I’ve been involved with over 200 CDP implementations previously decade. In most of those, the client or stakeholders have felt oversold and/or under-serviced by their CDP provider.
First, don’t allow yourself to be on this position. Run an RFP in your terms along with your use cases. Make sure the seller can allow you to. Or, not less than, know where you would like more help than the seller can provide.
As a marketing technology practitioner, I’m affronted by this wide chasm of expectations and reality. I, and plenty of others, need to help. But first, let’s take a look at how we came to grasp how we are able to do higher moving forward.
How we came
The widespread adoption of CDPs was driven by the promise of a wide selection of capabilities:
- One-click integrations.
- ID resolution & a single view of the shopper across all channels.
- Marketer-friendly UI for segmentation.
- Journey orchestration.
- Personalization of experiences.
- Advanced data science capabilities.
And often, these capabilities worked in real-time.
In 2019, Craig Howard said, “CDP is just not a thing. It’s a set of capabilities.” I didn’t initially understand the total implication of this: That CDPs didn’t all do the identical things;, they were all a set of capabilities.
Dig deeper: What the composability revolution means for CDPs
There were so many various mixtures of capabilities that few service providers could help. For marketers, their big ad agencies were and still are hopeless as solutions to assist with customer data, especially first-party customer data. Many have policies that prohibit access. For IT buyers, the large consultancies lacked the marketing expertise to drive value from the CDP.
Furthermore, they overcomplicated the whole lot with legacy practices and legacy mindsets about what a customer data store must be. Analytics buyers may or may not have seen the worth in a CDP, but it surely didn’t matter. They didn’t have the budget to purchase a CDP or the services that include it.
Given this no-man’s land of skilled support, CDP vendors built large service organizations with technical consultants, marketing operations professionals, account managers, customer success professionals and more. CDPs had great promise, but additionally a high need for expertise. Yet the vendors never resourced their services team like a consultancy would. Services were the red-headed stepchild of the CDP team, wanting to assist but without the resources needed to achieve this.
Furthermore, success with customer data is fundamentally a cross-functional effort. Few brands can adequately resource a customer data center of excellence. Even once they could fully staff a team, working with it was difficult for CDP providers. Software vendors tried to assist, but they will not be service providers. The result’s frustrated clients and fewer CDP license renewals.
Other technologies adding CDP capabilities
Today, pure-play CDPs are under attack on multiple fronts:
- Major cloud computing corporations added relevant capabilities. For example, Google Cloud has entity resolution, BQML, and countless others.
- Marketing automation tools have improved data management capabilities. Now, when a brand looks for a brand new ESP, they could find yourself replicating CDP capabilities or replacing their CDP.
- For big brands, Adobe and Salesforce are freely giving late-to-market and arguably inferior capabilities to select off customers from more specialized competitors.
- For small brands, Klaviyo offers one-click implementation and rapid time to value.
- For corporations with customer data warehouses, composable players like Hightouch and GrowthLoop offer compelling time to value and total cost of ownership.
Confusion abounds.
Dig deeper: What the composability revolution means for CDPs
CDP capabilities are a part of a much bigger solution
So how are the CDPs responding? By involving skilled service providers as a part of a broader “solution” to specific client challenges.
All the CDPs have compelling value offers. But those competing with Adobe and Salesforce are fighting a difficult battle given the aggressive nature of the competition. Brands need assistance sorting through the confusion. That’s where consultants might help.
Dig deeper: Navigating AI’s place within the CDP landscape
While CDPs were oversold and under-serviced a couple of years ago, they now provide mission-critical capabilities: ID resolution, activating customer data, journey orchestration and rather more. The CDP providers need assistance from expert consultancies to border and position these worthwhile capabilities as a part of the client’s overarching customer experience strategy.
Let’s take a look at a comparison.
For several years, service packages were commonplace within the CDP marketplace. These were often huge buckets of hours or monthly use-it-or-lose-it services.
Now, more brands are switching to shorter-term, deliverables-based projects and forgoing the services. This is a typical pattern in any downturn. However, the CDP vendors are responding elegantly.
They often herald consultancies early to assist put the CDP right into a broader solution that works with other mission-critical initiatives. And, importantly, many consultancies can offer complementary offerings from data technique to analytics to AI, BI and campaign activations.
For example, we recently worked with a number one independent CDP provider who had accomplished a successful proof of concept for a publisher. The work was well-received, but lacked a couple of core elements:
- Confidence to deploy customer data at scale.
- Executive scorecard for ongoing buy-in.
- ROI measurement.
- Journey orchestration in key journeys.
- AI-enablement for upsells and renewals.
Providing these is simply too much for many CDP vendors’ already stretched service teams. Consultants are desperate to help.
Consultants can provide composable CDPs with ID resolution strategy, data engineering for key customer data feeds, ML enrichments, and more. Composable CDPs usually find a knowledge engineering use case beyond marketing and customer experience. This requires help from specialized consulting firms with external ML capabilities, cloud data warehouse know-how, and use case road mapping.
CDP capabilities are the mainstream
It is a testament to the worth of the capabilities that CDPs helped bring to the mainstream that so many providers have embedded them — cloud computing corporations, journey orchestration tools, ESPs and more. Brands must embrace collecting and activating customer data as a core component of their customer experience strategy. Today’s solution-oriented model is sweet for CDPs, consultancies, and types. We will see greater adoption and usage of the relevant capabilities due to it.
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