What Does a Top Customer Data Platform Look Like?

What is a Customer Data Platform?

In the modern world, data is king. If your organization can’t make effective use of that data—draw it into a single platform, use it to support agents and gain customer insights—you’ll lose out to an organization which can.

A top Customer Data Platform functions as a ‘data aggregation layer’, bringing customer data from across your IT estate into a single, accessible interface. The CDP offers knowledge democratization for your organization, breaking down data siloes, and getting data where it needs to be, as efficiently as possible.

The Customer Data Platform’s features fall into three major categories:

• Agent Experience – those features that support agents, enabling them to do their best work.

• IT synergy – features that unify multiple third-party systems of record, breaking down data siloes to leverage omni-data on each customer, and create a seamless customer experience.

• Customer Journey Mapping – tools that allow you to track every customer interaction, across every channel of contact, in real time; creating a 360-degree picture of the customer.
  
  

A Top Customer Data Platform Supports Outstanding Agent Experience

Agent experience is the single greatest challenge facing the modern contact center. 49% of CX leaders reported an increase in employee attrition in 2022. Maintaining your talent long enough to meaningfully develop it is difficult, and agent attrition is a massive cost. Getting value-for-talent is a key step in turning your contact center into a value center.

A top Customer Data Platform offers your business knowledge democratization. This means that knowledge is distributed; brought to the locations where it’s needed, to make the most effective use of your data. This manifests itself in several Customer Data Platform features:

• When the customer first gets in contact, customer data is used to inform intelligent routing decisions. In combination with Intelligent Automation, a customer’s interaction history, in combination with their stated purpose, is used to direct that customer to the best available outcome.

• If that outcome is a conversation with an agent, that agent has all relevant information, both customer data, relevant knowledge articles, or any other information, presented in a screen-pop. This allows the agent to get straight to the point; no need for the customer to repeat details; leading to a quicker, more efficient interaction.

• Agents are able to create new cases during calls, allowing them to save on after-call work by completing essential tasks during the interaction.

• Once an interaction is over, after-call work can be completed within a single interface. The Customer Data Platform makes all third-party systems of record accessible from within a single pane of glass, freeing up time for your agents to move on to the next interaction.

A Top Customer Data Platform Creates Cost-Effective IT Synergy

Employees typically waste around 32 business days a year just switching between apps. A complex IT estate creates inefficiencies. Inefficiencies directly impact your bottom line. When customer experience is stake, even seconds wasted can turn a great experience into a frustrating one.

A top Customer Data Platform creates IT synergy. This means unifying and streamlining a tangled IT estate. No matter how many third-party systems your organization uses, a top Customer Data Platform will integrate into each of those systems via API, allowing data to be read and written from within a single interface.

For customer-facing agents, this is a game-changer. No longer will customers have to suffer periods of dead air, waiting for the agent to look up their information across multiple databases. A top Customer Data Platform allows data lookups, and updates to data, to be made from within the single agent interface.

And the efficiencies don’t stop there. Back-office workers can also benefit from the breakdown of data siloes, and from unifying multiple communications apps within a single interface. A top Customer Data Platform lets your business work smarter.

A Top Customer Data Platform Personalizes Customer Journeys

Companies that actively personalize customer contacts increase their revenue by upwards of 15%. A top Customer Data Platform makes that personalization easy. The CDP tracks the customer throughout the entire interaction, creating an ‘omni-data’ record. ‘Omni-data’ data from across every channel of contact—no matter how the customer chooses to reach out, that interaction will be recorded in the CDP.

This 360-degree picture of the customer includes a huge range of different metrics and measurements:

• Contact handling data – That is, information about interactions, such as Average Handling Time, First Response Time, First Contact Resolution, which provide insight into the performance of your contact center and your agents.

• Customer satisfaction metrics – These measure how the customer felt about an interaction, and include Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Effort Score, and Value Enhancement Score.

• AI-Powered metrics – Those forms of measurement that leverage AI and Intelligent Automation to gain customer insights. These include Natural Language Processing to automatically identify topic and intention, and Sentiment Analysis to detect tone and sentiment.

Each of these data sources provides an opportunity to personalize customer journeys. By identifying those customers who are dissatisfied with their service, you can locate opportunities to deliver proactive tailored experiences. With the support of screen-pops, you can ensure that your customers receive experiences hand-crafted to their needs, every time.

A top Customer Data Platform allows all of these measurements to be brought into a single pane of glass, as easy-to-build custom reports. These reports can be exported at the click of a button, and provide a complete picture of the customer and the contact center, to tailor your CX to the needs of your organization.