CDP the next level for CRM

Wynand Roos, managing director at The CRM Team.

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New customer data platform (CDP) technology is the next level of CRM, making it possible to unify even big data for AI-powered insights and a true 360-degree understanding of the customer.

This is according to Wynand Roos, MD of The CRM Team, who was speaking during a webinar entitled A path to a unified customer experience: Win and retain more customers with a customer data platform.

Roos noted that consumers have changed: “McKinsey says 64% of South African consumers who were polled cite convenience over value, while only 59% cite value as top drivers for their purchases. In addition, online purchases are soaring while in-store sales decline. The vast majority of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who recognise and remember them, and who provide relevant offers and recommendations.”

Meanwhile, companies are falling short, he said. 65% of consumers are frustrated by inconsistent experiences across channels, 74% are frustrated by irrelevant content on websites and more than half of customers will stop doing business with a company because of poor customer experience.

Businesses need to change, to better understand their customers and meet changing expectations of personalisation and service, he said.

Roos said managing customer data is not a new challenge, but it is becoming more difficult, with 63% of organisations saying the top obstacle to using customer data is an inability to unify it. “Many organisations have siloed and fragmented customer data, challenging their attempts to develop 360-degree understanding of their customers,” he said.

A CDP addresses this challenge, Roos said. Widely recognised as the next step in marketing technology, a CDP is the solution to the problem of disconnected customer data systems.

He explained: “A CDP is a prebuilt system configured to meet the needs of each client, and does not require the technical skill of a typical CRM system. It captures data from multiple systems, links it, and tracks behaviour over time. It can be used to target marketing messages and track responses over time. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights maps, matches and merges data to create a single view of the customer, and uses first party and third-party data sources to further enrich the insights. These insights can be consumed in a variety of applications for marketing, sales, service and contact centres.”

He said CRM systems are typically more limited than CDP systems – particularly when using big data, and they do not match and merge data. A CDP can use incomplete customer information and create complete customer identities using internal and third party data.

Roos demonstrated how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables organisations to create an extremely rich single view of the customer, understand customer behaviour and predict customer needs, as well as unify B2C and B2B customer data to generate AI-powered insights in real time.

“The benefits we get from CDPs include a 360-degree view of customers, dynamic segmentation, predictive scoring, the ability to personalise offers and engagement, offer individualised support, increase customer lifetime value and loyalty, and maximise return on marketing investment. In healthcare, it can also help reduce treatment times and improve patient outcomes,” he said. “There are connectors allowing the data to be consumed in multiple systems, and the information can even be extracted and used in Excel, for example.”

Thanks to their integration, CDP systems also support POPIA compliance, by ensuring that a customer’s unsubscribe request is applied throughout business divisions and channels, he added. “The CDP is also a great place to start when organisations need to clean customer data. We have even used the CDP to profile motor vehicles, predicting what kind of customer is associated with a particular model. So you can always make the primary object not the customer, but a vehicle, or even a part, and understand the relationships between sources of data.”

Roos said The CRM Team’s value lies in its understanding of the solution and experience in managing configuration, to help customers achieve the full value of Microsoft Dynamics Customer Insights. “We also have a dedicated training team to help customers implement and run the solution successfully,” he said.