Marketing today means one-to-one personalization, rapid fire reaction time — and it has to happen at scale. To meet this challenge, marketers must understand their customers’ wants and needs, but also their behaviors and ultimately “who they are.” While much of the data is “out there,” marketers struggle with the convoluted task of gathering fragmented data from siloed systems and sources to create a meaningful profile that can be used to deliver contextually relevant experiences that matter.

Marketers are looking to customer data platforms (CDPs) because of their promise to combine various data sources to build known customer profiles. However, as Forrester points out, many “CDPs lack the crucial capabilities to solve for identity resolution, data hygiene, and cross-channel orchestration,” leaving marketers with duplicate records, out-of-date information, and vulnerable to data misuse.

Real-time CDP lets marketers unlock the potential of their customer data with actionable profiles that update in real time and can be instantly activated across channels and devices.

The profile starts by integrating data from all customer touchpoints, combining personally identifiable data from sources such as CRM and loyalty programs, with unknown user data — like web searches, ad clicks, and device IDs. The profile is then deepened with streaming updates, cookie-less enrichment capabilities, and data cleansing and identity resolution tools to create a detailed, up-to-date, single identity. This profile can be used to deploy one-to-one, timely experiences or to create segments based on specified use cases. Finally, private customer details are kept private with security and privacy tools that make it easy to enforce regional and organizational data policies.