Not only has Customer Data Management technology exploded over the last decade, the importance of it has gone up immensely as well. The Customer Data Management technology you have has to align not only with the teams and expertise you have in place, but also the strategies those teams use to execute a stellar customer experience.
When we surveyed CDP users for our 2020 State of the CDP report, we found that 27% of respondents saw getting buy-in from other departments was the biggest challenge they faced during implementation. By aligning key technologies with the teams and strategies early-on, companies building— or rebuilding— their Customer Data Management stack can deliver on critical business goals like
- Real-time, cross-channel personalization
- Data governance and complying with privacy regulations like CCPA
- Deploying Machine Learning insights throughout the customer journey
- Minimizing wasteful spending in marketing and time spent deriving insights in data/analytics
These principles include:
- Focusing on data integrity to deliver quality, secured insights
- Thinking cross-departmentally to properly address the reality of today’s customer journey
- Valuing vendor-neutrality in your critical customer data technologies that help integrate disparate data
- Demanding true-real-time capabilities to prepare your teams to meet your customers wherever they are and whenever they’re ready to act
According to Gartner, over ¾ of companies are collecting a wider variety of customer data, relying on that customer data to make decisions, and more areas of the organization are collecting and using that data compared to five years ago. And in the next five years, those trends will continue unabated.
Now, more than ever, customer data will play a key role in the success of companies moving forward.
Gartner’s Analyst Note addresses three of the most common questions from their clients around Customer Data Management, including:
- How do we establish an optimal 360-degree view of our organization’s customers?
- How do we evaluate and prioritize use cases to leverage customer data for business value?
- How do we identify and select relevant data management technologies that will enable these use cases and deliver value?
These are huge questions that every business faces, from SMBs to Enterprises. With many overlapping capabilities and confusingly similar marketing promises amongst the many technologies represented in the Customer Data Management space, cutting through the noise to understand what exactly your company needs and which technologies can deliver will cut down on critical time wasted researching.
The right mix of Customer Data Management technology will be driven by your businesses’ unique needs, but every company will need a way to capture, prepare, integrate, store, govern, and analyze customer data.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew Berger
Matthew Berger is a content strategist and creator with years of experience helping B2B and B2C companies tell their brand’s stories in every form.