Are CDP's the Emperor's new clothes?

There is a lot of buzz around Customer Data Platforms (CDP’s) for 2019. They are at the top of the Gartner Hype Cycle and also top of most marketers’ ‘wish lists’ for this year, but will they really deliver on the promises?

Gartner says, “A CDP (or Customer Data Platform)is a marketing system that unifies a company’s customer data from marketing and other channels”.

Does this sound familiar? For many years, marketers have been reaching for the illusive holy grail of a Single Customer View, incorporating every scrap of information known or inferred about their customers and prospects to be held in a single repository.

The industry seems to be littered with large scale enterprise-wide SCV projects that are always ‘a year away’ from completion, or they have been stalled or even abandoned. These failed projects are usually blamed on the previous CMO, whereas the new CMO is going to be successful by replacing these failed projects with a shiny new technology – this year, for the mid-market at least, that will often be the implementation of a new CDP! But is this the new “Emperor’s clothes” of the customer technology world?

There is value in the key capabilities that should be delivered by a CDP – whether it’s customer profiles linked across channels, up-to-the-minute data to support real-time decisioning, orchestration of next best experiences for all customers and prospects. Companies that can get these systems implemented will undoubtedly reap the benefits of improving their customers’ experiences.

In order to be successful with a traditional CDP, companies will need to move or connect all existing siloed data from the myriad of technologies that are in place and hold them in the CDP. In order to get a full picture of consumer data throughout the business cycle, companies will need to incorporate Sales, Marketing and Customer service data together in one system. The CDP will then need to be able make decisions on what actions need to be taken for each individual customer or prospect and advise the outbound or inbound channel what to do – and this needs to happen in real-time to satisfy the demands of the modern “omni-channel consumer”.

But surely, something can be done that will save companies from having to move data from one system to another and also creating yet another database?

What if the data stayed where it currently resides, but could be used to help make decisions on other existing technologies and channels?

Think of it as a “Virtual CDP”, with all of the power of a normal CDP but saving time, energy, and coordination by integrating this approach.

This is exactly the type of solution that Kitewheel can provide. We connect your existing technologies in real-time,allowing decisions and actions to be made based on the latest state of your customers or prospects. As the data stays in its current location, companies are seeing benefits within weeks rather than months or even years as the time to CDP project completion shrinks dramatically.

To learn more about the power of this solution, visit Kitewheel.com and request a demonstration today.