Get more out of your customer data with a Customer Data Platform

The CDP market is growing rapidly, with more than 150 vendors offering various solutions. Each Customer Data Platform has its own unique features. This often makes it difficult for organizations to choose the right CDP. It is important to understand the differences between CDPs so you can select the best platform.

What is a Customer Data Platform? 
First of all, what exactly is a Customer Data Platform? Imagine a centralized hub that collects, aggregates and analyzes all your customer data from different sources. That's what a CDP does. It acts as a unified customer database and provides a (real-time) 360-degree view of each individual customer. What marketer doesn't want that? Think of it as a single source of truth for all customer data, eliminating the need to juggle data scattered across different platforms.

You can lay out the CDP landscape in many ways. There are different vendors with different solutions. 

Three crucial steps for choosing a Customer Data Platform
With all these different CDP solutions in mind, it's important to choose the right CDP for your organization. These three steps will help you make the right choice:

1.  Determine the main challenge that a CDP can address within your organization.
   Why does the organization need a CDP? What is the main focus for the CDP? It makes a big difference whether the CDP should help solve data problems or instead focus on data activation and personalization.
   
   
2. Evaluate your current data infrastructure and determine the position of the CDP within it.
   What solutions are currently being used and what problems do they solve? What will be the new position of the future CDP within this infrastructure and how will they be connected.
   
   
3. Compare different CDP options based on integrations, functionality and scalability.
   What is the main focus of the CDP? What are the key functionalities? What integrations are there with different CDPs? These questions will help you compare different CDP options and make the right choice for your organization.

At GX, we help organizations get the most out of customer data with our various services and solutions that deliver tangible results. As an experienced Customer Data Platform (CDP) consulting partner, we support the independent selection, implementation and activation of multiple types of CDPs.