Introducing the Experience CDP (xCDP)

Lytics recently announced a series of updates to our platform that finally solve the persistent challenges of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and the killer complexities of personalization at scale and turn any Content Management System (CMS) into a Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

Today, we are announcing the Experience CDP or xCDP — a CDP designed to help companies simplify the complexity of personalization, so marketers can easily connect their customer data to real-time personalization across the customer journey – delivering exceptional customer engagement and experiences in the moment, everywhere and all the time.  

xCDP represents a transformation in the CDP category, moving beyond the limitations of earlier eras of CDPs, which have focused primarily on how customer data is collected and transformed (is that in the packaged CDP or in the warehouse) and where it is stored (in the packaged CDP data model and optimized real-time data store or in the warehouse).  The fundamental challenge with these earlier approaches to CDP – the packaged CDP and composable CDP – is that both types of CDPs are both focused on solving the wrong problem – how is customer data is collected and processed and where it is stored.  Traditional CDPs – both the packaged and composable CDPs, have failed to live up the promise of CDP – the ability to personalize experiences at scale, across the customer journey.  

What problem does xCDP solve?

According to McKinsey’s Next in Personalization Report, 71% of website visitors expect personalization and 75% expect personalization to make the experience easier for them.  On top of that, 76% of visitors say that receiving personalized experiences makes them more likely to convert and 78% say that personalization makes them more likely to repurchase.  

Personalization matters now more than ever.  In the same McKinsey report, 76% of consumers said that they get frustrated when their interactions with a company are not personalized.  And yet, even after consumers have spoken – telling us that they demand personalization – more than 63% of marketing leaders say they still struggle with personalization according to Gartner.

But what about the benefits of personalization?

In a word, yes.  The benefits of personalization are real & meaningful for every business.  While only 1% of companies are using first party data to deliver fully cross-channel experiences according to BCG’s research report “Delivering on the Promise of First Party Data”, the benefits of personalization are clear: 

“Data-driven marketing can 2X revenue and increase cost savings by 1.6 times.”

Where do we go from here?

When we started the original CDP category in 2013, the purpose of our new customer data platform was clear:  We would make it easier for any marketer to deliver personalized experiences anywhere – by helping them build real-time profiles for personalization across the customer journey.  The challenge at that time was the same as it is now – personalization is complex and requires a combination of capabilities that most companies struggle to build, buy and maintain.  Back in 2013, there was a wave of companies investing heavily in Hadoop projects to put all of their data into a single storage layer where they’d be able to build better segments for personalization.  But this only solved half of the equation – bringing together customer data – but what about matching people to content.  Moreover, the vast majority of companies simply did not have the resources to build a big data lake or warehouse and connect all of their data, so they continued to use the channel tools they already had and the limited data that was already available.  In either case, the required capabilities to achieve personalization at scale were disconnected. 

Out of this, the CDP emerged to fill a gap – to provide a new data platform that would give marketers a tool that provided meaningful access to all of their customer data and a way to orchestrate personalized experiences at scale.  The intended result:  every interaction personalized across the customer journey.  

But today, CDP as a category, hasn’t made real progress against the core mission – simplifying the complexity of personalization at scale.  It’s still too hard and too expensive.  We still see companies investing in their internal cloud data warehouse strategy with the belief that once all the customer data is together and clean and joined, they will easily be able to solve the “last mile” problem of personalization at scale and help their marketing team deliver exceptional experiences everywhere.  Many of these critical initiatives continue to fail – not for a lack of trying or resources, but because the complexities of personalization at scale require a new modern toolset – that isn’t simply about selecting the right architecture – composable on top of the data warehouse or a real-time streaming architecture – but brings together the right tools needed to simplify and solve the personalization use case(s).

Now Introducing xCDP

xCDP is the first self-service, real-time data platform that simplifies the complexity of personalization, bringing together real-time data, real-time profiles, segments and orchestration alongside a warehouse-native approach so every company has a clear path to personalization at scale.  Instead of focusing on where the data resides, the xCDP is focused on solving the underlying complexity of personalization – making data available in real-time, connecting user data to content for personalization and recommendations, enabling orchestration across channels from one unified platform and making this simple and available to try for free, without the upfront cost and required resources of other CDPs.  This results in truly exceptional personalized experiences – realizing the value of customer data and CDPs, combining the power of data-driven experiences with self-service simplicity.

Lytics introduced our Free Personalization Engine offering built on the world’s only xCDP to address the massive obstacles in how companies can quickly and easily get value from their customer data and simplify the killer complexity of personalization.  For many marketers, the killer complexity of personalization feels like too big of a rock – it costs too much, takes too much time and it’s too hard to manage both the data challenges and the content challenges to scale. 

