David Raab of Raab Associates has launched Customer Data Platform (CDP) Institute to highlight the importance of Single Customer View (SCV), as new entrants continue to enter Marketing Technology (MarTech) segment, creating further confusion among Marketers, as the number of solutions available at the disposal of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) continue rise exponentially.
First reported by he CDP Institute intend to educate marketers about the issues, methods and technology used to manage customer data, with a special focus on CDPs.
According to David,
Today’s customers simply assume that your company knows – and remembers – who they are, what they’ve done, and what they want, at all times and across all channels. Marketers and marketing technologists know that gathering and acting on unified customer information isn’t easy. In fact, just a few companies have actually achieved complete integration. The rest are battling with technology, strategy, budgets, organisations, staff skills, and other obstacles to success.
But customers don’t know or care about those challenges. If you don’t meet their expectations, they’ll assume you don’t care about them and take their business to somebody else they believe will treat them better. Whether those other firms will really give them a better experience almost doesn’t matter: once you’ve lost them, you’ll have to fight twice as hard to get them back.
No wonder so many marketers have made a unified customer experience their highest priority.
David further goes to define CPD,
A unified customer experience is impossible without unified customer data. Most data originates in separate systems that weren’t designed to share it with anything else. Traditional methods for collecting that data into unified customer profiles, such as an enterprise data warehouse, have failed to solve the problem. Newer approaches, like “data lakes”, have collected the data but failed to organize it effectively.
The Customer Data Platform is an alternative approach that has had great success at pioneering companies. A CDP puts marketing in direct control of the data unification project, helping to ensure it is focused directly on marketing requirements. CDPs apply specialized technologies and pre-built processes that are tailored precisely to meet marketing data needs. This allows a faster, more efficient solution than general purpose technologies that try to solve many problems at once.
CPD Vendors
Directory compiled by David already includes the following vendors:
- ActionIQ – Focus on the flow and scale of data, analytics, and campaigns.
- AgileOne – The Customer Data and Engagement Hub for the Enterprise.
- Aginity – Enterprise analytics management.
- Ascent360 – Create Needle Moving Campaigns For Any Marketer.
- BlueConic – Customer data platform, built for marketers to harness the data required to power the recognition of an individual at each interaction, and then synchronise their intent across the marketing ecosystem.
- BlueVenn – Customer analytics and real-time omnichannel customer journey optimisation.
- Datalicious – A full-service analytics agency and technology firm, providing the tools and insights to help companies achieve more effective marketing outcomes.
- Datoram – Helps marketers at thousands of leading companies connect all of their data sources together, whether it’s a handful or hundreds, to form a single source of truth for more efficient reporting, better decision making and total control over their marketing performance.
- Ensighten – The Leading Customer Data Platform for the World’s Top Brands.
- Hull – Enrich all your tools with each other’s data.
- Lytics – Understanding who your customers are, how they engage with your brand and what content interests them are the building blocks for relevant, one-to-one marketing campaigns that increase lifetime customer engagement.
- mParticle – Get data into and out of any system without compromise.
- NGData – Transform customer experience management.
- Omniata – Analyze and manage the user lifecycle with data.
- RedPoint – RedPoint data management and omnichannel marketing solutions simplify the complexity of harnessing data to drive business growth.
- Segment – Collect all of your customer data and send it anywhere.
- Signal – Signal’s integrated technology combines data collection, persistent identification, data onboarding and media activation for real-time cross-channel engagement.
- Tealium – A single approach to connecting data across teams, vendors, and touchpoints in real time.
- TreasureData – Treasure Data connects data and teams together with a full suite of tools that automate data collection and processing. Faster than ever before.
- Umbel – Get better insight, deeper data and more customers with data driven engagement campaigns.
- TagCommander – A new vision for smarter omni-channel engagement.
- YetiData – Virtual Marketing Data Warehouse unifies customer data, no matter how incomplete or imperfect and regardless of its source
I must admit, all of the above vendors are new to me except BlueVenn and Segment. Further analysis is required to understand each companies’ specific offering as there are significant overlap among them. At the outset, the focus here seems to be to help marketers make sense.
Advisory Board Members
- Tasso Argyros, Founder and CEO, ActionIQ
- Anthony Botibol , CMO, BlueVenn
- Scott Buelter, President, Ascent360
- Julia Farina, Director of Marketing, Lytics
- Shawn Goodin, Marketing CTO, JPMorganChase
- Mayur Gupta, VP Growth & Marketing, Spotify
- Steve Herdegren, VP Marketing Operations, Wiley
- Gangadhar Konduri, Chief Product Officer, AgilOne
- Kathy Menis, CMO, Signal
- Cory Munchbach, VP Marketing, BlueConic
- Dave Myers, COO, Co-Founder, mParticle
- James Niehaus, SVP Product & Strategy, Ensighten
- Kazuki Ohta, CTO, Co-Founder, Treasure Data
- Dale Renner, CEO, RedPoint Global Inc.
- Prashant Sridharan, VP Marketing, Segment
- Tim Suther, Founder, Suther Strategic LLC
Single Customer View by UnifiedVU
At this stage, I believe our solution is significantly different from those listed above. The majority focus on building their own marketing database from data collected from a number of software applications and data sources. In this respect, UnifiedVU is significantly different from them.
Our primary focus is to build a presentation layer on top of your software and data silos to help you bring operational intelligence and let you complete your daily jobs that touch multiple software applications faster. We then focus on solving the problem where your customer data is scattered in a large number of software applications.
This is our version of the Single Customer View. We do all of this without storing any data and in real-time. We let you keep your silos as they are.
According to David’s definition of a CDP,
A CDP is a marketer-managed system that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems”. This definition has three critical elements:
– “marketer-managed system”: the CDP is built and controlled by the marketing department, not the corporate Information Technology department. Some technical resources will be required to set up and maintain the CDP, but it does not require the level of technical skill of a typical data warehouse project.
– “creates a persistent, unified customer database”: the CDP creates a comprehensive view of each customer by capturing data from multiple systems, linking information related to the same customer, and storing the information to track behaviour over time. The CDP contains personal identifiers used to target marketing messages and track individual-level marketing results.
– “accessible to other systems”: data stored in the CDP can be used by other systems for analysis and to manage customer interactions.
As we do not store data, we do not meet the definition of a CDP as defined by David.
Nevertheless, its exciting to find someone setting up an initiative to bring like minded vendors together, even if they are trying to solve the problem in the old fashion way – data integration instead of virtual integration that UnifiedVU brings to the market (the next evolution in integration).