Blast Analytics and Marketing

Analytics Blog

Supporting Leaders to EVOLVE
Category: Data Management

Evaluate Customer Data Platforms For Your Business

February 25, 2022

If you’re like most people in the business world, you’ve probably been hearing a lot lately about customer data platforms (CDPs). With this much hype, it can be difficult to differentiate between key functionalities that you need for your business and the exciting buzzwords that attract attention but don’t add much business value. So where should you start?

What’s a Customer Data Platform (CDP)

teammates evaluating the different functionalities of cdps on a computer

Let’s start with the basics. CDPs have found an important place in the modern data ecosystems because they centralize customer first party data from across your various customer touchpoints. They’re focused on providing a full 360-degree view of your customer so that you can engage with them in the right ways.

Simply put, a CDP does the following:

  • Aggregates all your customer first party data from various sources
  • Integrates the data to tell a singular customer journey
  • Enriches the story by creating meaningful classifications and potentially
    importing external sources
  • Allows you to operationalize what you know about your customers in meaningful and
    highly monetizable ways while providing true digital experience optimization

What CDP Functionality Should I Focus On?

There are some key things to focus on when evaluating the capabilities of CDP technology to ensure that it fits the needs of your business:

  • Aggregation – an efficient and secure pipeline to import your data into a centralized system
  • Integration – identifying like users across your various data streams through customer stitching
  • Enrichment – classification and segmentation of your customers to drive relevancy and engagement
  • Operationalizing – leveraging connectors with your content management system to personalize assets and target customers

This is just scratching the surface. Read our full article on How to Evaluate CDPs for Your Business or contact us to discuss your needs.

Nathan Poorbaugh
About the Author

Nathan is a Principal Solutions Architect at Blast Analytics with more than 8 years of experience in analytics, customer data platforms, and operationalizing of enterprise data and analytics solutions for customers. He’s built his career on building unique solutions for multiple Fortune 500 clients with strategic innovation and applicability at the forefront of his design decisions. Nathan has a passion for understanding things of complex nature to help organizations get the most out of their data.

Connect with Nathan on LinkedIn. Nathan Poorbaugh has written on the Blast Digital Customer Experience and Analytics Blog.