Customer Data Platform: Unlocking Customer Data

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Wonder why after you search for a particular product on the internet, you’re bombarded by recommendations almost every time you’re on the web? Or, after you add a product to your cart but leave without making a purchase, it keeps showing up before you every time you’re surfing the internet? 

There’s no Math. Rather, it’s quite simple The brand that you just interacted with just integrated all your touchpoints on a customer data platform (CDP) and is trying to sell their product to you based on your actions.

Now, if your business offers goods & services, you might want to learn more about CDPs. That’s what we’ll explore in this blog. Let’s start with the basics before we delve into the specifics.

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What is a Customer Data Platform

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is software that merges data from various sources to create a centralized view of the customer containing data on all touch-points and interactions with your product/service. You can segment the data in an endless number of ways to customize marketing efforts.

The data platform provides a single source of truth for individual customers with data on their behaviors, preferences, and interactions across different touchpoints in the customer journey. The purpose of a CDP is to enable you to effectively use customer data and unlock its benefits for optimizing the customer experience. 

By integrating data from multiple sources, it empowers a business to gain actionable insights required to deliver personalized experiences and design tailored marketing campaigns. 

What is Customer Data?

Customer data refers to the information consumers leave behind as they interact with companies online and offline: through websites, blogs, e-commerce portals, and in-store interactions. 

There are four types of data that the Customer Data Platform collects and organize.

  1. Identity data. 
  2. Descriptive data. 
  3. Quantitative data. 
  4. Qualitative data. 

01. Identity Data

Identity data builds the foundation of each customer profile in a CDP. This type of data allows businesses to identify each customer and prevent costly replications uniquely. Identity data includes: 

  • Name, such as first and last name.
  • Demographic information, such as age and gender.
  • Location information, e.g., address, city, and zip code.
  • Contact information includes a phone number and email address.
  • Social information, such as Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.
  • Professional information like job title and company.
  • Account information, such as company-specific user IDs and account numbers.

02. Descriptive Data

It expands on identity data and gives you a complete picture of your customer. The categories of this data type vary based on the company.

For example, a real estate agent company may collect lifestyle details about their customers. While a child-care company collects data about the number of children in their target customers’ families. 

Descriptive data includes:

  • Career information like previous employers, industry, income, and job level.
  • Lifestyle information includes the type of home or the number of vehicles.
  • Family information like the number of kids and marital status.
  • Hobbies, such as magazine subscriptions and gym memberships.

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03. Quantitative or Behavioral Data

Quantitative data enables businesses to understand how each customer engages with the brand by gathering data on interactions and transactions. 

Quantitative data includes:

  • Transaction information includes the number and type of purchased or returned products, the number of abandoned carts, and order dates.
  • This information also includes RFM analysis — recency (How recently did a customer buy from a brand?), frequency (How often does a customer shop?), and monetary value (How much does a customer spend on a purchase?).
  • Information on email communication, such as email opens, email click-throughs, email responses, and dates.
  • Online activity such as website visits, website click-throughs, product views, and social media engagement
  • Customer service information like communication dates, query details, and service representative details.

04. Qualitative Data

Qualitative data provides context for customer profiles; it gives customer data personality. This type of data collects any motivations, opinions, or attitudes expressed by a business’s customers — whether relevant to the company or not. 

Qualitative data include: 

  • Motivation information e.g., How did they hear about the brand? Why did they purchase a specific product? or What made them choose your product over others?
  • Opinion information, like their satisfaction and likelihood of recommendations.
  • Attitude information, such as favorite color, animal, textile, or food.

As you can see, a Customer Data Platform collects and consolidates a wide range of data. It’s important to note that the data may vary based on your business and industry.

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Customer Data Platform: What are its components?

There are four key components of a CDP that enables you to leverage the true potential of customer data to create a customer-centric brand.

Here are the four components of a customer data platform software: 

  • Data collection: Gather data from multiple sources. 
  • Data integration: Unify data to create a comprehensive customer profile. 
  • Data segmentations: Organize customer data into actionable segments
  • Data analysis: Extract meaning from data to uncover patterns and insights. 

Let’s look at these components in detail. 

1. Data collection: 

The data platform allows you to collect customer data from various sources and acts as a centralized data repository. It captures both structured and unstructured data, such as demographic details, product preferences, purchase history, survey feedback, and customer service interactions. 

The best customer data platform should provide flexibility in terms of the data you can collect. The software should also be scalable to enable you to evaluate a large volume of data and adapt to business growth. 

2. Data integration:

The platform integrates all the collected data to create a 360-degree view of the customer profile. It identifies and merges records that belong to the same customer across different sources of data. During this process, it automatically removes duplicates and inconsistencies. This ensures that your unified customer profiles are accurate and up to date. 

The process involves data mapping and converting the attributes in order to build a standardized view of the information. It aligns data formats and normalizes fields to make sure the data are consistent. 

