Today, digitally savvy marketing organizations not only have 360-degree view of their customers but also actively engage with customers across the channels of their choice. Customer Data Platforms lay a strong foundation for this. From the look of it, CDPs are becoming a standard part of everyone's corporate IT architecture, so we must prepare for this new reality, and we cannot fully prepare without understanding the associated problems with this developing technology.
While a number of point solutions have adopted the name CDP and claim to solve the use cases CDPs are supposed to solve, the reality is that separate point solutions struggle to actually deal with the complex, nuanced technological challenges associated with unifying data and activating it across channels. But it’s clear the challenge is real. The CDP use cases must be addressed, and marketing and IT teams need a solution. Existing point CDPs may not be the solution these teams need for a number of reasons. For one thing, there’s a lot of confusion about what a CDP is and what exactly it should do. But beyond that, analyst firms are wary about whether CDPs in their most basic form can take businesses all the way to the customer experience finish line.
Above all, CDP success depends on learning to build successful customer experiences. Today’s consumers demand a delicate balance of personalization, convenience, efficiency, control, and privacy. The unified, complete, accessible data provided by CDP makes it easier to deliver this balance, but it’s still up to marketers and others throughout the organization to design the right experiences and execute them effectively. Marketers who focus on delivering great experiences will find they naturally develop into effective CDP users. Marketers who don’t focus on customer experience will find that even the most skillful CDP use creates little long-term value.
Still, companies need to solve the problems of disparate data and disconnected journeys. Adobe’s real-time CDP offering provides an integrated, robust solution that builds on your existing technology. This allows you to focus your attention on your customers instead of complicated integrations or costly workarounds. Just because point CDPs have failed to live up to their hype doesn’t mean you can’t solve the problem they were meant to address.
We present to you, “Top 10 Customer Data Platform Solution Providers - 2021.”
