A CDP is a solution that pulls together customer data from multiple sources to give you a 360-degree view of each customer. They help you deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. You can use a CDP to personalize every customer touchpoint, across all online and in-person engagement channels.
A CDP collects all your customer information in one place and puts it to work across your business. By connecting data from every source, a CDP makes it easier to deliver relevant experiences, optimize campaigns, and improve customer relationships. Some common features of CDPs include:
Unified customer profiles: Combine data from multiple sources—CRM, web, mobile, and email—into a single, comprehensive view of each customer.
Real-time data collection: Capture customer interactions as they happen so you can act on insights right away.
Identity resolution: Match data across devices and channels to identify and merge records belonging to the same individual.
Segmentation and audience building: Create dynamic customer segments based on things like behavior, demographics, and lifecycle stage.
Data activation: Send customer data to other tools—like email platforms, ad networks, and analytics tools—to personalize experiences across channels.
Privacy and compliance management: Ensure data usage aligns with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) by managing consent and governance.
Analytics and insights: Use dashboards and reports to understand customer behavior, campaign performance, and ROI.
A CDP unifies an organization’s customer data—including transactional, behavioral, and demographic data—from all channels and sources. CDPs are business-managed systems that create persistent, unified customer profiles accessible by other systems such as analytics, marketing, advertising, and customer engagement platforms.
Business applications can directly access and use standardized data from the CDP to facilitate a wide range of actions, including segmentation, web personalization, journey optimization, marketing campaigns, next best actions, recommended products and services, churn detection, sentiment analysis, and case resolution.
Organizations today collect more data than ever, but much of it is trapped in information silos. Some systems weren’t built to integrate or interpret data, so critical insights often remain out of reach. This fragmentation limits your ability to see the full picture of your customers and their needs.
With the rise of digital channels, customer data now spans a wide range of touchpoints—from anonymous ad views to direct purchases and support interactions. The result is a customer data boom that adds both opportunity and complexity.
Customer data spans everything from anonymous ad impressions to known purchases, product usage, and customer service interactions. There are three main types of customer data:
When your data stays fragmented, it becomes difficult to understand customer behavior and preferences. This leads to less informed decision-making, ineffective campaigns, and missed opportunities to deliver meaningful engagement.
To make customer data useful, it must be unified and enriched. A CDP brings together data from multiple sources, analyzes it, and delivers a complete, insight-driven view of each customer across their journey. With a CDP, you can transform siloed information into connected insights that support more personalized, relevant, and effective experiences.
Customers today expect interactions that feel relevant and tailored to them. To deliver those experiences, you need a deeper understanding of what they want. A CDP provides a single, accurate source of truth that can be accessed across teams, helping you drive growth at every customer touchpoint.
A CDP makes it possible for marketing, sales, and service teams to work from the same unified view of the customer.
Here’s how that shared data foundation helps personalize interactions across key touchpoints:
Deliver targeted campaigns and personalized content across online and in-person channels. With a CDP, you can increase conversion rates, boost marketing ROI, and deepen brand affinity by recognizing loyal customers and rewarding them with meaningful offers.
Use unified data to segment customers and tailor sales conversations. A CDP gives sales teams context such as loyalty status, customer lifetime value, buying frequency, and recent purchases—helping them personalize outreach and capture more opportunities.
Equip support teams with 360-degree customer profiles so they can deliver consistent, proactive experiences across channels. With richer context, agents can anticipate needs, resolve issues faster, and route high-value customers to the right specialists.
A CDP provides a centralized view of your customers and helps you work more efficiently, adapt to change, and build trust while creating personalized experiences at scale.Here are some of the key benefits of using a CDP:
Bring together data from disparate sources in a system that’s reliable and easy to update. By centralizing audiences and business rules, you can apply them across tools—saving time and reducing the need for ongoing IT support.
Respond quickly to shifts in customer behavior and technology trends. A CDP provides a solid data foundation that integrates with existing systems, making it easier to retrieve, share, and act on insights across your business.
Take advantage of built-in AI and machine learning to make accurate predictions and surface insights you’d otherwise miss. Features like natural language processing, predictive recommendations, and intelligent insights reduce the need for costly in-house development and maintenance.
Honor customer privacy and consent without adding extra workflows. A CDP gives you control over customer data, reduces the burden of managing siloed systems, and helps build trust through compliance with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and FedRAMP.
Access real-time insights that drive meaningful actions. Spot opportunities by customer preferences, geography, or behavior. Enrich profiles by combining customer data with operational and IoT data, and use inventory status and past purchasing history to deliver predictive recommendations that improve ROI.
CDPs and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions both collect customer data, but they serve different purposes. CDPs help you manage customer data, improve your marketing effectiveness, and inform high-level business decisions about customer touchpoints. They generate unified customer profiles and segments that can be shared with other marketing tools or business systems in your stack and be used to personalize customer engagements.
A CRM only stores what’s known as first-party data—information about your customer’s direct interactions with your company. Traditionally, data entry in CRMs has been manual, with sales teams logging notes from calls, updating pipelines, or recording support tickets. Modern CRM systems now reduce that burden by syncing with email and calendars, pulling in data from connected apps, and using AI to automate routine tasks and suggest next steps. This combination makes the information more accurate, adoption easier, and the system more effective for employees managing customer relationships
While CRMs can help you organize and manage information about customer-facing interactions, they’re generally most useful for employees who manage individual customer relationships.
While a CDP shares some similarities with other customer data solutions, it plays a distinct role. Unlike a CRM, which focuses on relationship management, or a DMP, which manages anonymous audience data, a CDP brings these pieces together by integrating first-, second-, and third-party sources. This creates a complete view of each customer that can be used across systems.
For organizations already using CRM systems such as Dynamics 365 Sales, a CDP doesn’t replace them—it extends their value. By combining CRM data with other sources, a CDP provides deeper insights, supports personalization at scale, and enables consistent experiences across every customer touchpoint.
A data management platform (DMP) collects and organizes second- and third-party data to support advertising. DMPs focus on anonymous customer segmentation for audience targeting and ad campaigns. They don’t natively support first-party data and instead rely on external sources to enrich and scale audiences.
A CDP, by contrast, aggregates first-, second-, and third-party customer data—including personally identifiable information (PII) like names, addresses, emails, and phone numbers—to create persistent customer profiles. These profiles can be used by marketing, sales, and service teams to deliver personalized experiences and strengthen engagement.
The key difference between CDPs and DMPs is that DMPs help you target certain audiences for advertising, while CDPs provide a comprehensive view of your individual customers that allow for personalization across every touchpoint.
Marketing automation is software that helps marketers nurture leads, run campaigns, and build customer loyalty. These systems often rely on data such as email engagement, form fills, and web activity to power campaigns, but they aren’t typically designed to bring together multiple data sources for truly omnichannel experiences.
A CDP pulls data from all sources—including online, offline, operational, and IoT—to create insights about your customers. While marketing automation can drive single-channel engagements such as targeted emails, achieving true one-to-one personalization requires the unified, 360-degree profiles delivered by a CDP.
By serving as the intelligent data source behind marketing automation, a CDP enables consistent experiences across every touchpoint. With unified profiles, marketers can optimize automated campaigns—targeting the right customers, at the right moment, with the right message.
A CDP gives you a complete view of your customers by unifying data from every channel and touchpoint. With that single source of truth, your teams can create personalized experiences, act on real-time insights, and work more efficiently across marketing, sales, and service.
You can take these capabilities further with solutions like Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, which integrates with existing systems, applies AI and machine learning to surface predictions, streamlines workflows, and helps safeguard customer data with enterprise-grade security and governance.
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