Starting with a Customer Data Platform: what to look out for?

Also read: “Haal meer uit je klantdata met een Customer Data Platform”

Customers have high expectations, and organizations must be able to communicate the most relevant message throughout the entire customer journey. Often, customers encounter conflicting messages across different channels. Traditional marketing technologies fall short in effectively recognizing and tracking customers across multiple channels. The customer data that you are allowed to collect and can collect is spread across various systems and locations. So how can you bring everything together? A Customer Data Platform (CDP) offers the solution. It functions as a unified customer database, accessible to activation technologies such as campaign management platforms and ESPs. A CDP provides a 360-degree customer view, enabling marketers to act in real-time based on data from the entire customer journey.

If you want to start implementing a Customer Data Platform, it is important to first assess the digital status of your organization. For this, we use the 'Digital Maturity Model,' a framework that evaluates the digital maturity of your organization based on different levels.

Digital Maturity Model

1. Foundation; At the fundamental level, it's about the basic activities. Think of a well-designed website with the right metadata, thoughtfully created forms, integrated with CRM and analytics, allowing you to set up your initial campaigns.
2. Optimization; Once this is set up properly, you can start thinking about optimization. Data is increasingly linked, the right tags are used, this way you can continuously improve conversions. Gradually, you start leveraging other channels as well.
3. Engagement; Now you have the ability to gain a clear view of the individual customer. You now know their interests and purchase history, and you can approach them personally—with offers, but also with service notifications.
4. Orchestration; When you know all the ins and outs of the customer - a "360-degree customer view" - you can orchestrate the customer experience: based on predictive models, you move to true 1-to-1 communication. Smart algorithms determine the next step: what content or proposition does your customer need now? Supported by calculations and provided with Next-Best-Actions.

Digital Maturity and the Customer Journey

The Digital Maturity Model is a useful tool to determine where your organization stands in its digital marketing development and how you can improve to the next phase. Naturally, you want to mature quickly, as you can't afford to lag behind in the face of rapid developments. Your customer is evolving too. In the customer journey, they have increasingly high expectations. We often use Google's customer journey model, characterized by the phases See, Think, Do, and Care. This STDC model is a well-known concept. It becomes interesting when we link both models—the maturity model and STDC. The best way to do this is by creating a matrix where we plot STDC onto the maturity model.

Key Takeaways

• The maturity of your data is likely not the same in every phase of the customer journey. This presents natural opportunities for quick improvements: focus on the phase where you are currently lagging behind. The architecture in other phases should be sufficient to implement improvements quickly here.
• Although your maturity is unlikely to be equal in all phases, we recommend keeping it as balanced as possible. This way, you'll benefit from rapid improvements without purchasing expensive software that you won't actively use.
• The actions mentioned in the matrix are just examples. Use them for inspiration and be creative in taking other relevant actions to improve the customer journey.

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.