Developing an excellent customer experience (CX) strategy is essential for any business seeking to thrive, or even just survive, in the modern world. Consumers and buyers have lower levels of brand loyalty and higher expectations than ever before, and the expect companies to deliver convenient, personalized, and innovative services 24/7.
Businesses need to access the right data to outshine the competition and both attract and retain customers. Customer data provides a comprehensive view of every aspect of the customer journey, as well as your target audience's pain points and goals. Unfortunately, only around 15% of executives believe they have a truly unified view of their consumer data.
The good news is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms, and their newer cousins, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), can improve your access to crucial insights and elevate your CX strategy.
The question is, which solution is best suited to your business?
CRM vs CDP: What’s the Difference?
It’s easy to confuse CDP and CRM platforms as being two versions of the same solution. After all, both tools help to unify data and assist businesses in strengthening connections with customers. However, there are some major differences between these solutions.
A CRM system is a collective store of consumer data, case information, and activity history, often used by marketing and sales teams to drive business and increase revenue. It centralizes contact information and interactions, ensuring teams can access customer insights in a unified place.
A CDP, or Customer Data Platform, on the other hand, is a more advanced and comprehensive type of data management tool. A CDP works as a “data aggregation layer” in a business or other organization, sitting above the multiple existing systems of record, aligning and enriching information about customer journeys and conversations from across the entire IT estate.
A CDP provides a comprehensive solution for accessing customer insights that goes beyond the basics of a CRM system, particularly in a more complex organization operating multiple discrete systems of record (including sometimes several CRM systems) and offers access to unique features that break down silos: improving IT synergy, enhancing customer journey mapping and improving the experience of the service agent.
The Benefits of CDP over a CRM
The major difference between CRM and CDP solutions is that a CRM focuses on specific interactions between customers and your brand. Conversely, CDPs provide a big-picture view of all customer behavior wherever it occurs, synchronizing essential data, and empowering team members.
Martin Taylor, Co-Founder and Deputy CEO of Content Guru, comments: “Customer Data Platforms provide a transformative advantage over CRM tools by offering a unified, real-time view of customer data synthesized from many different integrated sources. Crucially, these sources stay in place, meaning that a CDP can quickly be implemented on top of a complex IT estate, without needing to change any of the ways in which people work. Through leveraging data-driven customer insights, organizations can offer a more bespoke level of personalization through seamless, omnichannel customer journeys. By harnessing the power of CDPs, businesses can drive engagement, increase conversions, and foster long-term consumer relationships. Ultimately knowledge is power and CDPs allow brands to gain a competitive edge in today's data-driven marketplace.”
With a Customer Data Platform, companies can:
1. Enhance Employee Experiences
Excellent customer experiences start with fantastic employee experiences. Unfortunately, many contact centers struggle to keep their teams empowered and engaged. Around 49% of contact center leaders even reported an increase in employee attrition during 2022.
Improving the agent experience starts by providing employees with the tools, resources, and knowledge they need to be effective in their role. Customer Data Platforms go beyond the basic interaction tracking features of CRM, to offer true knowledge democratization.
A Customer Data Platform provides the insights required to power an intelligent routing strategy, helping to ensure customers are pushed to the right agent based on their history and need. A CDP also instantly provides each agent with the data they need to manage an interaction, in the form of a screen-pop, facilitating delivery of personalized service more rapidly and with minimum effort.
