CDP (Customer Data Platform)
What is a CDP?
Customer Data Platform is defined by the CDP Institute as “packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.” The main purpose of a CDP is to combine all customer data into sharable profiles. A CDP is designed to have connections to multitudes of sources, uses a data store that handles all data types, employs advanced identity matching methods, and gives other systems easy access to this data.
Many sales and marketing systems like marketing automation or CRM platforms store customer data, but are designed to meet specific needs.
A system is only considered a CDP if it can meet all the following criteria:
- accept data from any sources
- retain all detail of the original input
- store data indefinitely (subject to GDPR or other privacy constraints)
- construct unified data profiles
- share profiles with other systems
- react to events in real-time
- share individual profiles in real-time