers and the company, which is crucial to the customer experience. Real-time messaging can be used for marketing, sales and customer service.
Managing privacy concerns
Privacy, regulatory compliance and data security are critical to the success of any CDP program. However, these concerns can often be a barrier to success if you don’t have a solid plan in place. This section will explain how to address some of these challenges head-on so that your organization can focus on its core mission: building great products!
The ability to analyze customer data in near real-time is essential for success in today’s business world. Customer data platforms (CDP) are the key to unlocking this capability. As we have seen, however, there are many challenges facing companies as they seek to implement a CDP solution. It’s not only about integrating a CDP into existing systems or analyzing data from multiple sources; it’s also about understanding what kind of data should be collected in the first place and how best to use it—and all these things must happen on an ongoing basis as well. But don’t let that scare you off! It’s worth noting that while there may be some initial hurdles involved with adopting CDP technology, businesses that do so stand to gain significant advantages over those who don’t make the switch right away.
