And Adobe has some important tips to help you drive business success.
Providing a single repository that delivers a 360-degree view of the customer enables an organization to deliver a highly differentiated and much more engaging customer experience (CX). Brands who leverage a CDP are already proving how IT and marketing teams can work together to drive business success.
As organizations deploy their first CDP use cases, or plan to do so, Adobe’s experts have some important tips that can help improve the chance of success with these projects. The most important is that the CDP must support both known and unknown data. An unknown contact is one that may not be a registered or named user yet is still a valid contact or website visitor. Adobe has designed their use case with the capability to bring together known and unknown data to activate real-time customer profiles across channels throughout the customer journey.
Unlike other “database-type” systems, the CDP utilizes a much broader array of both inbound and outbound data and information streams. And given the breadth of the information, IT teams should focus on CDP solutions that provide a generous number of connectors to their current enterprise applications and a rich set of APIs that will support both new development and connection to other systems. IT teams must also ensure that these links communicate both ways to bring information out of, and back into, current enterprise applications. This functionality allows IT to leverage available data warehouses or data lakes.
Keep in mind that CDPs are different from other databases. It is essential that IT understand “Lambda style” data-processing architectures, which are designed to handle massive amounts of data by taking advantage of both traditional batch type and new streaming data processing. IT teams will need to become conversant in how to support real-time engagement and the “emotional” data stream that impacts it. This is a fundamental point of differentiation from existing data warehouse and database implementations.
Adobe’s CDP experts have also identified important steps for IT teams to take as they start the project. They recommend starting with a cross-functional team to document the specifications and key design points for the CDP. This team may include IT, development, marketing, sales, and possibly legal/compliance (to ensure GDPR compliance). The team should also think about CDP in the broadest possible sense. While version 1.0 may have limited scope, the team will save substantial time and money if it creates a comprehensive initial design that can be used well into the future.
For more information on what customer-centric IT looks like, click here.
