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Powering Consumer Experiences with Data: A look at MDM and CDP

By Kim Toomey posted 09-14-2021 08:05

  

We are squarely in an era where digital has transformed our daily lives and experiences as consumers. Within the technology and data industry, we often talk about digital transformation as a future project, but the ease of which I can have a sandwich hand delivered to my house via my phone suggests we are definitely living in the future.

Every company is at a different point along this journey. Faced with evaluating the tools, people and processes required to capture and insert data into more and more consumer-focused experiences is an ongoing project. While virtual rooms full of data and IT professionals design, architect and implement various technologies in the name of digital transformation, I often find myself looking at this picture from the opposite side - as a consumer, reverse engineering customer loyalty systems in my head while at the grocery store, or while on the phone with a customer service representative at Ikea trying to track down an old receipt. 

Anyone else?

Just me?

If you are in the data world, architecting a cohesive solution to personalize or enrich your customer’s experiences, there is a lot to consider. A common consideration amongst teams responsible for customer data experiences, is whether a Master Data Management (MDM) system or Customer Data Platform (CDP) is the right solution. 

Improving customer experiences through data is the goal of Reltio, other MDM systems, and CDPs.

Is a MDM or a CDP best for your business? It depends on the business and its goals. While we cannot guarantee this blog series is going to settle any internal debates, we can shine a light on some considerations for your solution and ways these technologies can be even more powerful together.

Take a listen to my webinar on MDM and CDP


Master Data Management Defined

According to Gartner, the leading research and advisory company, Master Data Management (MDM) is a data solution focused on accountability, accuracy, semantic consistency, stewardship, and uniformity of an enterprise’s data assets- including customer data, but likely other data entities as well. 

In order for the best business decisions to be made, data driving these decisions must be correct, reliable, and trustworthy. Reltio works to support this in a myriad of ways.

What is Master Data Management? Reltio describes it as "A technology used by large companies to identify, collect, match and merge data to create a what is called a "single view of the data" or "single source of truth," which is the foundation for a digital transformation. It removes duplicates and standardizes master data, and it’s elements such as first name, last name, mailing address, phone and email address."

What is CDP?

A CDP is a marketing system that works to generate a unified view of the customer, often purpose-built to serve marketing and audience teams. In other words, when a company needs a single outlook on its customer so it can best personalize content or retarget ads, a CDP will be able to segment users and deliver audience information to final mile delivery tools. It may also be able to optimize the timing and targeting of messages and offers. CDP is a much newer technology that has emerged within the last 10 years, while MDM as a practice and solution has been around for decades. 

You could think of MDM as the Julia Roberts to CDP’s Cameron Diaz in My Best Friend’s Wedding. 

A Few Notes on CDP’s

The CDP space continues to grow and evolve. With that, you’ll find various flavors of CDP software to choose from, further complicating your evaluation of new technologies. You can find many expert definitions of the different CDP vendors, but generally speaking, most fall into one of these categories:


  • Infrastructure CDP, which tends to have the most overlap in functionality between CDP and MDM. This has a real-time collection of first-party customer data across a variety of marketing tools.  Also, infrastructure CDP allows for customers from anonymous signals to become unified in a single record through identity resolution. It will also route data from one tool to another. Thus, infrastructure CDP is very strong in collecting and aggregating data, as well as building that single view of the customer. 
  • Marketing clouds, or the larger data suites, allow companies to build within the marketing cloud as a part of their integrated marketing suite. 
  • Omni-channel decision engines have native machine learning capabilities, and allows companies to segment customers according to different types of behaviors, interactions, and more. In addition, these engines have omni-channel journey mapping capabilities. Therefore, a company may be able to plan its messaging and time it accordingly to keep the customer engaged. 

These solutions have the capability to work together and complement one another, to build the best data pipeline powering a company’s digital experiences.

Reltio and CDP - Better Together

Reltio MDM has the capability to work together with CDPs to build a clear, single view of the customer. Together, Reltio MDM and CDPs create a secure and reliable customer data ecosystem that companies can confidently use when considering big business decisions. 

Depending on the overall needs of your business, mastering through cleansing, deduplication and matching customer records within an MDM system, then enriching and activating these records within a CDP become a very compelling solution to businesses. In our next series, we’ll deep dive into some of the considerations for technologies to consider when evaluating both MDM and CDP solutions.


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