Simply put, a Customer data platform is a gathering of software that creates a single source of unified data. This is then available to other systems. All of your data is taken from the various input sources before it’s scanned through and then mounted into a unified location to create a profile. That profile of data is then shared with other marketing systems so that they can use the data for marketing needs.
Customer data is essential for any company because it’s a key way to gain valuable insight into how customers and clients are behaving. Whether you’re a solopreneur, a company of 15, or 5,000, having a single repository of customer data on a single platform, across all departments (customer management, sales, tech, engineering, support, marketing, analytics) can greatly impact the value of your work effort. But these days customer data is endless.
Customer data is being tracked on all devices these days, with an emphasis on smartphones with certain trigger words. This includes Google keywords that an individual looks up, what pages they look at, and how long they linger on a page. Data about what someone's purchasing habits are, and how often they repurchase are also on record. There is even data on what songs they listen to, what songs they skip, what their geotags are in images, and where are they repeatedly going. All of this data improves marketing insights so that a business can target, retain, and build its customer base.
There are four types of customer data platforms—data ingestion, unification, intelligence, and activation.
Data ingestion is the process that brings together data from all of the different places your data is stored across various systems. Because this is the first and oftentimes easiest process a lot of companies prefer to do this integration process on their own. However, doing data ingestion on your own can eat up a lot of time and money — two things no one likes to waste. They also risk being inaccurate. The benefit of a customer data platform is that it will streamline this process and place data from all of the sources into one. It will even take data that’s jumbled up and disorganized and reformat it for the platform it’s being used on in a way that rids a lot of error and miscommunication. What data ingestion does is track certain habits or traits, or big events.
Unification is also referred to as identify resolution. And that’s when all of the information on the customer data platform creates a single customer record. So, the customer data platform is used two-fold. One is to integrate all of the information of numerous customers into a convenient, mess-free location. And two is to form a single profile on each customer so that you can hyper-target certain needs and wants. This provides what’s known as a “360-degree single customer view.” Thus, creating an at-a-glance customer history that creates data records for other marketers or people on your team.
Now you can extract certain data that is useful for the end goal. Think of items like name, location, phone number, age, and date of birth. Each little bit of information becomes useful and unified. From all of this information, the customer data platform will form a series of explanatory information on the user profile like graphs, maps, statistics, etc.
Do you want to know how to specifically target your customer at what time, what channel, and in what way? The customer data platform takes these questions and breaks them down into intelligence and analytics. Its single view will provide straightforward information in a quick, effective way. This enables you and your team to easily identify what to do next. This is where marketing teams oftentimes come in to create customer personas. Customer personas group customers together that have similar behavior patterns. From the time of day, to age and location. You can then target sales in specific marketing campaigns and create a tailored approach. It’s through this segment that the data goes from just information to actionable next steps that can be personalized.
The final part is where all of this customer data creates automatic campaigns for your actionable tools. It will tell you what to do, when, and where.
To choose the best customer data platform that’s right for you you should do a few things. First, determine what your most pressing needs are. Then, get an understanding of who will be using the customer data platform in your company. Look at what tools they will need the most. From here, determine what warehouse system you are comfortable with, and then start to dig into your options.
When it comes to customer data platforms it is important to do what’s best for you and your company. After all, you want to optimize your customer results. Take your time when deciding.
