Customer Data Platform: Key to Unified Customer Insights

Customer-facing businesses rely on customer data to inform their day-to-day operations and business strategies, but fragmented data across various tools makes it difficult to gain a comprehensive view of customers. A customer data platform (CDP) is a software solution that collects, unifies, and activates first-party customer data from various sources, creating a single, coherent, and complete view of each customer. CDPs enable businesses to gain deeper insights, improve segmentation, and drive personalization efforts across channels by breaking down data silos and consolidating customer information. They deliver a comprehensive 360-degree view of customers by ingesting data from diverse first-party channels such as CRMs, web forms, ecommerce platforms, email campaigns, and social media. CDPs aim to consolidate customer data into individual, centralized customer profiles through identity resolution, which involves stitching together data from various touchpoints and devices to create a single customer view. While CRM and DMP also deal with customer data, they serve different purposes and possess distinct capabilities. CDPs specialize in first-party data, creating persistent customer profiles for personalized engagement across channels. They offer features such as data ingestion, identity resolution, segmentation, and data activation, which work together to collect, unify, and activate customer data for enhanced decision-making and engagement strategies. The global CDP market is projected to expand from $7.4 billion in 2024 to $28.2 billion by 2028 at a CAGR of 39.9% during 2024–2028.