CuriousOwl

CDP has gained tremendous popularity in the recent years because of the varied use cases it applies too. Using CDP, a can help in solving a lot of marketing challenges without putting too much effort and it’s a substantial investment to upscale and improvise your marketing and communicating efforts. But with so many vendors out there providing ‘n’ number of functionalities, it can get overwhelming in choosing the right vendor which is suitable for your business.

That is why one can start by acknowledging the right use of Customer Data Platform. And use cases will act as a stepping stone in this journey. Here, I have tried to go through about some of the primary use cases which can assist you in making the right decision or at least providing basic idea about the platform.

Understanding, What is a Use Case? 

Defining, “What is a Use Case?” Is quite important here to form a base for our discussion. Because what can be an important problem for one organization may not be as relevant for another. Defining the topic will not only help us create a base but also help us in coming to the same page.

Use case represents utility of any product or services. How the application is going to act when an input is provided to the system by its user and the outcome it’s going to produce. A Use case should be able to define the pain points which need to be solved. It will not just support is solving issues, but also help in identifying new opportunities.

For example, you are looking for an application or tool to help you achieve cross-channel engagement with your customers. You have a lot of data available within your organization distributed across various systems and departments. Whether it’s your CRM systems, databases, or any other marketing tools. Using this data and information, the application is going to provide the desired outcome within the stipulated time.

CDP can assist to solve many use cases. Here, we have classified those use cases in 12 major categories based on how CDP is used in various organizations. But don’t worry if you don’t find yours. You can have your own set of cases as per your requirement and customize CDP accordingly

12 Main Customer Data Platform Use Cases

Data Management: Managing data is one of the most important use cases of any type of CDP. All variations of data, whether it’s structured, semi-structured or unstructured, available from any type of data source is ingested in the CDP. Then data gets cleaned, processed, integrated, and standardized for activation across external platforms.

 Data is captured here is a requirement in the future, it comes handy. Data management becomes really efficient with CDP. CDP helps in adding, resourcing, enabling and accessing any additional data sources and transforming that data for marketing. CDP ensures data persistency and orchestrating proper flow.

 Analytics & Insights: Analytics and Insights – Deriving relevant insights by analyzing data becomes very challenging if the data is not consistent and dispersed across different platforms or departments. Data Preparation in CDP helps create a unified and persistent customer database. CDP possesses capability of batch processing and real-time data analysis.

CDP helps in customer journey analytics, Lifetime Value analysis, Identifying high value customers, Campaign Analytics, Behavioural analytics, etc. It not just augments legacy analytics techniques, but also can assist in developing new analytical models more rapidly. Identifies gaps and data silos across organization, unifies them and leverages data for deeper insights. Overall, it aids analytical and marketing teams by providing data at macro and micro-level.

 Engagement: They developed CDP to help marketers drive engagement with its customers across channels and other mediums to enhance customer experience and loyalty. Increased engagement can come from understanding more about customer affinity and interests, which is what CDP they built for.

 Better customer engagement results in better performances, which ultimately results in higher ROI(Return on Investment) for marketing spends and more efficient use of marketing budget. You can create an experience funnel to ensure high customer engagement throughout customer journey.

It can be done via Email Newsletters, Customized Ads, Personalized Content, Web/Mobile Push Notifications, Rule-Based Segmentation-engage customers(active or inactive) with remarketing, Ad Campaign Setup specifically tailored for a particular audience segment, implementing Product or Content recommendation applications based on individual profile.

Measurement & Attribution: Implementation of right measurement and revenue attribution model is crucial to leverage and use all channels effectively. Sometimes, because of inefficient attribution, companies end-up attributing to channels which had just last-touch(last click) interaction with customers. And the other channels, which played a significant role in acquiring those customers, loses its value.

Since CDP tracks complete customer journey, you can take better decisions and strategically allocate resources across the board. With CDP, you can measure Customer lifetime Value(CLV) more accurately and have better Cross-Channel marketing attribution.

Activation or Deployment: Unifying data and activating it across various external platforms can be effortlessly done using Customer Data Platform. You can deploy data in almost real-time to create exceptionally personalized interactions. You can say that CDP act as a Data Source for other external platforms and highly structured and rich data can be availed using it.