3. Data segmentation:

In this step, the customer data platform segments customers based on attributes extracted from their data. Audience segmentation enables you to tailor marketing efforts for specific customer groups, leading to personalized experience and improved engagement. 

The software uses the customer profile to segment them based on their purchase record, geographic location, interactions, and more. Grouping customers based on shared characteristics helps you better understand the various market and their unique needs. 

4. Data analysis:

Data analysis is a central part of this process. You simply cannot gather customer feedback and let it sit in your system. The customer data platform software helps you convert the feedback into meaningful and actionable insights giving you a deeper understanding of your target customers. 

The tool offers built-in analytical capabilities to report and visualize data. This allows you to identify patterns and uncover hidden insights to drive strategic efforts. The CDP should not only enable you to analyze data but also create reports and dashboards to allow everyone in your organization access to consistent and complete data.

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Customer Data Platform: benefits

Investing in a CDP can help your business maximize the value of customer data. With a centralized hub for data, you have a unified customer profile which will enable you to make targeted data-driven marketing strategies. 

Some of the benefits of the CDP software are:

  • Single view of customers.
  • Agility of the platform. 
  • Democratization of data. 
  • Effective CX and marketing. 
  • Operational efficiency. 

Let’s dig into these benefits. 

1. Single view of the customer:

CDPs are purpose-built to collect data from a wide range of sources, unify it together to form a comprehensive view of the customer across devices and channels, and then make that data available to other systems. That view of the customer can move with your business and customers to wherever it needs to be.

2. Agility of the platform:

A CDP provides organizations with a tool to build and connect a flexible technology stack that adapts to ever-changing consumer behavior and changing technology trends. By focusing on the data foundation, Customer Data Platforms give businesses tools to collect and integrate data from everywhere to drive better customer experiences.

3. Democratization of data:

The value of customer data extends throughout any business. Marketing, business intelligence, customer service, and beyond all depend on the availability of data to drive the business forward. 

A CDP democratizes access and the ability to leverage customer data across organizational departments and customer touchpoints.

4. More effective customer experience and marketing:

Customers are using more channels and devices than ever and have high expectations for being delivered a consistent customer experience. Customers do not like when they have advertised a product online that they’ve purchased in-store. 

By implementing CDP, organizations gain a consistent view of customer behavior and use it to drive the most comprehensive customer experience possible without blind spots.

5. Operational efficiency:

The task of integrating point solutions and setting up new technologies and tools used to be resource-intensive while also not being very reliable, as custom solutions can be hard to maintain. 

CDPs centralize customer data with maintained turnkey integrations saving hours of integration work. Also, you can set up audiences and business rules centrally in one place and can be applied across various tools saving huge amounts of duplicated effort.

Without customers, there is no business. They belong at the center of all that you do, especially your marketing, and in order to place them front and center, you need real customer data.

Customer Data Platforms deliver the immediacy, accuracy, and unity that you need to keep aligning your organizations, inspiring your marketing, and engaging your customers.

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Conclusion

In today’s landscape, where customer-centric experiences are a deciding factor in business growth, customer data plays a pivotal role. Businesses that harness the power of this data build a lasting relationships with customers and maximize profit. This stresses the importance of the Customer Data Platform. 

It is a strategic investment to consolidate and leverage data gathered from customers. It enables you to create personalized customer journeys, foster loyalty, and stay ahead in today’s saturated business landscape. 

FAQs

A CDP is software that allows a business to collect, integrate, segment, and analyze customer data. It unifies data from various sources and creates a consolidated view of each customer. The software offers a centralized platform for all information about the customers, allowing everyone in your organization to access a consistent and complete view of each individual customer.

A customer data platform software integrates customer data from multiple sources and organizes it to give you a single source of truth. It provides you with a holistic view and understanding of your customer base.

The software unlocks the potential and leverages the advantages of customer data. 

  • The CDP provides a comprehensive view of customers. 
  • It segments customers and helps you identify their unique needs and preferences, enabling you to optimize marketing strategies. 
  • Personalizing experience with the help of a single view of customers leads to enhanced customer experience.

CRM system focuses on managing the brand’s interactions and relationships with customers. It typically involved sales and customer service. 

CDP, on the other hand, merges customer data from various channels and systems and provides you with a unified view of customers.

The four types of customer data are: 

  • Identity data: Mostly contains demographic data of the customers. 
  • Descriptive data: Gives detailed information on customers’ experience. 
  • Quantitative data: Tells you about the engagement, interactions, and perceptions of customers. 
  • Qualitative data: Offers context on customers’ motivations, attitudes, and opinions.

Customer data platform software helps collect and integrate customer data, building a unified view of your customers. 

Whereas CDXP uses the capabilities of a CDP and other tools to help brands deliver personalized CX.

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