One of the many challenges faced by organisations today is which software or technology tool to invest in or deploy; with which to achieve superior data and insights-driven Business Intelligence needed to gain competitive advantage? McKinsey reports that the year 2020 saw significant increases in the volume, quality, speed, and variety of data across organizations. And as the scale of data grows, thanks to accelerated digital growth and maturity globally, so does the need for proper storage, processing and utilisation. The Customer Data Platform (CDP) is one of such powerful tools Businesses must consider in their data-driven business strategy.

Businesses can ideally select a preferred CDP Vendor, based on certain unique features required such as the Terragon CDP which comes uniquely equipped with over 108 million encrypted profiles of Nigerian customers; however, not getting cross-functional buy-in from various departments or key stakeholders within the Organisation prevents the full realisation of the immense benefits a CDP offers towards achieving  KPIs and Business objectives. 

Should it be merely an executive decision made by the CEO for Enterprise-wide implementation or usage or a Customer Success/Relations tool for Customer engagement to encourage loyalty, or a software/technology tool owned by the IT unit for enterprise-wide customer data syncing, processing and business support, or the Marketing department to enable personalised customer engagements? The right answer is – the CDP should be utilised by all of these parties as it helps the organisation achieve both short term and long term goals. So, irrespective of which department initiates or drives the adoption of the CDP, other departments’ and stakeholders’  understanding of the substantial value which could be unlocked and how it contributes to them achieving their KPIs, fast tracks the organisation’s digital maturity.

From the CEO’s perspective, the value the CDP offers must ultimately tie to the Business’s overall objectives ie growth through revenue increase and or cost-cutting; such as the Terragon CDP which guarantees a lower cost of customer acquisition as a short term benefit and long term increase of customer value, when fully deployed effectively.

The Marketing Team is first and foremost concerned with understanding the customer. What compels people to engage, and why do they keep coming back (or not)? In today’s data-driven world where CMOs make decisions based on customer insights, the CDP plays a central role in their strategic vision. Data-driven marketing enables them to gain high returns on Ad Spend and lower Cost of Customer Conversion; which makes them both relevant and important to both the CFO and the CEO. The fact that the CDP allows for carrying out measurable customer engagements and importantly, the ability to attribute sales directly to data-driven marketing is invaluable.

Since the use of data and insights is obviously critical to a Business strategic objective, the IT/CTO must realise they are major stakeholders and in some cases custodians of the platform. The CDP must meet certain criteria such as offering the highest level of Data privacy, always-on availability, scalability, redundancy and data recovery should there be an unexpected disaster as this ties to their performance indicators. Also, the CDP’s interaction with other data platforms for data aggregation and ingestion is critical for seamless activation and usage.     

For the Sales Team, the CDP can guarantee customer acquisition through a number of online (web) and offline (mobile) channels. The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning feature aids in based product recommendations for proper upselling &  cross-selling as well as look-alike modelling which also enables accurate targeting of prospective customers. . The 

To help Organisations achieve superior Business Intelligence, the Terragon CDP checks all the boxes for the various departments and stakeholder expectations by providing deep insights and understanding of the consumers, their behaviours and interests. It also offers continuous ingestion of data through the post-campaign feedback loop, coupled with the unification feature where data cleaning is carried out and enrichment through multiple 3rd party data sources.

Summarily, the place of the CDP in today’s data-driven marketing cannot be overemphasized; and in a perfect world, all stakeholders actually realise the advantage and potential of adopting a CDP enterprise-wide; and jointly canvass for investment in one. However, having just one department or stakeholder as a product evangelist or advocate within the Organization is a good enough starting point, until the enterprise reaches full data usage maturity.

Terragon is Africa’s leading Data and Marketing Technology Company. The Terragon CDP aggregates data from a variety of touchpoints and creates a single customer view of each customer, giving deep consumer insights and predictive recommendations through Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. It also enables data enrichment from various supply sources and an omnichannel activation feature for online (web) and offline (mobile) reach. Terragon is the only CDP company listed by Facebook as partners for the Conversions API solution in Africa.