What Hides Under the Hood of Future-Proof Customer Data Platforms?
As more MarTech ecosystems begin to include Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), marketers around the world need to ask themselves whether the CDP they choose is ready for the future.
Earlier this week at our annual user conference, PostFunnel Summit, I was speaking with one of our long-time users over a drink on a deck overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. During this conversation, I asked why she chose Optimove so many years ago. “It was the only solution that seemed ready for what we needed next and not for what we needed now,” she said.
All these years later, we’re still (and always will be) ready for what marketers need next. This time, we are proud to introduce the underlying technology for the next generation of Customer Data Platforms.
What is a Next-Generation Customer Data Platform?
The CDP Institute defines Customer Data
Platforms as “a packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer
database that is accessible to other systems.”
This means, a CDP’s main objective is to ingest,
cleanse, and unify all relevant customer data, available to a company. This
data will provide a persistent single customer profile for marketers, serving
as the foundation for data exploration and insight discovery, customer
segmentation and multi-channel campaign orchestration.
Traditionally, vendors collected and
processed batches of data from disconnected sources, allowing them to perform
complex data calculations and transformations based on sophisticated business
logic or build and run machine learning models.
The nature of today’s market, however, requires
something else. Customers interact with brands across a multitude of channels
and expect a seamless customer experience throughout.
It’s quite common for someone to begin their purchase discovery via a voice assistant, research the product online, and then complete the purchase at a physical store. If the product goes out of stock, customers expect an alert from brands before they reach the store. If they arrive to the store, they expect the sales representative to provide relevant personalized information or offers, not a standardized pitch.
Today’s rapidly changing environment requires
brands to keep their unified records updated with realtime data. As a result,
CDPs need to evolve to combine realtime data streaming (such as when a purchase
is made, changes in inventory, etc.) with their existing batch processing
capabilities.
Only by transitioning from pulling static tables stored in isolated data systems, to connecting all sources through live data streams, can brands and marketers ensure that they provide their customers with the best experience every time.
The Infrastructure for the Next Generation Realtime Customer Data Platform
This past Tuesday, Optimove announced Optidata, a new data infrastructure powering real time access and activation of all customer data by seamlessly combining large-scale batch processing with a state-of-the-art event streaming framework.
Optidata combines a
“Pull” process for data transformation and modeling with a reactive “Push”
platform that responds to every new data point and live signal, ensuring
customer profiles and data models are always up-to-date. The pull process
cleanses and integrates large datasets from relational databases, data
repositories and a wide range of third-party systems and services, creating a
“single customer view” that includes an array of predictive models. We’ve
effectively created a CDP that evolves with real time calculations.
As a result, brands can seamlessly share all the up-to-date unified data with any internal system, leverage it to enhance proprietary models, or access it to create any desired custom attribute. Entire organizations can now feel certain that all systems, campaigns and customer touchpoints are synchronized with the most updated data, ensuring contextually relevant customer experiences across the board.
Whether your MarTech ecosystem already has a CDP or you are still trying to find the right one for you, make sure you are ready for what is to come, and not for what is already here.
Rony Vexelman is Optimove’s VP of Marketing. Rony leads Optimove’s marketing strategy across regions and industries. Previously, Rony was Optimove's Director of Product Marketing leading product releases, customer marketing efforts and analyst relations. Rony holds a BA in Business Administration and Sociology from Tel Aviv University and an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management.
