Customer data resides in many databases and systems, and can be used to formulate insights to help improve the customer experience. But, the precise benefits driven by that data will depend partly upon your unique business needs, and partly on the chosen solution used to manage it, so it’s advisable to think about the desired outcomes before settling on the most appropriate data management tool for you.

Customer data management is a three-pronged process for businesses, whereby customer information is first of all collected and stored in one place. This may be part of a data warehouse or data lake project managed by the IT department, part of a master data management solution, a tailored CRM project, or indeed marketers and businesses may choose to store their data in a Customer Data Platform (CDP).

Keeping things tidy, unified and in one place… is this your customer data? Or your sock drawer?

During the holiday season, just as retailers expect to see a surge in shopping activity and customer data, many of us expect a wave of socks to engulf us as we open our stockings. Even the most organized people struggle to keep their sock collections in order at this time of year. On an average day, most people will have one in the sock drawer, one in the dryer, several pairs accidentally put into little Jimmy’s room, and more languishing on the radiator. With no system in place to ensure they’re correctly matched, assigned to the right person, and easy to find at a moment’s notice when needed, it’s anarchy. And with new Christmas socks set to be added any day now, the situation is only going to get worse!

The CDP Institute (CDPI) is basically THE body providing key resources for organizations that are researching Customer Data Platforms. As a vendor-neutral organization, its main aim is to act as an authority on customer data management and distribute materials or news that will help marketers to make the best use of their data. Every year the CDPI member survey is sent out in an effort to better understand the CDP buyers’ needs around customer data management.

For those that want to read the full CDP Institute Member Survey 2020 report, you can access it here, or for a summary of the key findings from the report, alongside commentary from Anthony Botibol (BlueVenn's VP of Marketing and CDP Institute Advisory Board member), read on:

A Customer Data Platform has the potential to revolutionize your business by ingesting data from each one of your marketing platforms, unifying it to create a single source of truth for customer data, then using that information to power marketing campaigns for better prediction, targeting and personalization. But the decision to build or buy a CDP isn’t one that any company should take lightly, as it will have repercussions throughout your brand for months, or even years, to come. It will affect the setup time before you can start benefiting from your new technology, it will affect the costs you’ll need to factor into the budget, and it will have lasting impact on your ability to compete in what, at the moment, is a very turbulent and uncertain market.

By the CDP Institute’s RealCDP definition, a true Customer Data Platform must be able to ingest data from any source, capture the full detail of that data and retain it indefinitely (subject to privacy constraints), create a unified profile of an identified individual (that is, a Single Customer View or SCV), and share that profile with any system that needs it. This sounds like a marketer’s dream – but doesn’t guarantee that marketers will be able to access and leverage that data to gain insights, enrich the customer profile, and meet regulatory obligations. For that, an added user interface is needed.

A use case is a statement of what a marketer wants to get out of a project, system or platform. Whether they work for a single or multi-brand retailer, if the business operates on at least two channels, marketers are going to face these use cases as the Top 5 requirements for a Customer Data Platform (CDP):

Confused about Customer Data Platforms (CDP) and how they can benefit your marketing strategies and campaigns? Well, you’re not alone! A new Winterberry Group report holds the answers you need. It clarifies what should be regarded as the core capabilities of a CDP, which capabilities are ‘nice to have’, and what strengths are exhibited by various categories of the technology. It also gives an overview of the market and where it’s headed.

Learn more about what defines a CDP in the extract below, or download the full report here.

According to Winterberry Group’s analysis, the capabilities of BlueVenn’s CDP are industry leading; report provides clarity as to what core capabilities a CDP should have and how they deliver best value to marketers

BlueVenn considers delivering operational excellence through continuous improvement to be a core value. For that reason, we keep an ear to the ground to make sure we understand the common problems our customers are running up against and the functions they’d find it useful to have. Our updates are not made simply for the sake of it, they’re there to make users’ lives easier and to help them maximize their profits. BlueVenn Engage is our module designed to activate data from the Customer Data Platform, to help users to analyze and segment their customer data for perfectly targeted campaigns across every channel – and it just got better. Here’s how.

Over the past three years, there has been a lot of confusion about what a Customer Data Platforms (CDP) can and can't do, and subsequently what benefits a CDP can bring to a company. Here are the 5 most frequently asked questions about Customer Data Platforms:

1. Can I use our home grown solution to create CDP-like benefits?

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) will typically be controlled and used solely by the marketing team, so the information stored will be customer-related (contact information, customer activities/behaviors and transactions). Its raison d’être is to create a Single Customer View (SCV) by normalizing the customer data collected from marketing and operational systems across the business, and drawing together all known information about the customer into one ‘Golden Record’. During the Single Customer View creation process the CDP will cleanse the data, correct incorrect or inconsistent formatting, and merge duplicate entries. The data is also persistent, which means that it is retained indefinitely (unless required to be removed by law), including every change or process, which is then timestamped for 100% traceability.