GUIDES
How does a customer data platform work?
Customer Data Platform Architecture
What is a CDP?
CDP stands for customer data platform. Often, CDP platforms may be able to help businesses with customer data management and organization. After combining all the customer data, a customer data platform may help retail businesses gain helpful customer insights. By increasing customer satisfaction, a retail business may be improved in various ways. A CDP can help a retail business know their customer better.
Someone in retail might want to have a customer data platform to help with managing customer data and insights. Not only can a CDP solution be able to combine and organize customer data using the platform, but a customer data platform may also facilitate the data distribution of these customer marketing insights.
A customer data platform may also assist a business in activating personalized campaigns across various channels. While helping with these campaigns, a customer data platform may be able to reduce data discrepancies significantly, which helps marketers get data and insights that they might need in real-time.
Performances across many fields may be able to be improved with the help of a reliable customer data platform.
To more deeply answer the question “how does data platform work,” it is important to take a look at the different types of a customer data platform.
The customer data platform architecture actually comes in four types. These four types are data ingestion, unification, intelligence, and activation. Different customer data platform vendors typically have different focuses, so it is important to understand the differences between the various CDP types.
One of the customer data platform types is those that focus on data ingestion.
Data ingestion is the process through which a customer data platform captures data from all of a business’ sources. With the help of a customer data platform with automation capabilities, this data capture process can save a company time and reduce errors that might otherwise occur with manual data entry.
Customer data platform examples
A B2B customer data platform may help your business bring together all of your customer data in one place, improve marketing insights, help retain customers, and also build profitable growth.
When taking an overview of customer data platform examples, there are four main ways to classify the different types of customer data platforms.
The first type is data ingestion. The second is unification, also known as identity resolution. The third is intelligence. The fourth is activation.
With unification, a customer data platform can bring everything together from a customer’s record. Duplications are erased, and marketers and other workers may be able to see, at a glance, a customer’s full history. This includes any of a particular customer’s history across channels and touchpoints.
Different customer data platform vendors may focus on different needs and challenges that a company may have, which explains why there are various types of customer data platforms that perform differing services.
One of the incredibly convenient benefits of a good customer data platform is that when it comes to intelligence and analytics, such a CDP may provide the so-called single customer view.
This single customer view can show your retail business individual customer behavior, which channels work best for them, and what other data might be able to affect them.
The single customer view may also allow a retailer to quickly and easily check previous purchases by a customer. The platform then attempts to draw insights about the customer’s preferences. With these insights and more analytics, a customer data platform may be able to help your business make predictions for the future, and help you adjust your engagement strategy accordingly.
Customer data platform companies
There are various customer data platform companies out there. They can help a business improve their customer insights gathering and customer purchase information organization and management.
It can be much harder to find one just for a retail business. That does not mean that retail businesses cannot benefit from a good CDP. Retailers may actually be able to receive substantial help in the form of a customer data platform.
Lexer is one such customer data platform that helps retail businesses in particular. Lexer seeks to provide solid customer data platform software for retail businesses in particular. Customer data and insights may be able to be organized, collected, and combined through a customer data platform such as Lexer.
With single customer view insights, a retail business may be able to more efficiently improve the entire customer experience for their customers.
The Lexer suite of tools are simple to use. They can help brands and retailers improve the experience for customers, while also making it easier for the businesses to improve customer experience.
Lexer is a leading provider of customer data platforms for retail businesses, and retail businesses in particular.
To be more specific, Lexer is a customer data platform suite that can provide helpful insights and analytics. Raw, siloed data may be transformed into a single customer view. These kinds of insights can make it much more convenient for a retail business to understand their customers’ desires.
Customer purchase history, for example, may be organized into one place by a customer data platform.
Ultimately, a customer data platform such as Lexer may be able to help your retail business grow lifetime value, boost retention rates, and more. A customer data platform is not simply a marketing tool for the short-term. It is a solution that may be able to provide substantial and beneficial long-term impact on a business as a whole.
Customer data platform examples
Companies may refer to various customer data platform examples to better understand how a CDP platform works. For instance, when responding to customer support requests, a customer service representative can easily retrieve single view customer profiles to know about customers’ recent purchases and resolve issues promptly, rather than asking customers to recount their purchase history, which can be time-consuming and ineffective.
Online retailers could use a CDP to better manage and organize the data accumulated throughout a customer’s purchase journey. By automating data integration and combining important data from other systems, a CDP can help marketers understand which customer experiences were relevant and resulted in conversions.
Customer data platform vs CRM
A customer data platform may help you power personalized customer experiences. Lexer helps with insights, analytics, and gives convenient customer information views centered around how retailers might want to operate.
These days, there are abbreviations such as CDP, CRM that are thrown around when it comes to discussions about marketing and data capture methods.
A customer engagement platform vs CRM doesn’t make for too different a comparison upon first glance. CRM stands for customer relationship management. It is similar to a customer data platform in that both a CDP and a CRM focus on interactions of a business that involve their customers.
A CRM may focus quite a bit on profit and revenue, especially in relation to customer purchases, trends, and more. A CDP can provide retailers with insights that may greatly improve digital customer experience.
In addition, a customer data platform may be able to handle omnichannel marketing, which means that you would not be stuck to only email marketing. Website, email, social media, and more may all be used with a customer data platform.
Ultimately, whether a retail business wants a customer data platform vs CRM as their customer insights and data solution, it is up to that business in particular.
Customer data platform training
Because there are four distinct types of customer data platforms, it may be confusing to understand how a particular customer data platform works and what it focuses on.
If you are wanting to learn more about CDP fundamentals in general, Lexer’s website offers an online library of resources. These expert-written resources may be able to help you with any customer data platform challenges and concerns you may run into.
Customer data platform for dummies is made simpler with the many articles that Lexer has on their library website.
Lexer’s resources may be able to provide you and your retailer business team with helpful customer data platform training. The Lexer library can provide insight into customer trends, up-to-date opportunities, and more.
It is important to know that a customer data platform usually does not provide all of a business’ analytics needs on its own. It cannot perform the entire analytics process for you. It is a suite of tools that can greatly simplify the customer experience improvement process, but it still requires understanding and strategizing from a team of marketers or others.
Top customer data platforms
The help of top customer data platforms can bring many benefits to retail business and marketing teams. A business may be able to obtain better organized and more helpful, actionable insights into individual customers. The data capture process may also be simplified and automated through the assistance of a good customer data platform.
With the assistance of these gained intelligence and analytics, a business may thus be able to improve the overall experience for their customers, as well as make meaningful improvements to the business itself using these customer insights.
Of course, depending on what types of customer data platforms best suit a business, the top customer data platforms for that particular business may vary greatly.
Because of the way different businesses and vendors would need and provide different types of customer data platforms, it can be hard to say which is the best.
Typically, a customer data platform that is considered good would have adequate activation capabilities.
The ideal activation-based CDP would probably be able to connect to all of a business’ engagement channels. That way, you can then build and automate customer journeys and marketing campaigns from within the customer data platform itself. This would help save effort and time.
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