The imperative to gather every piece of data stays ingrained in the fabric of enterprise business through a decade after Big Data became the next big thing. The hype has disappeared on big data. However, organizations are still dealing with its impacts. No doubt, today’s hottest technologies are in response to the complications launched by the big data mentality to collect everything.
The hype for big data has been put out to pasture for several years. Nonetheless, big data’s central tenets stay with us: velocity, variety, and volume of data.
Customer Data Platform (CDP) striving to resolve the most complicated challenges of today’s marketers
The worldwide market for CDPs is anticipated to increase substantially throughout the following years. In fact, the CDP Institute attached industry revenue for 2019 at 1 billion USD. It also anticipates the sector to reach roughly 1.3 billion USD by 2024.
On the other hand, ResearchandMarkets foresees the sector will increase from 2 billion USD to 10.3 billion USD by 2025. It will grow at a remarkable compound annual growth rate of 34.0 percent throughout the forecast time.
That massive development is being driven by:
- the need to navigate complicated privacy regulations
- the propagation of customer touchpoints and devices
- higher anticipations for marketers to create real-time bespoke experience across channels
What does it mean?
Gartner foresaw that the average adult in America would own over six smart devices by 2024. On the other hand, Cisco predicts that the figure of devices connected to IP networks across the globe will increase to over three times the worldwide population by 2024.
Potential customers and existing customers utilize all of such devices to engage with the organizations they do business with. Further, these customers expect such companies to distinguish them whatever device they are using at any given moment.
Did you know that a survey performed by Salesforce State of the Connected Customer founds that seventy-eight of respondents want to utilize various channels to engage with brands depending on context? However, six percent expect brands’ engagements with them to be personalized according to previous engagements.
That concern is not going to vanish anytime soon. Segmenting the customer data of Salesforce by generations shows that younger associates switch devices more than older. Further, they tend to be including IoT-type connected devices into their range.
It’s worth mentioning as well that customer data security and governance have jumped to the forefront of marketer challenges. That’s because the soup of data regulations continues to increase.
The four technologies Gartner called out as transformative within their latest Hype Cycle revolve around one theme: making data helpful and practical. Those technologies are composed of the following:
- real-time marketing
- blockchain for advertising
- AI for marketing
- Customer data platforms
Each of these takes a segment of the original promise of big data. They strive to change it into a fully realized part of the martech stack. The hype might be similar – converting all data you gather into relevant, meaningful information.
Nonetheless, new guiding principles have arrived beyond only veracity, volume, and velocity in the intervening decades among the heyday of big data as well as today’s world.
Big data was able to set the table for such principles. Today, people are reaching the time for them to be served up to customer experience teams, IT professionals, and marketers as obtainable goals.
Each of those technologies takes up the job left behind by big data.
However, the best customer data platforms signify the most transformation of the hyped-up tech.
How can CDP help?
This is where the customer data platform comes to the rescue. In case you didn’t know yet, CDP is a system created for non-IT use to simplify customer data flow through the martech stack and build a single customer view.
Together with the proliferation of potential customer touchpoints, massive expectations, make identity resolution, and cross-device IDs essential for keeping marketers, service professionals, and sales experts present the best total customer experience.
Customer data platforms provide that normalization and consolidation, making the data profiles accessible to other systems as well.
On top of that, remember that CDP vendors look to strive to support marketers deal with the privacy concern. They do this by presenting powerful data governance protocols, which are approved by third party organizations. That guarantee compliance, along with such kinds of regulations and other data security standards.
For instance, a lot of CDP vendors are the International Standards Organization (ISO), Service Organization Control (SOC), and Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements (SSAE) certified. Such audits approve best practices around:
- security
- data privacy
- data management
- internal processes
Gartner’s hype cycle points to an organization’s need to better act and control their data in a future where data is limited by regulations and consumer expectations commanding rigorous privacy standards. Nonetheless, Gartner’s positioning of CDPs on the Digital Marketing and Advertising Hype Cycle continues the wider trend of controlling the technology’s strategic potential through the enterprise.
Hence, it only perpetuates the continuous segmentation of intelligence and data sources, which make a single view of the customer impossible.
Big data wanted too big for its time. However, the idea of having one source for all your data continues today on the Customer Data Platform. With a CDP, you can deal with enterprise-level volume and a collection of sources through many integrations while allowing delivery channels and such real-time insights.
However, we need to admit that the underlying challenge stays the same: organizing data is a company-wide initiative that is limited through the lens of departments and tools. Big data attempted to transform that. A few years later, organizations are beginning to seriously take the need for an independent data layer designed to inspire massive, structural transformation.
There you have it! We hope you now understand the reality behind the hype for customer data platforms. Hopefully, you find this post helpful and informative at the same time.
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