What is a CDP?

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a type of packaged software which creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems. Data is pulled from multiple sources, cleaned and combined to create a single customer profile. This structured data is then made available to other marketing systems.

The Wikipedia CDP definition is one thing, but for a company looking to increase customer loyalty via real-time personalization, retaining customers with a superior, tailored experience, what is a CDP?

At Teradata we define a CDP as:
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are marketer-managed systems that deliver the previously elusive 360 view of the customer, help enterprises sense and react to a multitude of customer pain points and opportunities, and reduces the friction that can occur when moving from insights to actions.

Benefits of a Customer Data Platform
360-Degree Customer View
A CDP system integrates and rationalizes customer data from multiple online and offline sources. Using a customer data platform eliminates the redundancies and inconsistencies that lead to increased costs and a disjointed customer experience.  

From Customer Data to Insights
Data is meaningless if it can’t be turned into insights.  CDPs use a variety of analytics such as machine learning, statistics, sentiment analysis, journey pathing, graph, and others to make sense of your data that leads to actionable insights. 

Activating Customer Insights
CDPs facilitate the transition from insights to actions.  An enterprise will have a variety of campaigns at any given time, and a CDP can orchestrate marketing efforts across multiple channels.  CDPs blend real time and integrated, historical data and machine learning to hyper-personalize communications at the moment of truth. 

Designed for the Marketer and CX Professional
Unlike a traditional data warehouse, set-up, maintenance, and usage doesn’t require technical expertise. A CDP democratizes customer data access and eliminates IT bottlenecks.

Customer Data Platform and Teradata Vantage CX
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) enable the creation of real-time, unified customer profiles by giving marketers control of data. Vantage CX acts as an enterprise CDP in the cloud, helping enterprises deliver superior customer experiences by aiding data ingestion and integration, giving business users the ability the ability to easily integrate and manage millions of customer records.

The Benefits of Vantage CX and Customer Data Platforms
Channel Connectivity: Self-service data integration capabilities let citizen data integrators rapidly access and explore new data sets for increased agility.

Connected ID: With Vantage CX business users can link new data sets to existing customer information in to create unified customer profiles.

Labs: Gives business users access to individual virtual sandboxes to store and process data in a way that reduces data movement and ensures governance and security.