Today’s customers have been trained by Amazon, Netflix, Spotify and many others to expect personalized experiences. Consumers demand personalization but have little tolerance for firms that do it poorly. Marketing technology vendors offer many personalization tools to help. But those tools need accurate, organized and accessible data that includes information from all sources, presents an integrated picture of each customer, adds intelligence to help guide decisions and is easily available to the systems that deliver the front-line experiences. Unfortunately, assembling quality data is hard.
A new solution has recently appeared: the Customer Data Platform (CDP). As purpose-built products designed from the start to assemble and distribute customer data, CDPs promise to be faster, easier, cheaper and more flexible than previous solutions. But CDPs are not widely understood and such promises rightly arouse much skepticism. This paper aims to dispel the skepticism by explaining what CDPs are, why they overcome previously unsolvable problems and how you take advantage of them.