With a lot at stake for Businesses, exponential growth expected in the Customer Data Platform Market

With businesses being deluged by customer data of all sorts (whether transactional, demographic or the whole range of behavioral – or impressions from ads, purchases, service history and product usage), the need to have a platform that ties it all together, is imperative.

Feeling the pressure to attract and retain customers, more and more businesses are embracing customer data platforms more than ever before. So much so that the industry research intelligence provider, The Insight Partners has said that the Customer Data Platform market

The report, which spans the five major regions and 18 countries across the globe, gives an overview of the customer data platform market, with an eye on global trends. It presents an in-depth report on the various segments such as deployment, components, application, size of organization, industry vertical, among others. This report spans the major regions and covers 18 countries across the globe.

Customer Data Platforms and Businesses

Most customers use more than one channel to connect with a business. But outdated technology stacks that businesses use, simply are not able to handle the proliferation of channels and the data that the brand has about its customers is all scattered, in siloes or located in multiple places within the system.

The Customer Data Platform gives businesses a unified view of customers – it builds customer profiles by bringing all the data from various touch-points together – information and clues that customers leave behind as they engage with a business or the way the use the internet.

There is data about the identity of a person – name, demographics, location, contact info, professional and social details, etc.

Apart from this there is information about his career, his family, his lifestyle, his hobbies, etc. There is also the data about the ways each customer engages with the business – his transactions, how frequently did he buy, how recently and how much did he spend. Did he check the website? Open an email? Did he have any service issues? There is also a lot of data that can prove to be very insightful about a person – what made him your customer? Where did he hear about your business? How does he rate a particular product? Why did he pick this over others?

All this information is very valuable to a business. A customer data platform, while improving customer relationships can complement your existing marketing stacks and augment your marketing efforts.

Data is a great, yet highly under-utilized weapon in a marketer’s arsenal. Data-driven marketing and strategies can completely change things for a company. A Customer Data Platform with the right thinkers to drive it can simply revolutionize businesses

A CDP can help prevent data siloes – it can unify all the data, collate it all in a central location and make it accessible to everyone who needs it. It gives businesses authentic data – the best kind of data to base their marketing decisions and strategy on. It empowers Omni-Channel marketing bringing all the data together giving businesses a unified voice across multiple channels connecting with every customer, regardless of the size of the customer base.

While all of this is true, unless a skilled, astute and seasoned marketer handles a CDP, the investment in a platform like this, can be just pointless. A skilled marketer must be able to use the ammunition at hand (the data and the CDP) and harness their power to help businesses grow efficiently and reach their highest potential for ROI. If they are not able to do that, investing in platforms of all kinds and sizes would be pointless.

At the end of the day, it is the people. Despite artificial intelligence and all the emerging cutting-edge technology. It is still the people. And that’s where the great differentiator is. So it’s up to marketers to up their game and hone their skills and take the businesses forward.

Marketers need to think smart and build a data-backed strategy that will pivot their Brand forward. They need to go way beyond mere cross-selling to their existing customers and engage with them meaningfully across all the stages of their lifecycle with the brand. They need to create great customer experiences for each of them, anticipating their needs and wowing them every step of the way. And that is not something that is easy to do, considering the high expectations from customers who not only have experienced great encounters with brands, they now expect it as a matter of course.

They need to know exactly how to harness the power that a CDP places in their hands – they need to know how to work a CDP and get the best ROI from it. CDPs are marketer-managed systems. So unless they know exactly how to work it, it can become just another investment that doesn’t give back. If in-house efforts don’t work, then outsourcing this to the right experts in martech can and must be the way forward.

Finally when the chips fall, technology will do its magic, but it will be the right people who will emerge the game changers and the earth shakers.