Customer Data Platform (CDP) provides a unified platform, wherein it brings together all the customer data from different sources and stitch the data together and catapult it into a unique customer profile. This will help the marketer to work easily with customers.
Example: For a long time, I was looking for a platform that can give me a set of my target customers, age ranging in 28-48 years, and are looking for their career progression, as they are almost at the stagnation of their career journey. If I could get their details (personal emails, contact, etc.), my marketing team can reach out to them and help in addressing their challenges, help them with setting their career goals, strategic planning, and promotion potentials. Also, a highly effective hyper-personalized customer experience, very unique to the customer.
Before the advent of CDP, there is no dearth of software applications or platforms, which can provide a 360 view of customers, however, the major missing piece of the game was an actionable insight, which can help companies or marketers, or individuals to take immediate action.
CDP is not only collaborating the customer data from various sources, make them into a unique profile, and segment the profiles in such a way to make this highly useful for the marketers.
The Customer Data Platform Institute provides the following definition of CDP:
“A Customer Data Platform is a marketer-managed system that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.