The Central Role of Customer Data Platforms

Last night I stayed up all night, participating in a large enterprise’s company-wide launch event for its global customer-centricity initiative. The company’s world headquarters, where the launch event was held, is located nine time zones from where I live, and my Zoom presentation to them began around 1:30 am my time, with the Q&A lasting until just after 3.

This dynamic company has a worldwide presence in a number of different industrial areas, selling mostly to large businesses in a variety of different fields, from mining to chemicals to agribusiness, and involving not just products but services. They knew, moreover, that because of their wide set of industrial capabilities they should be trying to sell even more products and services to each of their customers but, as a more traditionally organized, product-centric business, they also knew that this ambition was going to be hard to achieve. Which is why they began their global effort with this worldwide kick-off event, designed to begin educating their managers and to generate “buy in” for the initiative.

If I had to summarize my most important advice to them during the event, it would be that they should begin their initiative by agreeing on and installing an enterprise-wide customer data platform (CDP) of some type. They needed to start with a “top-down” system for identifying, tracking, and differentiating their customers. This was the message I put forward at several different times during my talk, because the strategies I was describing to them more or less all depended on it. Before they can hope to engage in any coherent key-account management activities, for instance, or promote successful cross-selling tactics, or de-commoditize their products by adding customer-specific features, I said they first needed to have a mechanism in place to give them an accurate, “unified view of customer data and analytics.”

The truth is, as businesses of all types rapidly try to digitize their operations and marketing efforts on account of the pandemic, this message is one I seem to be delivering more and more frequently. And it's really very simple:

If you want the fastest, least flawed, most-likely-to-succeed customer-centric transformation, my friends, START WITH THE DATA!

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I am an advisor to Treasure Data, a Customer Data Platform company. Click here to see my most recent Webinar with Tom Treanor, CMO at Treasure Data, entitled “Who Owns Digital Transformation?”