cover image of the Loppi drill core archive by kallerna, CC BY-SA 4.0
What do we know about our customers? The promise of half a dozen tools over the last decade has been a complete picture of our customers: everything from what they're doing on our platform to their sales info and their favorite color.
Time and again tools have promised us that they will solve every problem we have: consolidating data, offering analytics, interoperating with other technologies, and unifying customer profiles.
The latest new term for these end-all and be-all products is a Customer Data Platform or CDP: a tool that consumes customer data from everywhere and resolves customer data quickly and authoritatively. The problems with CDPs lies within their very design, and they are in short:
- high cost
- data lock-in
- failure to really do everything you need
- data reliability
These problems, again, aren't the result of a single vendor failing to deliver, it's more that you really can't rely on a single SaaS tool to know everything and do everything related to your customer.
In a recent post on The New Stack, Gavin and Kostas go in to more detail on the promise and the disappointment of the CDP.
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