To overcome these challenges, xCDP delivers on the promise of personalization at scale with five key pillars (easily remembered with the acronym “FOCUS”)

FAST

Real-time, all the time.  We see it everyday – complex data pipelines + Data Warehouse latency make real-time, in the moment personalization (i.e. same page) personalization and triggers virtually impossible.  If you want to deliver in-the-moment experiences, you need real-time data, real-time profiles, live segments and dynamic orchestration.

xCDP must be Fast – able to deliver personalization in the moment, on the page, with a profile that updates in milliseconds, not every 24 hours.

OMNICHANNEL

Personalization everywhere.  The whole point of a CDP is to bring together data so you can communicate in a coordinated way across every touchpoint.  Personalization needs to take place everywhere (in all your channels).  Orchestration needs to be omnichannel, not just email and ads – but many of the orchestration tools are unable to support the web channel or other real-time interactions.

xCDP must be Omnichannel – able to personalize experiences across the entire customer journey – from web to ads to email to mobile to support in-store.  

CONTENT

Personalization is dependent on your ability to match what you know about a user (what they like or don’t like) with content (offers, products, etc.).  Many companies struggle to move beyond basic personalization because they don’t know how to match users and content – there’s no easy connection between their user data and content (i.e. no bridge to understand every user’s interest and the right content for them).

xCDP must be Content-focused – able to easily bring together an understanding of users and content.

UNIVERSAL

Personalizing to everyone means I have to know my anonymous users as well as I know my known users.  One of the biggest gaps in CDPs is the data sparseness problem – do you have enough data on your users to be valuable.  xCDPs automatically build a new intelligent data layer for customer data – a universal schema – that describes each user based on their relative engagement, their interests and what they are likely to do next.  This new universal data layer is automated and available on EVERY single profile.   

xCDP must have Universal Understanding so that marketers don’t have to manage sparse data – every profile has meaningful insights that can be used for personalization now and always.  

SIMPLE

Personalization is complex, so your platform for delivering personalization must be simple, easy to use and get started with.  It needs to be easy to get started for FREE.  Zero risk is important because every marketer needs the opportunity to try and fail and then try again.  Without all the huge upfront risk.  Also, for many, the challenges of getting to personalization are just too many in number and breadth – we need to collect data, resolve identity, build and maintain profiles, sync profiles and segments to channels, match them with content and report on results. xCDP needs to solve the killer complexities of personalization by bringing all this together and making it simple.  

xCDP must be Simple and easy to get started with – free to get started, simple inspiration templates, automated AI insights.

Learn more about our strategic partnership with Pantheon where we have developed a new offering to bring DXP capabilities to WordPress and Drupal websites.  We’ve partnered with Pantheon to make it easy for any company on Drupal or WordPress to get started now with a free offering to deliver personalization in less than 30 days on your website and also create and sync targeted first party audiences for digital ad campaigns on Google and Meta. 

Benefits of Lytics xCDP:

Build automated insights quickly 

Lytics Content Graph and Interest Engines build a new proprietary interest graph on all your prospects and customers – providing rich contextual insights about your users and the things they care about.  Lytics Universal Schema analyzes data from any source and automatically builds an intent graph, including:  engagement scores, interests in products and topics and predictive models (e.g. likely to return, likely to purchase, likely to churn).  These new insights are created automatically – no data science team required – and accelerate the time to insights. 

Automate identity resolution

Lytics’ platform uses a graph model and AI process for identity resolution that ingests raw customer data, unifies it, enriches it, and assigns a common identifier. Customer profiles remain stable as new and conflicting data is captured, saving IT teams countless hours of profile maintenance. 

New data layer for content

Lytics platform builds an intelligent content graph using Google Vertex AI, NLP, computer vision, analyzing text, photos and videos to create ML-based semantic layer describing all of your brand content, offers, products, email campaigns, etc.  Lytics analyzes how users interact with content using a semantic layer to create real-time interests on every profile for Product Recommendations, Content Recommendations and content analysis.  

Native CMS integrations

Lytics integrates natively with open source platforms like WordPress and Drupal, bringing profile data, content and product recommendations and intelligent segmentation to your content workflow.  Lytics personalization SDK and personalization tooling simplifies the ability to deliver personalized messages and experiences directly with your CMS.

Dynamic journey flows

Lytics new orchestration product is the control tower for marketers – to set-up, organize and coordinate omnichannel, customer-centric porgrams. Lytics journey flows are both REAL-TIME and MULTI-CHANNEL.  New Flows product is simple to set-up and easy to manage entry triggers, set up time-based delays, manage branch logic and conditions, and analyze customer journey metrics.  Lytics Flows also supports real-time journeys and triggers, including web personalization experiences, mobile, ads and email/sms messaging – only CDP with real-time web personalization as part of journey flow.  

The xCDP is HERE

If your business wants to simplify the killer complexities of personalization at scale, Lytics xCDP helps marketing teams connect with their customers in more relevant and personalized ways across the customer journey.

Get started with Personalization Engine for free with upgrade to xCDP starting at $500/month.