Data is easily accessible to other systems, whether its advertising platforms, personalized communication channels(Social Media Platforms, Messaging Apps, Email, Push Notifications, Website Personalization), Analytics, Visualization/reporting, Customer Service Software’s, Data Warehouses, CRMs or any AI & Machine Learning applications.

Privacy & Governance, Compliance: Currently, data governance is the building block of your digital business.

Identity Resolution: Currently, Data governance is the building block of any digital business. User Privacy carries an utmost importance in recent times and every country, companies or organizations are taking unbending measures to ensure compliance and protecting customer data. CDP collects all PII(Personal Identifiable Information) and other behavioral data of its users, in order to drive personalized and relevant experiences to customers, but it also makes sure about consumer’s privacy is uncompromised. 

Whether it’s GDPR, CCPA or any other regulations, CDP assists the organization to become compliant with these regulations. User consent and collection are managed transparently on CDP. Major benefit of having a CDP in place for Data Privacy and Compliance is that it acts as an affordable, scalable and secured repository for user’s consent and personal data.

Orchestration: Designing a true cross-channel experience for a customer using available data is what a CDP strives for. The adamant of machine learning and artificial intelligence in the field has made Omnichannel orchestration extremely coherent. You can send very targeted and personalized messages specially tailored for the individual customer across all channels. Customized messages for better communication are possible throughout users’ journey no matter which platform or channel they are using.

Contextual Relevance: In today’s era, if your communication is not contextually relevant, then any effort that you put on your marketing or conveying your message is a complete waste of time. You will not get excellent results if the messages are not aligned with users’ interest, behavior or affinity. Being contextually relevant simply means serving consistent and pertinent content to your users on a right place at the right time.

 Customer Data Platform’s capability of synchronizing all the data and stitching it to individual profiles makes it adequately straightforward. You can deliver personalized and engaging content.

Any sophisticated reporting, visualization and BI applications can be seamlessly integrated with Customer Data Platform. Marketers can get a better understanding of their customers and get deeper insights, as CDP provides rich data at a very granular level.

Whether you are looking to get data at the macro level – for ex, the directors of the organization want to visualize the overall performance or department level to take decisions at the top level or the marketing team want to analyse customer journey across all channels to understand consumer behaviour. CDP can deliver all variations to its users for better decision making.

Prospecting & Acquisition: CDP can be really helpful in taking your prospecting game to the next level. As you know, the platform can create prime quality audience segments, which can be dispatched to the marketing platforms. Most of the marketing platforms have capabilities of Lookalike Audiences, which can be created based on these segments.

The quality of these newly created lookalike audiences is going to be great and you will gain new customers with less marketing spends and achieve better return on investment. You can create models based on CDP data to select the best prospects from the existing leads.

Readiness for ML/AI: Any customer-centric organization now understands the value which AI and Machine Learning can bring to the table. Powerful actionable insights can be derived at an accelerated pace with scale. Till date, any machine learning models could not provide any significant result. Not because ML technology is not fully developed or there are issues with those models. Its mainly because the effectiveness of Machine learning depends on data quality, which is usually unstructured and data accessibility.

Customer Data Platform, in this case, act as a vital source of high quality and consistent data. Structured raw data can be availed from CDP to train the machine learning models and create those models highly accurate and efficient. CDP act as a consistent data source on which the ML models can be trained and deployed. This ML learnings in succession can provide augmented ability for activation on external platforms.

Optimization: Making the best use of any resource is what anybody can strive for. CDP can act as an information hub to identify performing and non-performing assets and optimizing them to bring noteworthy outcome. You can do various types of optimization such as Engage-Time Optimization(Send emails or messages to customers at optimal time as per their preference), Cross-Channel Optimization, Ad Campaign Optimization.

CDP can help leverage consistent data across channels, which can help you in creating relevant strategies for personalized and engaged content. Create testing blueprint for different scenarios to improvise customer experiences in real time.

Initially, how many use cases you should work on?

