Three Ways a Customer Data Platform Will Transform Your Business

Content Guru explores how Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) deliver immediate value for customer service, self-service, and business insights.

Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a tool that unifies, harmonizes, and activates your customer data to drive efficiency and create outstanding Customer Experience (CX).

CDP reduces data duplication, unifies customer profiles across channels, and identifies critical trends across your customer base to coordinate business strategy.

These are big picture goals, and often take years to fully realize. That doesn’t mean that the CDP is only a long-term proposition, though.

Adopting a CDP drives real value in the here and now. From the moment of adoption, the CDP introduces new opportunities for efficiency.

The CDP can:

• Empower customer service and sales teams with accurate data to deliver effective support and power proactive communications.
• Improve customer routing and self-service options to improve quality of life for your customers and take some pressure off your customer-facing teams.
• Extract critical data from your systems of record, giving you full visibility over your entire customer base.

And that’s just the beginning.

1. The CDP Empowers Customer Service Teams

Your customer-facing teams are responsible for Customer Experience (CX), across every channel and touch point.

From outbound sales to ongoing support, your customer-facing teams drive the interactions that make businesses tick. Empowering those teams addresses critical business challenges:

• Empathetic support makes customers feel heard and valued, strengthening loyalty and reducing customer churn.
• Personalized outbound communications have unbeaten cut-through – the customer wants you to solve their individual challenges, not be deafened by cookie-cutter messaging.
• The more effective your customer support, the less it costs. Customers who have their issues resolved the first time don’t call back. That means fewer calls, less work, and less cost.

CDPs make an immediate impact on resolving these challenges:

• The CDP resolves customer identities, creating a unified, omni-channel profile for each individual customer. That profile, covering personal details, interaction history, and an overview of their relationship to the business, is presented to the customer support agent alongside the interaction. Additional context is an instant boost to empathy and connections.
• That same information can be used to support personalized outreach for sales teams. With full visibility over a customer’s challenges and history, they can build the relationships that matter.
• The immediate outcome of this is more efficient interactions – less repetition means reduced Average Handling Time, which means lower cost per call. That’s immediate value.

And it’s not just your teams who’ll see immediate benefits; the customer will to.

2. The CDP Elevates Customer Experiences

In today’s Customer Experience landscape, self-service experiences are critical. Customers expect to be able to resolve their issues without having to resort to calling up an agent.

When a customer is able to solve their own problems, they’ll have a better overall impression of your business. If it’s not a problem they can resolve on their own, businesses should aim to make the subsequent interactions as seamless as possible.

• When the customer calls up, their call is routed to the most appropriate outcome, whether that’s self- or assisted-service. That routing decision is informed by information from the CDP, and can be personalized to their needs. If a customer previously spoke with a specific agent, for instance, they are routed back to that agent.
• As established, the CDP equips that agent with all relevant customer information. From the customer’s perspective, that means no repetition of information, no confusing questions, only a polite, intelligent agent.
• Where a customer is able to self-serve, the CDP tracks those interactions, and automatically updates a customer’s record. Data is updated automatically, with no possibility for human error. Customer records are kept complete and up-to-date.

The customer won’t know what the CDP is or how you’ve implemented it, but they’ll still see immediate benefits. In the digital era, seamless Customer Experience is a key competitive differentiator for businesses. The CDP gives you an immediate advantage.

3. The CDP Provides Immediate Insight

From the moment of go-live, the CDP will pull all your customer data into a single platform. That data is analyzed – brought into real-time dashboards and wallboards for hyper-visibility, or shared in custom reports.

Any number of custom metrics can be created to ensure that the data is in the format most useful to your organization.

Here are just a few of the ways that the CDP provides immediate insights:

• Customer satisfaction score collected during interactions are collated into broad reports or tracked across the lifetime of a single customer. You can measure how individual experience has changed over time, or how that experience fits into the broader picture of your customer base.
• Interaction performance data is also factored in, letting you identify key points of friction within your Customer Experience ecosystem. Equipped with this data, you can begin designing truly seamless omni-channel journeys.
• Every inefficiency identified and resolved means time and money saved. By providing accurate-to-the-second data, the CDP starts delivering value for your organization from the moment you flick the switch.

Outstanding Customer Experience is flexible and reactive. The CDP provides a data framework—every metric, at every level of abstraction, to support an effective Customer Experience strategy.

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Author: Content Guru
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson