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.” Rather than providing true customer data unification, these CDPs leave marketers with duplicate records, out-of-date information, and vulnerable to data misuse.
