what is a customer data platform

A customer data platform (CDP) is a collection of software that 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. CDPs allow businesses to pull in customer data from any channel, system, or data stream to build a unified customer profile. The primary tasks of a CDP include collecting data, harmonizing data, activating data, and pulling insights from data. CDPs can ingest data from any source, including email, social media, loyalty, and systems like enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and data management platforms (DMPs) . CDPs can analyze and segment customer profiles using rules or machine learning, perform predictive scoring, and provide customer journey orchestration. The benefits of a CDP include more organized customer data management, a single, coherent, complete view of each customer, and the ability to offer hyper-personalized experiences for customers.