Customer Data Platforms (CDP) are a fascinating piece of technology. They are the latest martech solution promising to consolidate an enterprise’s customer data silo’s so that marketers can engage customers via omni-channel marketing. Their promise of always-on, real-time engagement with customers, seems almost unreal. But cloud-enabled, big-data architectures have made real-time data exchanges at scale a reality.
The purpose of a CDP is to collect all available customer data, first, second, and third-party, batch or streaming into one central location to serve marketing needs; all in real time. The ideal CDP is a tool for receiving both your known customers and anonymous, digital customers. It will connect all your customers’ engagements into a singular customer view accessible across the enterprise; allowing marketers to create content and processes to deliver the most relevant interactions based upon a customer’s signals.
Identity Resolution
The need to recognize your customer’s identity is crucial to marketing. Resolving a customer’s identity, across channels and devices is to create a singular view of the consumer within your marketing and operational ecosystem. Your resolution of multiple identity signals across channels and media to enable trusted B-to-C marketing activation and insights. Creating a singular customer record, can be an enormous challenge but it’s something that yields incredible return.
Why do you need ID resolution integration?
Here’s an illustration. Check out this video of Ms. Tamar Beraia playing Prokofiev’s piano Toccata Op. 11. It is a weird and wonderful piece of music which seems impossible to play. Watching her speed of movement, while playing this amazing piece of music, just seems impossible. It reminds me that the orchestration of music, which can seem like a random scattering of notes, is much like the complexity of the customer journey that modern marketers are trying to create.
Identity resolution gives the enterprise, like the musician, the ability to turn the sheet music (people-based data) into a work of art. It is the key component of the CDP. Without the ability to identify where your customers are in their customer journey, you’re not making music, you’re just making noise. Without a unified ID, the event stream is just a flood of unstructured data.
Bringing it all together
As you can see in the illustration, the unified record links the customer to disparate enterprise data sources and blends together into the system creating the parent record. The power of the CDP is its dynamism —as customer preferences and/or transaction history change, the record changes as well. If a customer interacts with an organization primarily through email, and then switches to interacting mostly through social media, the system underpinning the master record would notice this change and update its data accordingly. If the customer also decides to purchase something via a mobile app instead of a desktop interface, the master record will update the relevant information.
The value to the enterprise for integrating identity resolution and a CDP is creating and maintaining a singular, accurate, and continuously updated view of each customer that enables brands to proactively engage their customers at the right moments and meeting their needs with contextually relevant interactions. CDPs connect data throughout the technology stack, acting as a central point of data control that provides insights about customer behavior and engagement history with the brand at the moment of greatest need.
To win consumer attention and affinity, it is necessary for companies to develop and enhance their tools to implement the full potential of marketing in the digital age. With a CDP and a mature ID resolution capability, it is possible to integrate more data, draw deeper insights, and delivering increasingly complex customer journeys across channels in near real time. A CDP and a mature ID Resolution capability together make beautiful music.
Want to learn more? Check out A Marketer’s Guide to Identity Resolution
