How proficient are you with customer data? Take our self-assessment and see how a CDP can help

Most of us have had at least one horrible customer experience caused by a company’s poor data management practices. An ill-timed marketing email sent while you were dealing with a service issue, receiving a message clearly tailored for someone else, learning of a data breach—the list goes on and on. All these examples illustrate the importance of effectively managing your customer data across the entire company.

But customer data can be hard to organize. There’s so much to keep track of and so many systems to dig through to find it—some of which don’t even talk to one another! These challenges make it difficult to reconcile your data, understand it, and most importantly, put it to good use. However, your customers have experienced truly personalized service, and now they expect it everywhere. Keeping them as customers means offering the same—or better—level of customer service, no matter the channel.

Self-assessment: Is your customer data accurate, actionable, and effective at providing personalized customer experiences?

When’s the last time you evaluated your effectiveness at managing customer data? What’s your confidence level in the tools you’re using to capture it, consolidate it, and circulate the most up-to-date details across the company? To take a fresh look, get started with this brief self-assessment.

Answer six short questions for a high-level graphic view and score of your company’s proficiency with customer data. The first step to successful data management is understanding your organization’s current strengths and gaps. The next step is to use the right systems to help you organize and use it effectively.

It’s crucial to have up-to-date, well-maintained, accessible customer data, and a customer data platform (CDP) makes that possible. A customer data platform provides a single view of each customer to serve as the foundation for real-time personalized experiences and highly responsive customer service.

Need more reasons to consider the right customer data platform? Read on to learn more about the benefits of a CDP.

3 ways a customer data platform helps you optimize your data for powerful customer experiences

Among other things, a customer data platform helps you understand your customers, predict what they need, and interact with them on whatever channel they prefer to use.

1. Understand your customers.

Truly knowing each customer requires two things: gathering and maintaining a sufficient amount of data about them and having an identity management system that can create a single 360 customer view.

A customer data platform helps you gather customer information from across your business, bring it together into one system, create a unified customer profile, and keep that profile up to date.

2. Predict your customers’ needs.

Anticipating what your customer needs requires data derived from artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. A customer data platform (CDP) uses that technology to help you take the gathered information and use it to determine how and when you communicate with your customers.

To provide the best customer experience (CX) across the customer lifecycle, you’ll want to make the right choices about the next-best action to take, which channels to use, and what message to focus on. A CDP can help you do just that.

3. Interact with your customers using their channel of choice.

Sending the right message at the right time through the right channel takes some effort and coordination. A customer data platform can help you deliver this message across every touchpoint in the customer’s journey.

With the right CDP in place, you can provide a timely, relevant, consistent customer experience across channels—one that people have come to expect.

Take the next step toward CX data excellence

Get started today with our quick self-assessment to see how effectively your company is managing and using customer data.

Also, visit our website to learn more about the benefits of a customer data platform (CDP) and the impact it can have on your organization.

Want to take a closer look? Explore Oracle Unity Customer Data Platform with an interactive demo and the short video below.