"Constant data breaches and scandals have brought new attention to Customer Data Platform (CDP) with the business Martech stack to create a positive and personalized customer journey".

The era of Customer Data Platform aka CDP is just the onset of a commerce engine that serves a pivotal role in data privacy compliance. The market for CDP is augmenting at a rapid rate fueled by the desire to provide improved as well as secure customer experience. The need to work securely with customer data is scattered everywhere. This is one of the reasons why savvy marketers have started learning and confronting the challenges of working with customer data. The reason being, marketers want to maintain the trust of customers who increasingly expect companies to both protect their data privacy and use their data to personalize and customize their customer experiences (CX). Marketers must treat CDP as a great opportunity to indulge in as it holds the potential to properly manage first-party data in a personalized and relevant manner.

As a matter of fact, customers care about their data and their unified customer data profiles, thus they don’t offer it up to companies who are not capable enough to take care of it. In other words, some companies have access to volumes of data but have no idea how to collect it, what to do with it, or how to leverage it across functional departments. And gives birth to disconnected customer experiences and a lack of customer retention. However, this disconnection and lack of trust can be achieved easily with CDP which helps businesses to improve the customer experience across channels by understanding the needs each individual holds and further tailoring the experience to match their interests.
 
The article below unveils the close relationship between CDP and customer data privacy, accompanied by the facts of how CDP fosters the latter. Subsequently, the article will list out various methods to leverage CDP for data privacy. 

CDP: The must-have technology

There is no rocket science required to understand that customers have become more aware of their data and privacy. In the world of the digital era, customers are very well aware of the digital trails that are left behind with every ad they click. Therefore, in order to demolish the privacy issues and to put consumers in the driver’s seat, the Customer Data Platform (CDP) came into existence that bridges the gap between traditional marketing databases and newer digital channels to provide a 360-degree view of customers.

CDP is the latest marketing technology that helps companies to create a single view of their customers by storing data such as web page views, email clicks, and payment transactions. In other words, a CDP helps you build a complete picture of your customers, that too on an individual level. Moreover, when it comes to consumer privacy and data protection trends, the answer is a resounding CDP. Sounds great right? 

The defining characteristic of CDP is that it is a data store and not a campaign execution tool that has a hold of technologies to collect data from customer touchpoints and share information gathered across marketing systems. As a result, there is an improvement in marketing interactions and customer relationships. The main objective of the CDP is to bring together all customer data under one roof and stitch the data together into unified customer profiles. Some of the features may ring a bell and let you hark back to CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Read how CDP is different from a CRM, and even better than the latter, to understand the actual differences.

Ever-Increasing Demand for CDP

Notably, the recent focus on privacy concerns is the repercussions of numerous cyber attacks that lead to massive breaches of personal data. As a result, the consumer data privacy regulation charge has seemed to pick up more speed than ever before. Not to mention, the way companies handle personal data of customers has now changed. All thanks to CDP, a force that has turned into a wave covering all the privacy agendas around the globe. 

The benefits of CDPs are limitless to the entities that look forward to excelling in the present and future. There is no choice in staying away from a Customer Data Platform if you wish to manage your customer data effectively. But, why is it so? Well, to understand this you need to realize the advantages of the same. So, here are a few advantages of the CDP which always keeps it in high demand.

A unique view of customers

CDP is designed with an intent to collect a massive amount of customer data from a wide variety of sources, then unify them in a complete view of the client in all devices and finally channels and ensures that they are available to other systems. Implementing CDP supports the company in understanding the consumers and their behavior. Not to mention, a broad picture of the customer enables sales and marketing and service teams to strategically promote the right message to the right people at the right time and place.

Increased Revenue

Besides proving the best customer data experience to customers, the ultimate goal of the company is to increase the revenue. As a matter of fact, CDP if used in the right direction can surely help companies to attain their ultimate goal. CDP enables tactics that are individualized to each customer, for example, by presenting personalized, relevant communications and recommendations for the content and offers most likely to convert. This way most organizations use this treasure data expertise CDP increases customer retention and the company experiences an overall increase in revenue.  

Customer-centered marketing

Nowadays, customers use more channels and devices than ever before and expect to have unified customer experience in all of them. For example, they don’t consider it healthy at all seeing an online advertisement for a product that they have already purchased in a physical store. Well, all thanks to CDP which helps the company to provide a complete view of customer behavior that can be used to create a complete customer experience without blind spots. Therefore, it is important for marketers to consider CDP if they want to drive customer-centric marketing in their business.

Enhances operational efficiency

Before CDP came into play, integrating different solutions and specific tools to view customer data would consume many resources. However, once CDP came into action, the centralization of customer data became easy with ready-to-use integrations. The process of centralization helps in reducing the time consumed as well as improving operational efficiency. Furthermore, CDP allows businesses to build and connect a Martech stack with a view to adapt to the ever-changing consumer behavior with turnkey integrations, thereby saving hours of integration work. 

