What is a CDP?
First: What is a CDP?A CDP is software that unifies customer data into a 360-degree view of each customer and enables business users to export customer profiles, segments, and intelligence via connections to engagement channels that customers interact through. Simply put, a CDP is an audience hub that facilitates personalization wherever customers show up. By leveraging CDPs, organizations can gain valuable insights into customer behavior and orchestrate targeted experiences across channels.
It is worth noting that a “360-degree” view of each customer is more theoretical in nature than absolute. Brands often desire to ingest every data point into their CDP, but rarely end up achieving the mission due to marginalized returns. Instead, a CDP is often perfectly useful if it includes less than 100% of customer data that a brand owns. Slalom advises brands to focus on including the data points useful for understanding and optimizing customer experiences, and not more.
To begin understanding a CDP’s scope, let’s review their foundational capabilities:
Data unification to collect data and establish a single view of each customer
Audience intelligence to understand customers and predict what’s next
Audience segmentation to enable targeted communications and experiences
Data activation to inform final-mile engagement tools of specific audiences and intelligence about them to assist personalization
