Customer Data Platform Implementation Specialist

This phase involves understanding business needs, customer data and the technology landscape – along with buy-in from key stakeholders on how the unified customer record will be created and maintained in the system.

Typical activities include:

    1.Build your team

It’s important that organizations put a cross-functional CDP implementation team together so they can come up with a coordinated strategy that will exceed their customers’ expectations and delight them with the experiences they’re providing. 

Behavioural Response CDP’s team can help you identify collaborative, forward-thinking and hard-working professionals who want to get their hands dirty. 

This team could include a combination of roles like: Customer Experience, Paid Media, Email Marketing, Content, Social, Marketing Ops, Analytics/BIG Data, Dev/Engineering, and more.

This team will work to improve communication between departments while simultaneously breaking down silos between people and tech. 

We will also help your team do things like:

• Map out project objectives to meet the strategic goals that have been put in place
• Determine the overall digital strategy and how it rolls up to the CDP
• Align content and customer experiences with this digital strategy
• Implement and manage tactics and timeframes
• Analyze, test and recommend optimizations of tactics throughout the process

Behavioural Response will help you set up an agile group ready to pivot and optimize when necessary. A group that embraces the sentiment that the only constant is change. 

Once assembled and aligned the final piece of this step is for this team to educate the greater organization on what the CDP is and how it will help the organization achieve their goals.

    2.Planning and requirement setting

Marketing (CRM/ loyalty and marketing operations) leads this phase where the ask is to define four key program requirements:

Marketing objectives – this could be improving loyalty engagement, customer retention , customer acquisition or customer engagement across touchpoints

Challenges with current data – is it gaps in the data, poor quality or lack of trust in available data, or a combination of all

Success criteria – metrics that business will track to validate the quality of customer data against marketing objectives

Marketing campaigns – the types of campaigns that will be executed once transformed customer data is available, and how the data will be fed to marketing systems such as campaign execution tools

    3.Identify data sources

This session is primarily led by data and IT engineering teams who manage customer databases. Marketing technology and analysts may also be involved if they capture customer data via surveys or campaigns. Other aspects covered in this phase require understanding the primary source for customer master, data collection, integration and verification process

3.1 Establish business rules for customer data unification

Based on available data and customer marketing priorities, we will work with marketing and data/ engineering to establish rules for processing and creating a comprehensive view of customer. Some of these rules could be around:

1. 1. • Standardization and verification of captured customer data
      • Prioritization of data sources for identifying customer attributes, for example, in cases where more than one value/ inconsistent data is present for a given attribute (such as more than one home store for a customer or multiple phone numbers for a customer)
      • Establishing mechanism for de-duplicating customer records. This would require agreement on approach to run deterministic and probabilistic matches to create the golden record of a customer

 3.2 Customer data enrichment

This consists of not only adding customer data from third party sources but also enriching customer data with analytical insights using the ‘as-is’ customer data.

Examples of such enrichments are – deriving customer behavior such as a ‘discount buyer’ vs. ‘full price’ buyer – derived from historical purchases and behavior.

‘Active’ visitor or an ‘engaged’ customer based on the customers interactions on e-commerce and digital campaigns. The analytical tags maintained for every customer vary based on marketing objectives, and form critical inputs for segmenting customers to drive engagement. Marketing plays a critical role in identifying data gaps and determine how the data should be enriched.

This is where we will help make your CDP solution a sound reality. Our team of specialists will help you lead successfully this phase – once critical data (such as customer master) is loaded and processed in the system, marketing is given access to the data.

Other customer data activities such as enrichment of ‘nice to have’ customer attributes and cleansing of low priority customers (as defined by business) are executed in an agile manner.

This ensures business can use customer data early in the cycle – they can test and validate the results and provide inputs, without having to wait till the end of implementation when it’s too late.

1. Data onboarding and ingestion: Getting the process and mechanisms to incorporate data sources and rules agreed upon in Phase 1 in place, to create the comprehensive customer data record.

2. Configure data feed into downstream marketing systems: This is to ensure marketing teams have access to create customer segments, extract customer lists and data for analytical and personalization purposes.

3. Set-up process for tracking customer metrics: This stage requires setting up a tracking and measurement process. A critical but often overlooked component of a CDP implementation is to track the health of customer data and business metrics. Information such as total customers vs. active/ inactive customers, customer retention, acquisition and conversion rates are key metrics to track to ensure the program objectives are being met.

4. (Optional) Set-up customer engagement and campaign integrations: Not all CDPs include ‘engagement features’ – such as real-time interactions or recommendation engines that provide personalized product and offer recommendations to customers using preferred channels such as email, mobile app, online, Social, SMS etc. B2C marketers see higher value from these optional capabilities, making it a prized component of a CDP.

The final phase in a CDP program is to ensure marketing and other customer-facing functions are trained and have access to customer data for their requirements.

In addition, data/ engineering teams are trained on monitoring data ingestion and serving from the CDP on an ongoing basis.

The success of a CDP program requires establishing a governance team which comprises of marketing, IT and data engineering.

Collectively, they ensure ongoing collection of new data, and verifying/ tweaking the applied rules such that they stay current and continue to meet business needs.

By tracking the health of customer data and marketing metrics such as loyalty, acquisition, retention, conversion and engagement consistently, an organization can become truly customer-centric.

A well-executed CDP program delivers on business goals quickly, be it controlling customer churn, increasing share of wallet or growing customer value.

Implementing a CDP is definitely an ongoing and continuous process that never stops, as you continue to pivot and adjust alongside it. 

Our team will ensure your strategy is up to speed with what’s been communicated and that you have an appropriate measurement schedule and cadence in place for what you’ll be reporting on, when and to who.

Remember that it’s not always about money – it’s important to do qualitative assessments of what life looks like post-CDP implementation too. Is the CDP solving operational problems? Internal challenges? Document and share those too.