7 Steps to Becoming a CDP Pro: The CDP Maturity Model

In Chinese gaming slang, a “high player” is short for a high-end player: someone who plays brilliantly with polished skills. How do you become a CDP pro and get the most out of your CDP? Let’s introduce a simple CDP maturity assessment model to find where your company currently stands in using customer data and which direction to take next.

The CDP (customer data platform) has been one of the hottest MarTech keywords in recent years. In practice, however, companies that truly get the full benefit of a CDP after implementing it are less common. After all, a race car needs a skilled driver to perform and post good times. Likewise, getting results from a CDP takes several supporting elements working together. That’s why implementation consultants with real hands-on experience help companies assess their CDP maturity early in the implementation. This gives companies a clear understanding of their own capabilities and, after the CDP is in place, a clear CDP roadmap within the company to keep optimizing CDP use cases.

So what is the CDP maturity model?

As shown below, it’s a simple scorecard of a company’s own ability to use data.

Levels 1 to 7 roughly start from how complete the company’s customer data collection is, move up through its ability to use that data, and end with full personalization and use in operations management. Companies that want to implement a CDP usually already have a fair amount of customer data. But that data may have been gathered separately by different agencies, and because it hasn’t been integrated, it often causes these problems:

• Customers can’t be recognized across channels, so they have to provide personal data and verify themselves again and again across campaigns and channels, which makes for a poor experience
• Campaigns struggle to reach customers across channels
• With incomplete data, analytics models can’t work effectively

So the first step to becoming a CDP pro is always integrating customer data. Many solutions on the market can help with customer data integration (such as CRM and data warehouses), but MarTech thinking evolves fast, and a platform meant for integration should put “integration” front and center. The CDP emerged precisely to solve the customer data integration problem.

The better the data is integrated, the more value it can deliver. Higher value in turn brings higher-quality data, creating a positive reinforcing closed loop for the CDP.

ESi is confident we can help you and your brand or company on the journey to becoming a CDP pro. Leave your contact details and we’ll get in touch as soon as possible.