What a Real-Time Customer Data Platform Can Do for Your Business

How Actionable Insights Will Fuel Customer Experience 2.0

In the rush to digital commerce, organisations deployed a multitude of technology solutions, each focused on one part of the customer experience (CX)—and each with its own data silo. The resulting fragmented and unorganised customer data is the antithesis of Customer Experience 2.0.

Organisations that are striving to succeed are finding they need a single source of “customer truth” to support personalisation, coherent customer journeys, content delivery, omnichannel interaction, and analytics that provide insight. At the same time, they must comply with substantial new privacy and permission tracking demands coming from regulatory agencies. Both factors are making CIOs, business leaders, and marketers understand they need a single, cohesive customer data platform (CDP).

The Mandate to Change

Customers today demand a very different experience from what was acceptable only a year ago, and any brand that wants to attract or retain them must change the CX to accommodate the factors noted above while also respecting customers’ privacy and consent concerns. This is only possible with a CDP that consistently informs omnichannel interactions to ensure they are well organised overall and respectful individually.

Siloed marketing technology is a problem for the entire business. Other operating departments and teams want to leverage the information gathered by marketing as well, and they also need to meet compliance mandates, regulatory requirements, and customers’ trust expectations. And of course, the security of customer data is extremely important: the data must be managed as the important asset that it is. That’s harder to do when the data is siloed; when data is everywhere, it can’t be managed or secured.

CDP Is the Way Forward

The optimal way forward is a single, consistent technology stack that collects data intelligently, resolved to people, and then facilitates the flow of that profile data throughout the entire organisation. Built upon an open, standardised, and extendable customer data model, this stack simplifies compliance, reduces misuse, enables effective data ingestion, and supports new consent models and dynamic segmentation. The structure and consistency of the platform enable effective use of artificial intelligence and machine-learning techniques that will provide powerful insights and support real-time processes. Relevant context for customers is ensured because personalised interactions across a lifetime of data are now possible.

When an organisation deploys a CDP that supports a flexible, expandable, real-time, customer-centric data model, it provides the foundation for a business to deliver next-generation experiences and to leverage a dependable source of critical information. Firms that adopt this technology are the ones that will win in today’s highly competitive marketplace. Those that don’t will be overwhelmed as they constantly try to integrate disparate data with only a scant hope of meeting compliance requirements and delivering an experience that customers trust.

Ultimately, the CDP will have the same importance to the organisation as its ERP system. The only way to truly gain an accurate perspective of prospects and customers is to have a single source of truth about them. This important topic will be a focal point of the upcoming Adobe Summit. For more information about the CDP and the role it will play supporting Customer Experience 2.0, please visit the Adobe website.