Customer Data Platform (CDP) Features

What is a Customer Data Platform CDP?

A customer data platform (CDP) is a “data unifying software”. Adding it on top of your MarTech stack helps manage your customer experience across every touchpoint — marketing, customer service, and product. It absorbs an enterprise’s data from all sources — batch, streaming, structured or unstructured, transaction or demographic — and makes it available 24X7 to all the enterprise users. The CDP Institute defines a Customer data platform as a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other enterprise systems, putting marketing indirect control of the data unification project. A CDP is not a CRM, a DMP, a data warehouse, or a data lake; the latter is where data is merely stored. A CDP is much more than that. It’s a sophisticated data hub where all things related to data converge — from data sources to customer information.

To cut a long story short, a customer data platform enables brands to make intelligent decisions around the right audience, giving them the right content at the right time using the right channel for the purpose.

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What are the Main Key Features of a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?

What Kind of Data does a Customer Data Platform Handle?

Every customer inevitably leaves behind information while interacting with a brand. When they surf the Internet or interact with companies using other online and offline channels like websites, e-commerce platforms, and in-store interactions, their footprints can be tracked. Here’s some of the data that a customer data platform (CDP) uses:

Transactional data
Includes information such as items purchased, number of abandoned carts, returned products

Customer attributes
Includes name, gender, contact information

Customer service info
Includes customer communications, live chat, number of interactions, and so on

Why a Customer Data Platform (CDP) cannot be Compared to a CRM or a DMP?

Yes, it is a fact that a customer data platform and customer relations management (CRM) tools both collect customer data. The similarities end there, period. Here are some of the differences between a CDP, a CRM, and a DMP:

• A CDP collects data on anonymous visitors, but a CRM gathers data around known customers or leads
• A CRM has a limited purpose: it analyzes only the sales pipeline while a CDP analyzes lifetime customer behavior and customer journeys
• A CDP can track online and offline customer data. In the case of a CRM, it cannot collect offline data unless someone manually enters it
• A CDP influence deals with all types of marketing while a DMPs largely influences advertising
• A CDP collects mostly first-party data, which means straight from the source but a DMP collect mostly third-party data
• A CDP retain data over a long period of time unlike a DMP

What is Identity Resolution?

Conventional rules for reaching customers have experienced a paradigm shift — customers are no longer tied to a single device. This means it has become difficult to identify customers as they move between various channels. To tackle this problem, you need to build an identity framework that unifies a customer’s experience regardless of the channel, and to create a means to ensure targeted and relevant marketing offerings to that customer.

By doing so, you are granted a 360° ‘Customer View’, and a ‘Unified Customer Experience’. A 360° view means we have enough information to have a holistic understanding of a person, and can better model their buying behavior, thus increasing the success rate of our marketing to them. The other half is to have a unified customer experience.

Because we have an identity that links a person’s persona across all devices, we can provide the same quality of customer experience via mobile devices that we might give them in a face-to-face environment. The full process of creating a 360° customer profile and using it to provide a unified customer experience is referred to as identity resolution.

What is “in” now instead is cross-device ID tracking. This is a process of collecting and combining data around a single customer in a way that links all his/her devices used back to him/her. Why is cross-device tracking gaining importance? It is a fact that today, the average person owns multiple devices connected to the World Wide Web. Eg: laptops, smartphones, smart TVs, game consoles, etc.

Benefits of Identity Resolution

By creating an identity profile for each customer, you can better understand the context and intent of customer interactions with your business.
You can also be able to better predict sales figures by segmenting your customers by common profile qualities, offer near-real-time promotional offerings, and have a better handle on customer satisfaction and how to drive repeat purchasing.

Portability of identity also means that you can provide the same quality of service across all channels.

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What is a Single Unified View?

Our unified Single Customer View holds all the most relevant data about the past, present, and expected future behavior of every single customer. Using a single source of customer intelligence, you can easily scale personalized customer experiences across all customer touchpoints.

Customer segmentation can help you in many ways: It helps a business develop focused strategies to hold on to its top-paying customers. Or, to re-engage those clients who haven’t purchased in a while. It is also used to provide a heightened customer experience.

•  Customer data platform helps identify the least and most profitable customers, thus helping the business to concentrate marketing activities on those most likely to buy your products or services
• Helps build loyal relationships with customers by developing and offering them the products and services they want
• Helps improve customer service
• Helps maximize the use of your resources
• Helps improve or tweak products to meet customer requirements
• Helps increase profit by keeping costs down

Your Guide for Selecting a Customer Data Platform

A customer data platform is a “data unifying software”. Adding it on top of your martech stack helps manage your customer experience across every touchpoint – marketing, customer service, and product.

It absorbs an enterprise’s data from all sources – batch, streaming, structured or unstructured, transaction or demographic – and makes it available 24X7 to all users within the enterprise.

So what do I need to do to get it?

Getting a CDP customer data platform for your enterprise’s digital transformation requires some serious thinking. We call it the 5-step process that will act as a guide for you to eventually select the right CDP for your marketing team. Not to mention the fact that at last count, there were over 60 CDPs available in the market, adding to the overall confusion. But first and foremost, you need to understand if your enterprise is ready for a customer data platform.

Here’s a quick checklist for that:

• Are your business goals in place?
• Do you want to meet these goals with technology such as data analytics?
• Does your data sit in silos?
• Is your data accessible to a majority in your organization? If not, can you make it accessible?

Why Choose CDP (Customer Data Platform) Oyster?

You will simply fall in love with the simple yet efficient architecture of Oyster. Our CIP is a development-progressive data management platform with all the necessary components in a place built with years of experience. But at its center is your customer.

The AI-infused Customer data platform has automation capabilities that make your day-to-day marketing tasks perform better.

The agility and brilliance of analytics are coupled with the simplicity of launch, integration, and upgrade of Oyster, all of which will propel your marketing stack into a new orbit altogether. Oyster is not just a standalone Customer data platform (CDP) but goes beyond just merely integrating various sources of data, providing actionable intelligence, obtained from various data points that can be integrated into all your business cells.

Here are some of the steps:

• Its AI-driven algorithm auto-checks incoming data quality
• On this incoming data, the identity resolution algorithm is deployed to identify customers
• On an ongoing basis the addresses, emails, phone numbers, and other aspects of a customer profile are updated
• Oyster’s recommendation engine provides suggestions to your marketing team at every step of the way

For example, one of Oysters’ customer data platform features is the individual graphical element or GUI that allows it to track and personalize the user interface at an individual customer’s level.

Oyster’s ML analytics /algorithms have evolved over time and have a very high level of accuracy. We assure you of a strike rate of over 90 percent.

Advanced analytics with several proven models:

• Estimating Customer Lifetime Value
• Look-alike models
• RFM and purchase propensity models
• Product preference models

Another of Oyster’s Customer data platform features includes natural language querying vis-à-vis the analysis of emails and the context of customer content. It is proven that when questions are asked in a more “natural” way, and the replies come in a readily understandable manner, it exposes data analytics to even a non-C-suite workforce.

How soon can you get going with the Oyster Customer Data Platform?

Nobody likes complications in their lives. Even engineers and developers. In the world we live today, the copious inflow of customer data and a broad swath of data management options can make life very complicated, very quickly. Oyster’s Customer data platform tech and licensing structure is plug-and-play. It’s available as a single product or one that can be built over time adding one module at a time, each dovetailing into the other. Upgrading because of changing business needs or a re-designed architecture is a breeze with no requirement to undertake the entire procurement.

Interested to know more about our Customer Data Platform?

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