How customer data platforms will drive the customer experience growth

In today’s macroeconomic environment, with businesses facing talent crunches, supply chain woes, and inflation, delivering exceptional customer experiences across all channels and touchpoints is more important than ever. And a company’s ability to deliver those exceptional experiences is ultimately dependent on the quality and relevance of the data a company has.

Businesses today are awash in more data than ever before. There’s transactional data, demographic data, and virtually infinite amounts of behavioural data. Add it all up and you’ve got data from anonymous ad impressions to known customer purchases, all the way through to product usage and customer service. Customer data is a superset of all this data together.

In business, connecting dots — and in this case, data — is critical. It’s especially important when the number of ‘dots’ is exploding daily — in 2025, the world is expected to produce 463 exabytes of data per day. And even more so when connecting those dots enables a company to paint a complete picture of every customer. A picture that can be used to deliver each customer a personalised digital experience.

To make the most of your customer data, you need to focus on three things. First, pick your North Star Metric. This is the metric that is the most important to your team. Second, be thoughtful about what you’re collecting. You don’t need to track every metric in the world. Third, make sure you’re storing your data properly.

The marketing field is constantly improving, and it can be challenging to keep up with what’s next in the unpredictable nature of customer journeys. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are relatively new but it is a crucial part of the tech stack in the age of data-driven marketing. It is here to collect customer data, drive valuable insights and make the best decisions.

As a centralised database for ALL customer data, a CDP creates unified customer profiles that make it easy for marketing, sales and support teams to follow a customer’s individual journey. But there’s more—a CDP’s capabilities enable businesses to not only track, but to shape customer journeys using the best possible action at the best possible time and place.

Sure, there are other ways for businesses to handle, secure, analyse and use the data they gather to benefit their clientele and develop meaningful and lasting customer relationships. But these resources can also strain operational budgets, making it imperative for companies to optimise spending and generate consistent revenue streams while building a loyal customer base. With that said, it’s vital to create highly targeted, unified interactions that deliver everything customers are looking for with regard to consistency, alignment and contextual relevance from the brands they connect with. CDPs are the first step to achieving all that and more!

The best way to explain this is by example. Say a company is trying to get a better understanding of its customers. Their CDP would be used to collect data from touch points like Facebook, the company’s website, email, and any other place a customer might interact with the company. The CDP will collect all of those data points, consolidate them into an easily understandable unified customer profile, and then make that profile usable to other systems that might need it — like the Facebook ads platform.

An example: CDPs are becoming a critical element in the marketing arsenal of major luxury retail brands. Sportswear giant Nike, for example, has rolled out an in-store shopping application named the Nike App at Retail. The Nike app stores customer preferences and allows them to shop online or in-store with the preferences and interactions connecting together. The app functions in three ways: Customers can use the app to see if their size is available and reserve it; NikePlus members get the benefits of special offers; Customers can scan the barcode to learn more about a product.

Your clients demand and expect tailored experiences, and an effective way to deliver that is by improving your understanding of their needs, wants and preferences. A CDP provides the basis for in-depth analysis that allows you to enrich every customer touchpoint.

Customer experience is not just a set of actions. It also focuses on feelings. How do your customers or prospective customers feel about your brand? At every customer touchpoint, you can improve—or destroy—how your customers feel about you. So there are important decisions to make at each touchpoint, and those decisions influence how successful your business will be as a result.

Change cannot happen in a vacuum. You’ll need appointed leaders to oversee and champion the change with the support of the executive team, shareholders, and the board

Without insights, a customer experience strategy is reduced to guesswork and reliance on whatever has worked in the past. A lack of customer insights precludes a consumer-centric culture by putting business agendas at the frontlines of the buyer’s journey rather than the buyer. This contrasts directly with a business that works in sync with its consumer-facing teams to win loyalty by serving customer needs first.

Customer insights enable brands to:

• Understand customer behaviour and attitude
• Predict product acceptance
• Anticipate consumer expectations
• Locate and address pain points
• Build loyalty and reduce chur

Consider the following findings from Mitto and Demand Metric’s 2021 report “The State of Customer Experience”:

• Companies with a complete omnichannel strategy are 2x more likely to respond quickly to customer inquiries in real time or within the hour
• 4x more likely to say they have “extremely loyal customers”
• 3x more likely to report higher revenue over the last 12 months
• More likely to report higher average customer satisfaction scores (CSAT)

A Customer Data Platform gives brands the tools to make this happen. With identity resolution, intelligent customer experience insights, and journey orchestration,

The types of solutions in the Martech landscape continue to grow, and sometimes they may seem to have overlapping features or capabilities. This makes it much harder for marketers to find the right solution for their needs, or figure out how these systems can work together. This holds true for CDPs, DMPs, and CRMs alike. They all help digital marketers work with customer data, but are very different at the same time. And more specifically, it’s the difference in the way these solutions collect data, and the exclusive features they offer, that are essential to identify.

Here at Beagle, we understand the Data landscape, this helps us understand our clients better and also place the best candidates, often leading to company growth.

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