The modern customer journey isn’t a straight line. Most customers will interact with your business multiple times before they decide to spend their money. However, you can map the customer journey—and make more accurate predictions—if you can collect data on each interaction a customer experiences with your business.

A customer data platform is a type of software that helps businesses automatically record data when a customer interacts with a business.

What is a customer data platform?

Customer data platform software gives you a single profile for each customer. It collects online and offline data from a variety of sources, including anonymous visitors. Customer data is added to the CDP (customer data platform) in a single customer view. When a team member needs data on a customer, they can easily go to the CDP and find all of that data in one place.

Customer data platform capabilities

A CDP is a ready-to-integrate software designed for marketers, though other teams may benefit from the platform. After installation and integration with your current data sources, CDPs generally don’t need advanced technical knowledge. Teams can start getting a better understanding of customers right away.

Unlike customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, customer data platform tools are made to handle large data hauls from multiple sources. A CDP can take different types of data from lots of different sources and convert them into an easy-to-read profile of a customer.

These profiles help with identity resolution, so you can see how a customer interacts with your business across devices and channels. For example, your CDP matches a social media profile that engaged with your post to a customer shopping profile on Amazon that browsed your products. You can now see this customer is actively aware and interested in your business.

3 benefits of a customer data platform

• Customize experiences: CDPs let you gather data on almost any customer preference, behavior, or characteristic. Use this data to customize the customer experience and increase the chance of returning customers.
• Improve cross-team collaboration: Different teams often have different data, which leads to different messaging. When all of your employees can see a single customer view, they can create cohesive branding and messaging no matter where a customer is in their journey.
• Work more efficiently: Manually uploading data or cross-checking multiple profiles for the same customer eats into your team’s time. CDPs give you all the data you need—in one place—for faster, more efficient use of data.
  
  

Start with quality data

Creating a unified view of your customers works best when you have high-quality data to fill your customer data platform. Making sure your CDP has accurate data makes your platform more valuable. Data quality services from Experian validate the data you collect, so you can be sure it’s up-to-date and accurate. Learn more about data verification services by getting in touch with our data quality experts and get a free trial today.