Customer Data Platform Development -How It Is Effective and Essential for Corporate Banking?
Professionals who work in the bank industry will definitely say that customers are their primary and most important asset. In circumstances where customers face financial hardship and struggle to meet their necessities, banks owe additional responsibility of prioritizing customer needs and supporting essential workers, to relieve them from anxiety and promptly revert to shifting tastes and preferences.
In order to identify the pain-points of customers while seeking financial assistance, banks bring opportunities and solutions for new federal assistance programs, loans, and changes in retirement plans, mortgage freezes, and any other potential financial hardships and offer an enhanced customer experience. To make everything convenient for customers and to create a new experience for customers, a digitized platform is needed.
This is where the Customer Data Platform (CDP) comes in place, where all the bank information from the customer perspective is made accessible to customers from anywhere. Moreover, with limited one-one interactions and feedback opportunities, it becomes highly difficult for banks to know about your customer preferences. From this blog, we would like to illustrate why a customer data platform is essential for corporate banking.
What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?
A customer data platform development (CDP) is generally referred to as a marketer-managed system because it creates a continuous, unified customer database that can be easily accessible from other systems as well. There are several reasons why a customer data platform would help banks address customer database challenges, turning them into a unified customer profile and saving them in a single data repository.
Here we have listed the top 4 reasons why a customer data platform can be best suited for banks.
4 reasons why a customer data platform is suitable for corporate banking
1 – Integrated data across all data points
Banks have discriminately spread all their customer data to different data sources such as CRM applications, POS systems, data warehouses, legacy systems, and more. This remains the biggest challenge to banking marketers to comprehend and establish customer data to get a single combined view. With a customer data platform, banks can integrate customer data from any transaction system and collate them as a central data repository.
2 – All-in-one central view of customer data
No matter whether the data is available online or offline, the customer data platform (CDP) makes it unified. Therefore, banking marketers can use this customer view to develop unique and tailor-made experiences or execute targeted campaigns across the preferred channels of customers.
3 – Processing real-time customer data
When accessing a customer database is one challenge for banking marketers, another challenge is receiving their accurate information. With CDP integration in place, banking marketers can now ensure correct information of customer names, addresses, preferences, and more and are updated as well. Therefore, marketers no longer need to worry about running marketing campaigns for targeted customers and need not concern about customer data integrity.
4 – Crystal clear data insights to drive hyper-personalized marketing campaigns
It is now easy for banking marketers with customer data platforms to acquire access to data insights for each customer who interacts with the bank and their product preferences, along with preferred marketing channels and many other details. This will help marketers to run hyper-personalized marketing campaigns using the right channel at the right time. It makes sure there is no deviation in focusing on the target audiences.
Features and benefits of a customer data platform
- It provides a holistic view of the customer information and preferences so as to help execute and optimize personalized journeys.
- By effective leveraging of CDP, banks can easily turn the control of the customer database highly useful to marketing.
- It provides actionable insights to marketers by integrating multiple data sources automatically, which may not be time-intensive and an imperfect process.
- The customer data platform is one of the customer profiling tools that helps in eliminating data silos across vendors and makes it possible to generate reports even on-the-go.
- Within no time, the CDP converts multiple data sources into a unified single source, making the data viable and accessible to marketers anytime.
Challenges of customer data platforms
- A CDP platform may fail to meet consumer demand for a highly-customized cross-channel experience.
- CDP can be helpful in resolving your data challenges and can present your customers with a seamless experience, but remember it cannot resolve any of your organizational challenges.
Best practices for leveraging a customer data platform
CDPs cater to unique attributes that alike them from traditional marketing databases and solutions. Here are some of its characteristics for your knowledge:
Personally identified customers
Every customer is assigned a unique identifier code which could be by name, postal address, email address, or any other unique information. This helps in effective tracking of an individual customer’s interactions and behaviors persistently across channels. CDPs allow you to link activities and interactions other than internal data sources to individual customers, with the help of this unique identifier.
The Collaboration of Multiple Data Types
Businesses that follow traditional systems only focus on one or a few types of data and restrict from targeting other viable sources. They look at only website visits, order history, or social media transactions, whereas the role of CDP lies in accepting and integrating multiple data types in various formats. Moreover, CDPs easily provisions the addition of new data sources.
Availability of external data
When there is a need for executing marketing campaigns, CDPs play an important role in fetching every single data from external systems and keeping it ready-to-use. CDPs provide marketing-relevant features such as predictive modeling scores or other actionable insights.
Taking over complete control of marketing
Similar to other database solutions, a customer data platform does not put the entire control of the customer database in the marketer’s hands. Therefore, marketers without technical expertise need not worry about dealing with a CDP. It makes the job of marketers pretty easy and they need not depend on IT for the management of customer data.
For What kind of customers does CDP work?
- CDP greatly works for events i.e. behavioral data that is obtained from a user action in a session of a website, an app, or a mobile browser.
- If customer characteristics include names, addresses, birthdays, contact details, and more, advanced CDPs can also protect machine-learning powered analysis like purchase or likelihood.
- If your business has transactional data such as purchases, returns, and other information from e-commerce websites.
- If you are measuring campaign metrics such as customer engagement, reach, impressions, and other metrics from campaigns.
- If you are handling live customer service data such as chat information, number and length of interactions and frequency, and several other data from CRM systems.
How is a CDP different from DMP and CRM?
Several factors differentiate a customer data platform from data management platforms and customer relationship software.
- Customer Data Platform provides holistic customer data whereas the DMP and CRM do not cater.
- With respect to marketing and sales, CDP and CRM integrate lasting customer profiles, whereas DMP does not.
- All three are packaged systems and show similarity in this aspect.
- CDP and DMP provide real-time capability in marketing and advertising, whereas CRM fails to provide this.
- CDP and DMP are open platforms, while CRM is unlike both.
- CDP comes with a cross-channel personalization feature, which is not offered by DMP and CRM.
- CDP and CRM show all the data of the customer base, whereas DMP shows only anonymized data.
- Only Customer Data Platform provides segregation through identity resolution.
- CDP and CRM give priority to first-party data, whereas DMP does not.
- Only DMP provides priority to third-party data and the rest two do not.
- All three cannot function efficiently without IT support.
How to use a Customer Data Platform (CDP) Effectively?
#1: Online to offline connection
If you want to create an accurate customer profile online, a CDP allows you to merge both online and offline activities. You can easily identify where your customers are navigating online with CDP.
#2: Customer segmentation and customization
With CPD, you can segment and prioritize your target customers and substantially render a personalized, omnichannel experience across their business lifecycle with you.
#3: Predictive customer scoring
Nurture your customer profiles with predictive data that shows the probability of purchase, churn rate, visits, and opening of emails you send to your customers.
Along with these attributes, you can check the usability of conversion rate optimization and A/B testing. Along with the product recommendations, smart behavioral targeting, identical advertisements, automation of omnichannel, and more.
Bottom Line
The customer data platform is an effective data management tool, highly used by many companies, especially corporate banks, to carry a professional relationship with customers and provide them a great user experience of using their services. Ideally, a CDP helps organizations know how effective their marketing campaigns are and how easy the accessibility and availability of overall customer data is in a single centralized database store.
A CDP can way improve customer lifetime value and foster customer loyalty, leading to effective and efficient marketing campaigns successfully.
Author Bio
Sandeep Agrawal
Sandeep holds the position of CEO at Credencys Solutions – a customer data platform development company. He has more than two decades of experience in creating world-class teams and driving innovation through cutting edge products. With a motto of ‘Go Digital,’ Sandeep delivers an Extraordinary Customer Experience to its every client.
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