There is a common misbelieve that a Customer Data Platform, or so called CDP (read the basics), only serves the marketing department. Know that this is not true. It all depends on how deep your strategy is ingrained within your organisation.

A well-designed CDP strategy has the potential to not only bring marketing efficiency but also to make several departments happy. To name a few: Finance; Sales; Legal; Customer Service; IT, and so forth.

Increased profit

Probably the most important benefit for your Finance counterparts is that a CDP will drive stronger revenue by increasing marketing efficiency.

A better understanding of your customers and the ability to orchestrate their experience in real time will allow marketing to serve the right message, at the right time, to the right folks – undoubtedly leading to better conversion rates. When you say better conversion rate, you also say increased revenue and increased benefit.

Better customer service

By essence, your CDP will connect the dots between all the touchpoints a customer has with your brand. Then, redistribute this information across the business in real time.

What does that mean for customer service? It means they will not only have access to the customer’s personal information and order history. They’ll also see what marketing communication the customer was exposed to or what content they were interested in on your site.

In other words, the customer representative will be able to personalise the communication based on the latest customer’s experience and preferences, whether that is on the website, in-store or with your latest paid media campaign.

Stronger risk management

Adopting a CDP is also managing risks faster and better for your organisation. This translates in less troubles down the line for your legal department. In fact, a CDP, by unifying all sources and user profiles in near real time, will reduce the risk associated with siloed data and lower the odds of data loss or leak.

Additionally, it allows for faster privacy management. Typically, each data source will have its own privacy system. Without a unified customer profile, this process can become very tedious. Think about a user who wants to be taken out entirely or who would like their data to be used in a very specific way. A CDP puts you in the driving seat and makes it easier to unify and manage users’ consent across different marketing flows and other laterals such as sales or customer service.

Less engineering burden

There is a tendency to add new technology systems as they get released to the current environment, with the objective of being more and more data-driven. This always requires additional investments, brand-new implementations, building connectors from scratch and more manpower to maintain the structure in place. In other words, more connections to and between more data platforms. It goes without saying that you will also need additional resources in the form of an analyst or data scientist to cleanse and make that data actionable.

When it comes to a CDP, most of them come with out-of-the-box integrations with your own data flows. This will not only lead a much faster set-up but also will reduce and dedupe the amount of engineering support needed to deploy the tool. A CDP often simplify the CX ecosystem with fewer connections.

Remember that when pleading a case for a CDP to non-marketeers, you should convince them it will benefit everyone by:

1. Increasing revenue
2. Improving customer service
3. Reducing the odds of data loss
4. Making users’ consent more manageable
5. Reducing the burden on engineering

In the end, having a company-wide data strategy with your CDP takes you a step closer to being a real and fully data-driven organisation, which is not a nice-to-have but a must-have in today’s world.

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