Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are powerful tools to collect, unify, and activate customer data across digital and business platforms. However, the reality often falls short of expectations, leading to frustration among organizations investing in CDP projects.
If you find yourself grappling with the challenges of a CDP implementation, it's time to rethink your approach to data capture, and perhaps even data management in general.
The Data Debacle
Identifying data shortcomings
The primary issue plaguing CDP projects revolves around data – data gaps and integrity.
Data is housed in numerous platforms across the business. As these tech platforms capture and distill thousands, if not millions or billions of data points each day, it’s only natural that this unshared data becomes siloed, compartmentalized, and unstructured. The benefit of combining these data sets is never realized because systems aren’t natively configured to share this data and the data gaps only widen.
Business units are left with data sets that reside within the tech dedicated solely to that department, fragments of information about a brand’s customers that have meaning only to those working with that data. However, when combined with the data from another department’s tech, along with the digital engagement data from websites, apps, those fragments equate to a powerful digital identity and digital profile of a customer.
Overcoming poor data quality
To address these shortcomings, successful CDP projects bridge data across systems. They deploy customer data capture that prioritizes digital identity verification to create persistent digital profiles, across digital platforms, devices, and over time.
The Scale Problem
Uncovering data accessibility and usability challenges
CDP projects are often met with another mountain to climb – the inability to utilize data when needed, along with a lack of real-time digital identity resolution. Without a structured approach to make data usable, organizations struggle with data governance issues stemming from disparate data feeds.
When you can’t connect the data, you’re left grappling with pieces of customer data that can’t be structured or landed into your systems to be actioned. If you’ve bought into the CDP vendor’s promise of real-time data capture, you’ll be let down. Yes, CDPs do capture data in real-time, but the catch is that they can’t package or structure your data in a usable format in real-time to land it into your system. This leaves you out of luck if you want to actually action on it in real-time – best case, it will be available in hours if not days.
Bottom line, if you can’t use your data to impact the interaction someone is having with you at that moment, you’re fighting a losing battle.
Safeguarding scalability
Successful CDP implementations ensure data is always available in the right format. These deployments rely on structured data models for seamless integrations in real-time and have the capacity to capture all interactions without the need for custom code or tags that don’t bode well for larger scale data initiatives further down the line.
Successful customer data platforms are structured to instantly retrieve profiles of anonymous, known, and authenticated individuals, while maintaining complete data ownership and control – think first-party technology. And they cover their bases with established comprehensive audit trails to track data sources effectively and efficiently.
The Control Conundrum
Identifying data ownership and compliance difficulties
Many CDP projects experience a loss of ownership and control over data, leading to compliance risks and shortcomings to persisting consumer digital data preferences. Poorly controlled data and compliance structures also jeopardize the safety of personally identifiable information (PII) within system integrations. This can be detrimental to the brand, eroding customer trust.
Securing data ownership and compliance
Successful CDP initiatives focus on capturing, storing, and persisting user preferences as part of their profiles. They prioritize data ownership and control, implement robust measures to protect PII, ensure all data is first-party, and maintain the flexibility to comply with diverse privacy regulations.
90% of marketers deem their CDP inadequate to meet their current business needs.
It’s time to flip that script.
By identifying potential pitfalls early on and adopting solutions that enhance data accuracy, establish robust digital identity verification, and enable real-time data utilization, organizations can unlock the full potential of their CDP investments.