Create unified profiles that elevate the customer experience.

1. Trusted data sources.

The foundation of your customer profile is the data you collect about your customers. Whether zero-party data from account signups, first-party data from web, mobile, and offline interactions, or second- and third-party data you share with partners, it must be clean, flexible, standardized, and easily accessible for real-time experiences. An open-source data model like Adobe’s extensible Experience Data Model (XDM) normalizes and standardizes data while also providing a way to store metadata about user permissions and preferences. With clean data, machine learning is better, faster, and more effective. “When you think about how companies and the technology that support them are siloed, there’s data sitting all over the place,” Caruso explains. “Folks want to bring that data into Real-Time CDP for the purposes of activation. The XDM is what customers are using to normalize it and reconcile it so that it’s understandable to the rest of the company.”

2. A stellar center of excellence (CoE).

Developing a new way to manage customer data takes more than just the right technology. It takes business acumen and the right team to initiate change. That’s why you need an audience center of excellence — made up of CIOs, CMOs, departmental heads, data scientists and legal representatives — to provide oversight and create best practices to ensure the success of the transformation. These cross-functional teams work together to identify the data each department needs to improve their business processes, reconcile disparate data sets, develop a segmentation strategy across teams, set enterprise key performance indicators (KPIs), and create an activation roadmap.

3. A real-time solution.

While many CDPs were designed as point solutions for specific functions, a CDP that works in real time to create and enrich unified customer profiles as customers engage with your brand provides value to the entire company. Your technology should be scalable and robust enough to be an enterprise solution, and not just a departmental tool. With an enterprise solution, you can share and activate customer profiles across channels such as web, mobile, email, call centers, and more, extending the value of other technology investments. This accessibility means better resource use, like cutting down on IT requests, to deliver value to the entire company. When the CDP is enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI), it can surface rapid insights to help you prioritize high-propensity profiles.

A CDP collects your data into one place and unifies it into activation-ready customer profiles that you can immediately access for personalization. You can then send these profiles to destinations according to your marketing strategy and help deliver the next best actions exactly when they will make the most impact.

The right CDP is privacy-centric, with data usage labels and policies built in and customizable, to ensure compliance with company and government regulations. A CDP works with anonymous and known customer data and can stitch together personally identifiable information (PII) such as names, street addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses across customer data sets, based on the customer’s or company's needs. You can use a CDP to identify repeat visitors and tailor messaging accordingly. This known data can come from your CRM, POS system, phone communications system, or any other business system that collects data. In contrast, pseudonymous data (whether first-, second-, and third-party data) provides you with context, behavioral, and business data to give you information that you can use to make better business decisions.

 2. Enhance profiles.

To create exceptional experiences that last a customer’s entire lifecycle, profiles must be dynamic. A real-time CDP continually adds data as it is gathered to reflect exactly where the customer is and what they want right now. You can also extend beyond first-party data sets to find insights and scale with access to second- and third-party data.

3. Build audiences.

In a real-time CDP, you can segment data sources to help you market to your desired audience. Data flows in and is organized at speed. And you can find additional insights and scale using built-in models like AI for propensity scoring and look-alike audiences.

4. Activate profiles to destinations.

With audiences at the ready in your CDP, you can send them to the destinations that are integrated in your system or ones you’ve configured with APIs. This is where personalization happens.

“When you think about this through the lens of activation, this unlocks the capability to deliver these highly personalized and relevant customer experiences that make someone want to buy, make someone loyal to your brand, make someone want to engage, make someone want to continue further down the funnel,” Caruso says. She then adds, “Being able to have customer data you want to action on in place and then deploy it into relevant audiences in the moment to impact what that individual sees based on everything we know about them is what creates differentiated customer experiences.”