Fair and gentle retail nation – I have one phrase for you “build verses buy.” These three words tell the entire story of the birth of the CDP market…a lurid tale of vendors and industry analysts foregoing the treatment of the disease to monetize the symptoms.
A small collection of meaningful technical barriers
prevented retail from building their own single-customer view
and gave rise to the CDP market.
While I would love to Tom Clancy the hell out of this article, we are going to keep this simple and take a look at the business goals that drove retail’s quest for the “single customer view,” the reality of how those goals stack up to today’s CDP market, and the paths back to the original purpose.
1. You don’t want the Single Customer View (and you never really did)
I never met a retail executive who wanted a single customer view. There was, however, a profound understanding of the value that would live on the other side of the single customer view.
The single customer view was a waypoint
in your journey to pragmatic/predictive customer insights.
What you wanted was descriptive. It was predictive. It required more than just a focus on data aggregation but rather the tangible analytical and predictive results that drive your business forward – across every sales channel, product lines, season, and product catalog.
2. You want to own your customer core (not rent it)
As a retailer – we sell products to people. It is our foundation. It is our bedrock. And – gosh and golly – it 100% feeds like the type of thing we should outsource to a SaaS vendor (who limits data access, can terminate our agreement, locks us into longer-term contracts, and holds us hostage due to the cost/complexity of change). /s
It’s time to acknowledge that for customer analytics and insights
most vendors are a pain in the SaaS
The alternative is – well, it’s yours. It’s in your cloud. You have direct data access. Your analytics teams can build atop it. Your data science teams can build/extend models. It’s the modern alternative – composable customer insights infrastructure.
3. It’s about more than marketing: It’s about Customer Analytics & Insights
See above. Your customer data drives the org – not just marketing. There was always the understanding that insights would change…everything…from marketing, merchandising, store operations, strategy.
The single source of “customer truth” is an enterprise need,
empowered through access, use case, and architecture.
While CDPs support base marketing use cases – their support for the rest of the organization is…light. Further complicated by this is data access, the ability for you to expand or build atop their data – further restricting your ability to drive organizational value.
4. You need retail specialization:
There is no getting around it. If you are going to do more than just “store a single customer view” – you need specialization. This is more than the oft’ missed basics (like managing/recognizing return reason codes, extending tokenization, or understanding stores by format), it’s about data context.
Your desire for massive-scale predictive customer insights
require a system of learning – from data onboarding to context.
Data context makes a Customer Data Platform into a Customer Insights Platform. It describes products we used to sell, are selling, and will sell. It describes how customers engage in sales channels, interact with sites, and shops your marketplace/social commerce presence.
5. Enhanced Privacy and Compliance:
GDPR/CCPA is here. EU has emerging legislation on “No Presumed Relationship” and “Permission Expiration.” Larger brands are focused on PII Repatriation – reconsolidating PII into their own walls. We are all dealing with the “death of the cookie.” The question is how do we deal with it…
You don’t want Compliance to be a tick box on a vendors list,
you need it to be part of your “Customer Core” – part of your Insights Operating System.
A CDP dangling off your enterprise is yet another point of exposure vs. a tool empowering compliance. With Customer Insights Infrastructure – compliance is infrastructure – meaning your PII never leaves your own control; compliance is fully integrated and goes beyond simply another service – providing enhanced capability within your enterprise.
Shameless Plug: OpenINSIGHTS Proofcamp
Whether you are just beginning your CDP journey, actively shopping for a CDP, or find yourself in the “I’ve got a CDP – so what now” – OpenINSIGHTS can help you refine your approach while redefining value.
Our OpenINSIGHTS Proofcamp enables you to experience hundreds of predictive marketing opportunities along with our industry redefining customer analytics – with your own data and in your own Google Cloud – and sometimes magic lives outside a quadrant.
