Why Customer Data Platforms Will Set You Up For Data-Driven Growth
According to David, the formal CDP Institute definition of a customer data platform is, “packaged software that builds a persistent unified customer database that’s accessible to other systems.”
‘Packaged’ software means it’s something you ‘buy’, it is not a data warehouse or a data lake that you typically ‘build’ as a custom project.
“Unified persistent customer database has multiple components to it,” David says, “It’s unified as it takes in data from all sources. This means it doesn’t just work with some subset of data.”
A customer relationship management (CRM) system, for example, will work usually with the data the users have entered into the system, without usually importing data from other sources. A data management platform (DMP), traditionally works with cookies that get ‘thrown away’ after 60 or 90 days.
David says CDP has a unique combination of features which makes it the ideal platform.
“No one feature is absolutely unique only to the CDP, it is the combination that makes it different. The combination is there because It is designed to build those persistent, shareable profiles for all the other systems.
