Biggest Customer Data Platform Challenges—And How To Solve Them

Customer data platform challenges can take the wind out of your customer data strategy’s sails. While CDPs are supposed to solve data challenges, some vendors promising CDP benefits fail to deliver the complete package. This article explores how to choose the right solutions for the biggest CDP challenges.

Customer Data Platform Challenges

CDPs are powerful platforms that collect customer data and unify silos to create a single source of truth for a company’s marketing, sales, and service teams. They solve problems that plague brands tracking omnichannel customer journeys, like scattered data, incomplete customer profiles, and lack of actionable insights. In a cookie-less world, CDPs have been heralded as the Next Big Thing, after CRMs and DMPs. Thanks to its increased popularity and adoption, various vendors have used the label ‘CDP’ to make their solutions sound relevant although they lack core capabilities. Take a look at some of these challenges:

1. Inability To Scale

CDPs designed to handle smaller datasets will prove difficult to scale when a company’s customer base grows significantly. When these smaller-scale CDPs must process greater volumes of data or more complex sets of information, the processing speed slows considerably and generates redundancies. On paper, this may not seem like too great a concern, but eventually missed opportunities and unserved customer needs reveal a company’s weaknesses. In response, some companies settle for fewer diverse use cases and stay within their limits. Choosing a customer data platform able to scale up or down, however, offers a solution that’s capable of addressing specific needs at the right moment without overhauling data architecture. When business is booming, companies often find their martech stack, along with other applications, needs an upgrade. Investing in a CDP designed to integrate easily with a range of martech tools makes sense, as increased adaptability can help future-proof a company’s customer data strategy.In addition, enterprise-grade CDPs offer greater security and governance for managing large sets of customer data. This gives users peace of mind regarding compliance and customer data privacy.

2. Difficulty Extracting Data From Source Systems

Some companies find it difficult to build a unified profile of their customers when their CDP solution fails to extract data from source systems. This indicates an absence of key technology components that should be present in a true customer data platform. Vendors that offer personalization tools, yet lack integration capabilities, may position themselves as CDP providers despite their insufficient features. In such cases, IT personnel are left with the task of ingesting structured and unstructured data from different sources. Data personnel may choose to write custom code for ingestion or build customized frameworks to extract information.  A genuine CDP package comes with connectors that enable seamless integration with an existing technology stack. Best-in-class CDPs are also characterized by schema agnosticity and flexibility, which allows them to ingest all types of data, including offline information. To keep customer profiles unified and updated, choose a CDP solution that offers a wide range of out-of-the-box connectors and integrations.

3. Failure To Yield Actionable Insights

Failure to derive accurate results from analyzed data ultimately leaves companies with impotent insights. Again, these shortcomings lead to missed opportunities and delayed responses to critical customer/market trends. This scenario may cause companies to bring in outside analysts or a separate tool to analyze incoming data.Without robust analytics tools and capabilities, massive amounts of raw data can hamper data-driven decisions rather than supporting them. Discerning users would do well to choose “pure-play” CDPs, which collect data and deliver actionable insights. Look for CPD solutions that come with embedded analytics as well as data visualization features to access insights quickly and implement them in ongoing initiatives. CDP solutions should also enable marketing teams to analyze customer behavior without relying on IT or data personnel. In short, you can solve the biggest customer data platform challenges by choosing a full-package solution that adjusts to your business needs—instead of the other way around. An enterprise-grade CDP keeps pace as your business grows and scales data management accordingly. A full CDP package also includes connectors to enable seamless integration with your existing stack. Lastly, pure-play CDPs deliver actionable insights with embedded analytics and data visualization to allow quick responses to customer and market trends.

Solve Your Customer Data Platform Challenges

Treasure Data offers an agile solution to your customer data platform challenges. Our platform is designed to evolve with your existing technology stack to future-proof a winning customer data strategy. Treasure Data enterprise CDP comes with 170+ connectors for seamless integrations with your current stack. Check out what you can do with Treasure Data CDP:

• Manage petabytes of structured and unstructured data
• Use out-of-the-box integrations to connect with major SaaS B2B/B2C apps and data sources
• Resolve identities and unify customer profiles
• Build audiences and segments
• Analyze data with AI and Machine Learning technology to derive actionable insights
• Use insights to personalize individual journeys at scale while protecting privacy

To learn how to solve your customer data platform challenges, consult an expert today. Want to learn more? Request a demo, call 1.866.899.5386, or contact us for more information.