Customer data platform (CDP) has gained significant popularity as it offers businesses a better way to manage their customers, prospects, and sales activities. It is used by most of the top B2B companies such as Salesforce, SAP, Oracle etc. CDP helps B2B companies to collect and analyze customer data at scale and improve their sales process. However, choosing the right CDP provider is important because it can influence your business’ success in terms of revenue generation and lead-to-customer conversion rates. Read on to learn more about CDP.
What is a customer data platform?
A customer data platform (CDP) is a software solution that collects, stores and analyzes customer data. CDP solutions can help businesses connect with their customers in a personalized way by collecting not just their names but also their interests, hobbies and other information that makes them feel more like an individual.
As per the Adobe Real-Time CDP’s professionals, “The CDP is a cloud-based solution that can be accessed from anywhere, which means you don’t need to be physically present at your office or store location to use it.”
What customer data platform offers?
A customer data platform (CDP) is a data integration platform that helps you to collect, cleanse, enrich, and analyze customer data. It helps you to improve customer experience, increase revenue and reduce costs by:
- Collecting all the customer data from different sources like CRM systems or third-party platforms.
- Cleansing the collected data so that it can be used for analysis and reporting purposes.
- Enriching the collected data with more information relevant to your customers. This may include demographics like age range or household income details; purchase history like what products they bought from you recently; their social media profiles if available; location-based information such as where they live or work etc.; even whether they have kids at home etc.
Why consider CDP for B2B business?
A CDP helps you gain new insights about your customer data and allows you to understand your customers better. A CDP can help you with the following:
- Understanding what data is relevant for your business, as well as how it’s being used
- Improving the accuracy of your customer profiles by consolidating data from multiple sources
- Gaining new perspectives on customers through machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) analysis
How to choose a suitable CDP vendor?
Choosing a suitable CDP vendor can be a daunting task, especially if you are not familiar with the market.
Here are some key areas to consider:
- Customer view across all channels – A good CDP should provide a comprehensive customer view across all channels. This means that it should provide insights into your customers’ activities on web, mobile and social media platforms, as well as their interactions with your employees (such as phone calls or emails).
- Support for all data sources – Your CDP should support all your data sources, including those from marketing automation tools such as Salesforce or Marketo. Also, consider if there is any integration available with other business operations such as accounting software or CRM system. The more applications the platform supports, the better it fits into your business operations workflow seamlessly.
Now, you must have a better understanding of how customer data platforms can help B2B businesses. If you’re still unsure whether it’s worth investing in a CDP or not, it is recommended that you contact your vendor to find out more about what they offer and how it could benefit your business.
