How to choose the right Customer Data Platform (CDP) for financial services
November 1, 2022
Customer data platforms, or CDPs, allow you to organize, clean, and segment customer data. This helps customize the user experience, boosting brand engagement and customer retention. And although CDPs have been around since 2013, there’s still confusion about how to pick the best CDP for your business. Hint: the market leader isn’t necessarily the best choice for every brand.
In this brief guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about customer data platforms for financial services. This includes why you need them and how to choose the one that meets your business needs.
What is a customer data platform?
A CDP is software that collects, organizes, and unifies first-party customer data. Data is collected from various sources, including surveys, transactional records, and web analytics, then combined into a single customer profile.
This profile empowers the lives of marketers, data engineers, and developers because making more customer-centric business decisions is easy.
Why should you use a customer data platform?
Here are some benefits of implementing a CDP into your work processes:
- It builds unified customer profiles
- You deliver personalized customer experiences
- You increase customer satisfaction
1. It builds unified customer profiles
The main reason why financial firms rely on CDPs is that they develop unified customer profiles. They’re the central hub for all customer information. When your marketing team creates ad campaigns, they can simply head to the CDP to gather data and better understand the target audience.
Or, if the product development team wants to upgrade your product, they can use customer data to see which features are popular and which need improvement.
2. You deliver personalized customer experiences
The more data you can collect, the more opportunity you have to deliver personalized customer experiences.
Epsilon found that 80% of customers expect customization from companies. Less than 10% agree brands provide it.
This shows the importance of a personalized customer journey. By using a CDP to customize client experiences, you can charge more for products and services while reducing marketing spend.
3. You increase customer satisfaction (and loyalty)
Studies show that using a CDP to organize and clean data can boost customer satisfaction ninefold. And this makes sense. When customers interact with content they enjoy, they trust an organization with their information, and they’re more likely to turn into loyal, lifelong customers.
How to choose the right customer data platform for banking
When deciding on the best customer data platform for your business needs, following these steps can help you out:
- Build an interdisciplinary selection team
- Determine your company’s use cases
- Create a shortlist of options and select the best one
1. Build an interdisciplinary selection team
The first step is building an interdisciplinary selection team to help choose a suitable customer data platform. CDPs are built for marketers, so you want the head of this team to be a marketing manager or creative director.
However, it’s also essential to include the expertise of your IT and cyber security team because your customer data should always be secure. These IT professionals guide you away from software with poor security.
It also helps to have your data scientists and managers involved. They’ll select tools best at analyzing and cleaning data. Once you’ve gathered a team of competent professionals, it’s time to determine your company’s use cases.
2. Determine your company’s use cases
By understanding what you want to do with your CDP, you’ll narrow your search to companies specializing in your end goal.
Here are some common use case examples that businesses have:
- Create targeted marketing campaigns
- Deliver a more personalized customer experience
- Aggregate and organize offline and online data
- Gain a better understanding of the customer journey
Fortunately, the Lytics CDP caters to all these needs. Data engineers use it to collect and clean data while the 360-degree customer view is popular among marketers and copywriters.
3. Create a shortlist of options and select the best one
Most companies go all in on a CDP that they think will fit their needs. But once they’ve integrated it into business processes, they find flaws, which can hamper customer data understanding. Not only is this expensive, but if these flaws affect marketing campaigns and product development, it can create a divide between you and your customers.
Instead, have a shortlist of potential tools and slowly integrate small amounts of data. This allows you to spot any issues and makes it easy to transition into other software options.
How Lytics gives you a 360-degree view of customer data
CDPs are a must for any business collecting first-party customer data. It streamlines the entire data collection process and prevents silos. This benefits every department within your company from product development, to human resources and marketing.
So if you’re looking to implement a CDP into business processes, consider the Lytics real-time customer data platform. It provides unbreakable encryption so you can be sure your data is safe. The 360-degree customer view also helps you understand your customer, so you can create more targeted ad campaigns.
The best part is that Lytics offers a free trial so you can get a feel for the platform before deciding if it’s for you. Sign up for a Lytics free trial today.
