Putting customer data in the hands of marketing, delivers real business value
CDP systems have been around longer than you might think. The term itself was first used in 2013, and the technology first appeared on Gartner’s celebrated hype-cycle chart three years later. But it’s taken until now to get it into the hands of that part of the business that’s closest to the customers – the marketing department.
Old-school CDPs were much more targeted towards technical users. Their interfaces were intended for data analysts. Marketers and other business users looking to realise value from their organisation’s data had to work through IT.
However, this emphasised overall capability rather than individual use-cases. Companies looking to realise value quickly thought in terms of a 'big bang' rather than a gradual roll-out. Then, 18 months later, everyone had moved on to projects that were delivering more immediate value and the CDP was left to gather dust.
The mindset of consumer brands today is to look for high-value use-cases that we can help bring on-stream in three months. To do that, between us we’ve got to democratise access to the organisation’s data. That means giving users tools that make it super-easy to be executing on those use-cases within three months. Then, when other teams and departments see the results, they’ll start knocking on the door wanting their turn. So while we may not have all the plumbing in place from day one, we’re immediately helping them drive adoption of the technology and the return on their investment.
To make this land-and-expand approach work, you need a supplier who’s a partner, rather than simply a vendor. It’s not like picking up a new car, where you get 30 minutes orientation and off you go. It has to be much more collaborative. Obviously you get training at the start and hand-holding through the initial part of the process. But then you need someone who can help you identify the next opportunities and share best practice based on what your peers are doing.
The agentic future beckons
The elephant in the room here, as with so many other aspects of life, is AI. It’s one of the things making the CDP accessible for business users, but that’s just the start. AI is supporting businesses to better model against their data, what’s known as predictive modeling. This means understanding which customer attributes and behaviours suggest a propensity for a particular action such as churn, increased frequency of purchase, becoming a higher value customer, etc.
Take churn, for example. Our clients will analyse customers that have recently churned. Then they’ll match their attributes and behaviors against their entire customer base to predict who else might be a high churn risk, allowing early intervention with targeted offers and promotions. .
Allied to this will be the ability to describe in natural language how an audience should be segmented, or how a customer journey should be structured. The AI will then do the heavy lifting querying the data.
That is just a step on the way to having conversations with on-screen AI agents. And, of course, it won’t just be people talking to agents. It’ll be agents talking to other agents, what’s known as agentic AI.
At the moment, marketing channels tend to be siloed and fragmented across your own business and a collection of agencies. You might be doing your CRM in-house, while your media is being handled by an advertising agency. Social, SMS, your app, your website, all these things should be working together, but they’re not. You can’t optimise across all these channels, because it’s too complex and there’s too much lag in the system.
However, at some point in the near future all these capabilities will be delivered by AI agents. And they’ll all be talking to each other to optimise every aspect again the strategy and the goals you set for them. True omnichannel marketing will (finally) become a reality.
This could be as little as 18 to 24 months away, and the clock is ticking. It’s already imperative to have your data foundations in place, so that any AI you use can deliver to its full potential. And while the future won’t arrive fully-formed, AI powered data processing is here today. Those companies that embrace it now are setting themselves up to succeed faster in the future.