If you are new to CDP implementation. There should be 2-3 key use cases to support the business case which can drive real impact on your business growth. Be specific and clear in defining your use cases. You should be able to align the use cases with your business objectives.

How to build your own Use Case for CDP based on your requirement?

You might think, with so many use cases already available, do I really need to create my use cases? The answer is yes, you may need to do that. Every organization differs from one another. Of course, your organization can be categorized based on industry, B2B or B2C, and many other parameters. And you can share various Use Cases with them based on those categories, but within organization, each one is different. Your organization’s challenges, mission for your customers, structure, processes, department setups, etc., can differ from what others are having. So, you can have different or rather unique set of use cases catered to your organization.

Following things you can work on to getting started with the creating your own Use Case:

Start with Self-Assessment:  Identify the skill, organization business needs, existing systems and data. Talk with all the members of your department about the problems which they are facing within department and the all data variations which they are having at their end.

 Bring team members onboard: Explain to your team what you are trying to achieve here and how this initiative is going to help in the growth of the overall organization. If you have a thorough understanding of the CDP utility, then teach them about it.

Creating a Use Case Worksheet: This worksheet is going to give you a clear and structured into what all things are important and should be considered while creating your use case. Each column in the worksheet should have clearly defined metrics, goals and KPIs for which the Use Case is created.

Set a Timeline: Evaluate everything inside the organization, whether it’s any specific requirement in any department, adding a new functionality, complexity of that problem which you are going to work on, how much working hours required, etc. and create a timeline for how much overall time it’s going to take.

Have a CDP Audit blueprint: Implementation of CDP can be a tedious task in starting. And aligning the use cases with your business objective is what you should strive for. Document everything and clearly define your use cases and based that you can start evaluating the CDP vendors.

Cdpinstitute.org has a very descriptive and step-by-step use case generation approach. It starts with having a general descriptive information about the development of use Case. It mainly describes what tasks are required for the use case. You can start by defining the Name, Problem, Benefit and Solution of the Use Case.

Then you can move forward with narrating the goals, industry, systems, channels and data sources that is going to be used in the use case. There are a bunch of already defined Use Cases classified by the institute. Identify and confirm the uses cases which closely relate to your use case. Once that is done, then you can move ahead by explaining the and KPIs and functions. 

Who should be involved in the development of Use Cases? 

It’s always better to explain everything to all the details to everyone within the organization. Let them know why you are trying and what you are trying to accomplish from this. Set the right expectation for everybody. Choose the key members from each department who can assist you in building your case. But, let the team members from each department decide how much they want to involve.

You can ask from the CDP vendors itself. – Tell them about the type of data which you have at your end and ask them what all use cases can be defined based on data available at your disposal.

Anybody with the skill or experience combining Marketing + Data + Technical will be the right person who can certainly help make the right decision. 

If you are facing difficulty in developing the use cases or having dilemma selecting the right vendor appropriate for your organization, then it’s advisable to hire a consultant who is an expert in the field. You can reach out to CDPInstitute.org, which is a vendor neutral organization founded by David Raab (The person who coined the term Customer Data Platform). He and his team will certainly help in identifying the right solution for your company.

Ask the CDP Vendors these sets of questions while evaluating the CDP

• You have already implemented CDP in your organization and if any new Use Case arises, how quickly can the data stored in CDP can be used?
• How pricing is going to vary as and when data volume increases?
• If there is a requirement of adding or removing certain functionalities in the application, if that can be done? If yes, how rapidly the process can be initiated. 
• How efficient is the system in protecting the customer data and making sure that there is no data leakage?
• If the vendor says data is available in real-time, clarify with them what exactly they mean by real-time? Does that mean data activation will happen real-time or just data ingestion?
• Is both Technical and Non-technical users can use the platform? Because most of the marketers in your team might come from non-technical background and it’s important to onboard a platform which is comfortable for most of your people.

Conclusion

Once you are onboarding any CDP vendor, you should have a very clear picture in your mind about what all things can be expected from the platform. And understanding the use cases for which Customer Data Platform can be helpful and orienting that with your business objectives is your first step towards making your marketing efforts more customer centric.z