What is a CDP? Here's Why Your Dealership Won't Compete Profitably Without One in the Near Future

27.01.22 03:31 AM By Layton Judd

According to a recent Customer Data Platform Report, 73% of companies say that a CDP will be critical to their customer experience efforts. Consumers have started shopping online even more since the pandemic kept them safely homebound; therefore, consumer data and behavior is becoming even more important. 


A CDP ensures your dealership is maximizing the customer experience even when they are not shopping directly at the dealership. 

WHAT IS A CDP?

According to David Rabb, who coined the term, a Customer Data Platform is “software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.” In short, it is a cloud-based system that can create a full 360 degree view of a customer.

CDP vs. CRM

A CDP is different from a CRM and other tools geared towards the customer experience. 


How? 

3 Birds sums it up like this:
  • CRM is oriented for customer facing roles interacting directly with the customers.
  • CDP is oriented for marketing and product roles driving decisioning within the enterprise. 

We'll expand on this in future blogs, but for now....


The modern Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) as we know it today is software technology that was introduced in the 1990s, improving on paper and spreadsheet versions of the past, in order to allow businesses to better manage customer interactions and relationships. The idea was to become more customer-centric and rather than the old way of forcing customers into a fixed notion of channels, scripts, and databases to work from a one-too-many basis.


Soon companies needed multiple systems to warehouse different sets of first, second, and third party data; none of which necessarily or completely talk to each other. And each year, using that data for marketing gets more complicated as consumers drive higher demand for personalization - the data continues to fragment. 


While the CDP and CRM sound similar, the CDP goes beyond interactions and collects information on the customer’s behavior. If you combine these two, you can get a better look at your customer.


In addition to the CRM, the DMS adds vehicle lifecycle data that also feeds into the CDP to create the complete customer profile for automotive dealers . The DMS contains vehicle history and data that allows your dealership to understand where the customer is at in their vehicle lifecycle.

BENEFITS OF A CDP

Your dealership can gain a major advantage over the competition through the use of a vendor-neutral CDP to unify data currently sitting in different systems, making it easier to become more customer-centric while still leveraging the data.  CDP does more than a CRM and DMS can do alone. By doing all the heavy-lifting, so to speak, the CDP frees those systems up to do what they are meant to do. Combined with the dynamic, automated, capabilities of the marketing engine of a CDP, data is activated in a way that's truly next-level.

 

We've really only scratched the surface of the benefits to your dealership of utilizing a CDP.  Overall, it provides a single view of the customer, enhances customer experience, eliminates data silos, puts the customer at the center of the process, and increases the efficiency of your dealership.

3 BIRDS

Talk to us and get a sneak-peek at how Automotive's First Consumer Data & Experience Platform CDXP™ can help your dealership. Be among the first to gain the competitive advantage before it hits the mainstream. 



Submitted by:

Destiny Chafin

Staff Writer