CDPs For Improving Customer Experience

There are several surveys that show improving Customer Experience (CX) is a major priority for many consumer brands. Our own discussions with clients and prospects echo this and almost all of our clients have CX high on their agenda. Improving CX requires attention to several aspects and getting the right set of technologies is one of them. One of these key foundational technologies that can help you improve CX is Customer Data Platforms (CDPs).

 

What exactly is CX?

Customer Experience, or CX == Customer + Experience. Seems simple enough. But it is a loaded term.

Let’s look at Experience first. I would like to think of Experience as:

"Experience is an aggregate of all knowledge, feelings, learnings and perceptions that a customer may have accumulated as a result of interacting with a brand."

And who is a customer? Is this the one who subscribed to your email newsletter? Or the one who visited your store and signed up for your loyalty program? Or the one who eventually bought a product off your website? Was it the same person who did all these transitions? Or are they different customers?

How do you make an impact on a customer’s knowledge, feelings, learnings and perceptions, when your customers are interacting with you across different time periods, via different channels and in multiple contexts?

The most important thing then, in order for you to make an impact on CX, is to be able to uniquely identify who your customer is, irrespective of the channel, device or context of an interaction.

Let’s look at this in context of an almost-real journey of a customer planning to buy a car.

Example of Customer Journey

Figure 1 below shows an example journey of a potential customer planning to buy a car.

As you can see, this customer has taken a series of steps - visiting dealership (multiple deanships, at different times), checking brand website, reviewing social media, researching on third-party sites and so forth. However, it is not trivial to connect all these transactions to the same customer. Consequently, the customer is treated as a “new customer” at every interaction, without regard for any of his previous transactions. So every time this customer goes to a dealership (either same or different), the sales agent does not know what happened in previous visits or what have other interactions been with the customer. As a result, the agent can’t offer any personalized offer, recommendation or advice.

Enter CDP

This is where a Customer Data Platform (CDP) can help by linking your customers’ interactions.

A CDP helps by bringing in all the customer transactions, from dealerships, websites, social media interactions, call center discussions and from several other zero-, 1st- 2nd- and 3rd-party data sources into a centralized system. It then maps all those transactions to each unique customer. As a result, when this customer visits a dealership, even if it's a different one from the one she visited last, the agent there can have a much better idea of all his earlier interactions. This allows them to take an action specific to this customer, such as offering additional accessories as a sweetener or offering low interest rates on finance charges.

Figure 2: A Customer Data Platform (CDP) helps you create a single view of all transactions for each customer