Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) promise a truly unified view of your customers, opening doors to hyper-personalization and driving significant ROI. Yet, if you’re like many organizations, you might find your CDP initiatives getting stuck right after the initial Proof of Concept (POC) stage. While these early pilots brilliantly demonstrate value, the journey to a fully scaled, integrated CDP often stalls, leaving immense potential locked away.
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The Challenge: Why the Use Case-Led Approach Often Fails
A common strategy in CDP implementation, often championed by vendors, is a strict “use case-led” approach. This means identifying a list of specific use cases, prioritizing them by potential ROI, and then attempting to implement each one individually. While this sounds logical on paper for a POC, in practice, it frequently runs into major roadblocks once you try to transition out of the POC stage.
Consider a seemingly simple yet powerful use case: personalizing website content or paid media messages based on a customer’s last purchase. To bring this to life, what seems straightforward quickly unravels into a web of interdependencies (especially for large organizations). You need robust product transactional data, connected customer profiles, and the seamless integration of these data points. These are tasks that demand significant input and collaboration from various internal teams, including your local IT and data & analytics specialists.
The Bottleneck: Ad-Hoc Demands on Already Stretched Teams
This use case-by-use case model often translates into a stream of ad-hoc requests landing on the desks of IT and data teams who are already operating at full capacity. These crucial departments typically have little to no bandwidth for unplanned development or data integration tasks. The predictable outcome? Those valuable use cases get pushed back, relegated to long-term backlogs, and critical business initiatives lose crucial momentum. This reactive cycle, where every new use case sparks a fresh set of ad-hoc demands, is simply inefficient and stifles real progress.
Try This Instead: Shift Towards Strategic, Foundational Enablement
The current use case-led approach, while effective for initial validation, proves unsustainable for broad CDP adoption. To move beyond the never-ending POC and truly unlock the comprehensive value your CDP can deliver, you need to rethink your implementation strategy. Instead of a reactive, use case-by-case scramble, a more strategic and proactive methodology is essential.
Consider focussing on:
- Building Foundational Data Infrastructure: Proactively setting up the core data pipelines and data models required to unify customer data, rather than building them gradually for each use case and constantly hitting new walls.
- Integrated Technical Planning: Collaborating closely with IT and data teams from the outset to plan and allocate resources for the necessary technical developments that will support most (if not all) future use cases.
- Enabling Self-Service Capabilities: Creating a robust data environment where marketing and business teams can access and activate customer data they need, with less reliance on constant ad-hoc IT & Data team support.
- Having The MarTech Lead In The Driver’s Seat: Ensuring this person oversees the functional and technical CDP roadmap while gathering input for prioritised use cases from the campaign operations teams (e.g. CRM, eComm, Media).
This means shifting your CDP rollout from a gradual, ad-hoc approach to a strategic, foundational enablement. When you make this transformation, your organization won’t just pilot a CDP; you’ll finally realize the full, transformative impact of a unified customer view.
Ready to discuss how you can strategically unlock the full potential of your CDP? Reach out to our team at Artefact.
