NGDATA is a global digital experience company that partners with businesses to harness the power of data to drive customer-centricity
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How to select the best Customer Data Platform
When you’re past determining the first couple of use cases, it’s time to look ahead and choose the right CDP that supports the long-term growth your company is aiming for. There are a couple of advanced selection criteria that are relevant for long-term deployment and activation.
Check if the following elements are present in the CDP’s core:
- Scalable infrastructure
- Real-time capabilities
- Scalable data integration
- Cross-channel analytics
- Cross-channel orchestration
- Marketer self-service
- Industry expertise
- Product origin and vision matching your business
Look for the best industry-specific Customer Data Platform solutions
Check if the vendors have a deep technical understanding of your clients and do they know what data would power and propel your use cases? Where’s their roadmap going? The CDP space is still pretty nascent so every software platform is constantly developing. Make sure that the direction the vendor is going, is aligned with your company’s own long-term goals, and find out what specific solutions they created for your business’s challenges.
We developed solutions for the following sectors:
How to select the best CDP use case to start with
Start simple when selecting your first use case. Choose one that requires limited inputs and outputs, this is how you’ll get value a lot faster, and think of a concrete challenge your customer is facing today. Analyze where most of your customers reside and figure out which inbound or outbound channel to align with first to reach the majority of your customers. Next, determine which metrics you want to move pretty quickly such as more revenue or online customers, and come up with a use case that influences that metric and gets you in the market faster.
After a while, you can expand the number of use cases and go for technically more challenging features such as real-time interactions and going cross-channel. Critical in all phases is to have everyone in your organization on the same page, as they will all get great value from a CDP.
For more tips on how to select the first use case, read our blog post.
Scaling the use cases
Many companies struggle with the scalability of their customer experience (CX), and the initial expectations are rarely met.
We can distinguish 5 typical CX scalability issues:
- setting up an extra use case,
- maintaining the implemented use cases,
- orchestrating between multiple use cases simultaneously,
- the infrastructure beneath the platform,
- and the team members that have to work on the use cases.
This is where you need a ‘real’ CDP as it is an essential part of the martech stack if you ever want to master these key issues and scale up your CX. A CDP enables you to assemble all the necessary data from several systems from inside and outside the company and build dynamic, real-time customer profiles. These ‘single sources of truth’ will help you become a lot more customer-centric, as they are the source for highly relevant actions and communications, and at the same time, they give the necessary insights that make it possible to fine-tune the orchestration.
