Customer Data Platform Readiness: When am I Ready and What do I Need to Get Started?

What are the most important questions a marketing leader should ask in order to ‘self-assess’ their CDP readiness?

Marketing leaders should ask questions to assess where they are in terms of data and organizational readiness, and how their business is prioritized.

Do you have a well- established method for capturing customer data (including customer profile data, transaction data and interaction data) from both an operational and legal perspective?

A customer data platform (CDP) will have some data collection capabilities, but CDP-driven data collection should supplement other first-party data collection efforts. To determine data readiness, marketing leaders should ask: 

• Does the IT department have the ability to identify siloed data sources?
• Can the IT team provide these sources on an ongoing basis to the CDP?
• Does the company have all the data definitions/business rules required to make sense of the data?

Do you have the right staff, who can understand how to leverage a CDP for segmentation, analytics, advertising, and customer experience use cases?

To determine organizational readiness, marketers should ask:

• Do I have the team in place to implement this? 
• Do I have the project management to implement this? 
• Does my team have the bandwidth to implement the use cases?
• Does the executive leadership push the organization to be customer-centric rather than organizational or channel-centric?

Do you have the clarity, execution and metrics in place?

To determine business readiness, marketers should ask:

• Have my teams defined the use cases we will need around outbound marketing, advertising, customer experience, and analytics?
• Are these use cases prioritized, and mapped to value/KPIs?

WHAT BASICS NEED TO BE IN PLACE BEFORE INVESTING IN A CDP?

We identified the symptoms, diagnosed the problem and prescribed a good strong CDP as the possible cure. But –  have you checked for allergic reactions?

It appears that true, data-driven personalization across all touchpoints and throughout the customer’s journey would be difficult- if not impossible – without a CDP.  So, if that is your goal, and you have clarity on exactly where you are stuck with using your customer data more effectively, you should be ready for a serious investment decision. But it’s not all about what you don’t have. You also need to think about what you do have in place today for a CDP to deliver tomorrow.

Consider these:

1. A plan: document your journey and plan: what are the realistic expectations and outcomes along with milestones for the CDP investment? Who are the people accountable and who are the decision makers?  What will your KPIs and metrics be? What will you prioritize in case there is too much data?

2. Data: you need some amount of ongoing customer data from multiple sources with a reasonable level or capability for integration to be in place before CDP can work to move you forward. In essence, you should be at least at the bottom of the pyramid in the Graphic above. Even if it’s unconnected, siloed and inaccessible, you still need the inflow of high-quality data from multiple sources.

3. Data skills: you don’t need the tech chops of a data warehousing expert but some analytic and application experience is required within the marketing team to manage and own the CDP project, right from the evaluation and requirement mapping stage to regular use post-deployment, and of course the turbulent deployment stage in the middle. Get the right people on the team before moving to the next stage.

4. Management and user buy-in: it’s unlikely you will get a budget without management buy-in, but don’t forget adoption- will the users- the people that make up your marketing team – be able to accept this level of integration, transparency and measurability?

5. Marketing Automation: you need a fairly mature marketing automation solution or stack in place for optimal CDP outcomes. Having connected and real-time data in place won’t be much good if you don’t have a robust outbound/ inbound marketing automation system in place to use the data and execute personalized campaigns.

6. Integration capability: for CDP to deliver, data needs to flow. Ensure you have checked with internal experts on the integration capabilities of existing solutions and what it would take to get the data flowing both ways, as well as plugging in the analytics solution.

7. Compliance: with GDPR and other data protection data privacy laws in effect or due to come into effect soon, a unified customer view will go a long way in ensuring compliance. It is useful to understand the compliance requirements for your industry and geography and figure out whether and how a CDP could add value to the situation.