How CDP secures customer data?

‘’A Customer Data Platform looks to fulfill that age-old promise of centralizing all the customer data’’.

Data is a valuable currency in this world, and thus its security is the prime cause of the companies. CDP can open a lot of doors for securing the customer’s data and therefore learning how CDP secures data can help you stand out from the crowd of marketing technologies. However, there are many companies that are still unsure about how to comply with CDP to ensure data privacy. They are oblivious to the very fact that what a CDP can do for their organization. 

Well, staying compliant in the evolving world of data privacy laws can feel like an overwhelming task, but this is where a CDP can help you secure your customer data so that you can build trust in customers throughout the customer journey. 

Still not convinced? Let’s take a glance at the following points-

More data requires more management

With the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), businesses now hold a great responsibility to collect data about their customers. It is pretty much possible that most companies store data in multiple places using multiple sources. This is where CDP can help companies by serving as a single point of truth for customer information. Yes, you heard it right. CDP is a growing category and solution set that helps you gather information across different channels, platforms, devices into one single location. This in turn creates a single view of your customers wherein you can easily determine what data you actually need and what you don’t.

Transparency in data collection

In the world of increasing awareness, customers are no longer stupid and they very well understand that their data is valuable and vulnerable at the same time. They also know that their data is consumed in exchange for the services they avail for free. This is one of the reasons why they ask for transparency about how companies may use their data. CDP acts as a sort of a paper trail for data where customers have the access to know where data originally came from which is especially important in terms of compliance and privacy regulations like the GDPR and the CCPA. Also, from a marketing perspective, you don’t collect data from third parties and establish direct contact with customers.

Granular Insights into personalization

The year 2020 has marked itself as a year where customers don’t just want personalization, rather they expect it. Consumers often feel that the businesses are not keeping pace with the personalization expectation which is completely unfair on the customer’s part. Collecting a lot of different data and being able to deliver the data collected in a meaningful way is different which most of the companies fail to deliver. Well, this can be one done today only by CDP as it helps companies to know the value of the customer’s data and how to use it. Moreover, it ensures that marketers have clear plans to determine how to use the data you collect, at which parts of the customer journey, and to what end.

Strategies to leverage CDP for privacy

The expectations of customers from companies have seen a significant rise over the last few years. The most obvious reason being, the customers have experienced good personalized services and therefore they seek businesses that can offer well-maintained, accessible, and insightful customer data. There is no breaking news that all these aforesaid expectations can be made possible only by a good CDP. By the term good CDP, we mean to say that integrating CDP won’t suffice and the platform is deemed to be used in the right manner to promote privacy.
 
Given the overwhelming importance of this issue, the following strategies can be used by brands to leverage CPD for privacy.

GDPR and CCPA compliance 

First things first, both GDPR and CCPA facilitate consumers the right to ask for the data and information that their respective companies are storing about them. In the absence of CDP, the chances of the customer data gathered across multiple systems go missing is relatively high. A Customer Data Protection (CDP) makes this whole process look easy by providing a single source of truth for all customer data. Moreover, CDP complies with the “Right to be Forgotten” regulations, thereby helping companies to get rid of unwanted customer data with complete ease. 

Unified first-party data

Subsequently, there are a few marketers that show higher reliance on third-party data to create identity resolution, a process that is used to create a unified customer identifier across different data sets. These third-party data companies, with their best knowledge, match customer lists with third-party data and further extend it by sending back a unifying customer ID to the brand. However, in today’s era where customer privacy is the utmost important, relying on these sources can be a serious offense. CDPs have their own sets of qualities, using which they can perform this same identity resolution process by using first-party data only, thereby keeping the privacy issues at bay. 

Enforce Cross-channel Preferences

Last but surely not least, CPD is well capable of creating a cross-channel, gold master for customer preferences by simply integrating customer records across data sources with a view to creating a unified profile. Further, right after the creation of this golden master, it can be made applicable to the segmentation rules across different channels to make sure that customers who have opted-out for specific communications do not appear in the list that would have targeted them.   

Conclusion

To conclude, CDP makes it possible for marketers to tie the data together between the systems in real-time, therefore enabling them to divide and target their customers better. Customer Data Protection might be used as a critical part of your data privacy infrastructure, therefore it becomes important that a business first recognizes exactly what a CDP can do for them. A creative CDP strategy is a collaboration of marketing, IT, and other departments that work together to create a positive and personalized customer journey. Not to mention, in the upcoming months and years, the role of CDP is likely to grow even more prominent. 

Want to position your company with respect to privacy over the long-term? Contact us at [email protected] and we will help you see many opportunities in embracing data privacy.