“Good is the enemy of Great. And that is one of the key reasons we have so little that becomes great”- Jim Collins
Controversial and upsetting though this parable may be, it is remarkably accurate and is steeped in good, nay, great, business sense.
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) have proliferated the world of digital marketing and have driven their stake into fertile digital ground with unusual alacrity. Simply put, they are here to stay.
Given that the CDP institute (https://www.cdpinstitute.org/), in their 2021 listing of Global CDP vendors has called out over fifty firms as possessing the necessary firepower to enable marketing pundits at enterprises to make hay, the inevitable question of vendor selection looms large as decision-makers try to sift the great from the good.
Even a cursory glance through the list throws up several names that would make the cut for any self-respecting marketer. But as one studies the features offered more carefully, it becomes readily apparent that there are but a few who have thrown their gauntlets whole-heartedly into this exciting and highly rewarding space. Only few therefore, have made the bid to transcend the merely good and offer the great.
To don the hat of greatness, CDP vendors must recognize that delivering a seamless performance across the stages, i.e., from data ingestion to revenue recognition, is an imperative that can scarcely be argued with. In order to establish this elusive seamlessness, no feature is too small to be a part of the buyer’s consideration set.
Consider the case of providing ‘Probabilistic Match’ as an out-of-the-box capability. This feature alone elevates the CDP vendor providing it to a rarefied plane. It signals the intelligence of the algorithms at play and enables marketers and their business counterparts to sharpen their target end-user segments and weave meaning into seemingly unrelated data points. In other words, it is nothing short of travesty if serious vendors do not offer this as a part of their stable for their customers to profit from.
Deeply connected to seamless Customer Experience is the CDP provider’s ability to enable and help run multi-step, multi-channel/omni-channel campaigns. The digital divide that separates “old-school” marketing from its contemporaneous cousin is a significant marketing differentiator. Being able to leverage the underlying scalability of the Digital Ecosystem to deliver a multi-channel, multi-step campaign is but a logical extension of an inherently well-stocked CDP arsenal. By unleashing this capability across end-user targeted segments, firms can double down on delivering highly-personalized content via the digital smorgasbord of web, mobile and social, thereby enabling quicker closures, deeply engaged clients and a fine appreciation of the nuances that their target customers value.
While the aforementioned features are crucial components of a full-fledged CDP offering, it is prudent to also look at how delivery channels themselves can be crucial elements in ensuring the biggest bang for the marketing buck. Mobile SDKs that open the world of App-related enablement for the savvy marketer are one such instance. To effectively target the increasingly mobile-first digital consumer, the CDP Provider must place mobile at the heart of their omni-channel capability stack and assiduously work to cultivate sophisticated relationships that can help guide customer choice and discretion over the medium and long-term. Not being able to cater to this core requirement therefore, puts the marketer and his firm at a handicap that is difficult to remedy at scale.
Let us look at one last area of meaningful differentiation between a Good and Great CDP provider- Predictive Analytics. It merits no brownie points for inferring that without the ability to offer predictive analytical capabilities, CDP players run the risk of not delivering insights that can help businesses find new revenue streams and develop more meaningful outreach mechanisms to better serve their end-users. Being able to offer Predictive Analytics as a value-added feature both in its manual and automated avatars is therefore increasingly becoming valuable for enterprises and mid-size firms to glean insights that might well shape the path of success in their digital pursuits.
Where does all this leave us? What does this mean for the prospective (and existing) CDP client? What actions can marketers take to ensure that they aren’t left by the kerbside as they attempt to accelerate their digital footprint in a pandemic-ridden reality?
These are difficult questions to answer objectively. One way to address the uncertainty is to partner with a vendor who provides these features as out-of-the-box benefits that bring down implementation and go-live timelines. Another is to take a good hard look at the existing stack and examine the benefits of running a Proof-Of-Concept with a CDP vendor willing to demonstrate benefits that not only address the business initiatives and needs of today, but offer a meaningful promise of a digitally well-equipped tomorrow.
FirstHive’s CDP addresses all the above outlined benefits and more. It also has the distinction of being the only vendor with a global footprint and production-ready with every single feature the CDP Institute considers important in a ‘Full-Stack CDP Solution”. FirstHive, therefore, by virtue of a relevant and rich suite of features combined with implementation know-how stands tall and promises that most elusive of leaps to the modern marketer- The leap from Good to Great.
We are world’s first CDP to use Machine Learning for building unified customer identities and layer it with actionable campaign targeting recommendations to deliver disproportionate jump in Marketing ROI. FirstHive is a privacy by design, GDPR compliant product & also delivers a cross channel campaign orchestration capability on the unified customer data set.
With FirstHive, enterprises have experienced upto 6X jump in their Marketing ROI metrices. FirstHive has customer deployments across Indo-Pacific and US regions today including in some of the leading BFSI, FMCG & Manufacturing enterprises.
Lastly, an important point to note is that FirstHive is a resilient product backed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to strengthen its architecture. Besides Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) that offers highly scalable infrastructure, FirstHive also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) that stores billions of row of data with an above industry uptime, AWS Transcribe service to convert voice data of customer interactions into searchable & analyzable digital content and Amazon Sagemaker platform to train machine learning models & generate the intelligent inferences. The Hyper-personalization functions run on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) that is capable of elastically auto-scaling based on the varying business needs, while image recognition capability of Amazon Rekognition is leveraged in different types of sentiment analysis.
