Customer data platform (CDP)

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a software solution or technology that allows businesses to collect, consolidate, and manage customer data from various sources into a single, unified customer profile. The primary purpose of a CDP is to provide a comprehensive and 360-degree view of each customer, enabling companies to better understand their customers, deliver personalized experiences, and make data-driven marketing and business decisions.

• Create unified customer profiles:
  CDPs don’t just collect and store data. They process it into customer profiles that can be used to create single customer views (SCVs). Also called 360-customer views, SCVs are profiles created by a CDP from all the data gathered on a single customer. They provide marketers with a unified view of insights like their behaviors, information, purchase history, and interests.
  For example, each time a customer engages with a brand — whether it’s logging into a mobile app, reading a blog post, searching for a product, adding that product to a cart, leaving it in the cart, or buying a different product later — it’s all filtered into a SCV that acts as a summary of every way that customer has interacted with that brand. Using this clear and unified view, marketers can understand their customers better and deliver more personalized experiences.
• Eliminate data silos
  When different teams or departments each keep track of different sources of customer data, it creates data silos. One team might know a customer’s name and email address, while another has data on their purchase history and website clicks. While all this information is valuable when it’s combined, if different teams hold different pieces of information they can’t gain a full understanding of a customer’s needs and behaviors.
  A CDP gathers all your customer data into one place, even if data is streaming in from various sources. That way, a company can access all their online and offline data from every touchpoint all at once and create informed decisions on what experiences will resonate with their customers best.