How to procure the best customer data platform for your business

The market has undergone significant changes due to ongoing digitalization and innovation. This has resulted in hyper-competition where companies must adopt an omnichannel strategy to accommodate complex customer journeys spanning both digital and physical touchpoints.

Challenge

CDPs have quickly emerged as a prominent tool for companies to support and deliver cohesive and holistic experiences to their customers, across all relevant touchpoints.

Background

Remotion has comprehensive experience as a reliable partner, having conducted several procurements and requests for CDPs, always ensuring the best possible evaluation and selection of a CDP is facilitated. We have summarized some concrete actions and considerations to help your company choose and procure the best possible CDP based on your requirements and needs.

The Value of a CDP

The understanding that CDPs add value to companies through digital and innovative capacity in data management, profile unification, customer analysis, and audience customization, etc., has become more broadly understood and recognized. Understanding how to procure and choose the best possible CDP for your company, on the other hand, can seem less concrete and more abstract.

Establish a Clear Vision and Structure

The first action is to create a clear vision, scope, and detail of what the company wants to achieve in terms of use cases and capabilities by implementing a CDP. To do this, the company must review its own current capabilities and understand what new capabilities are needed to realize the vision. Before a new system is purchased, the first question should always be "can we achieve this with the technology stack we have today?". If the answer is no, the next step is to map how this gap can be filled with the core value proposition and features of a CDP..In line with the vision and set goals, it is important to create a structure with defined roles, responsibilities, principles, processes, and activities.

Conduct Preparations and Initiate the Process

The next step to successfully procure the best possible CDP for your company is to identify and thoroughly research suppliers on the market. Once relevant suppliers have been reviewed and identified, a request for proposal with necessary conditions and terms in line with your company's vision, goals, and capabilities can be created and sent out. The identified suppliers will retrieve the request and subsequently respond to questions and comments. Once the bidding process has started, always ensure that confidentiality agreements are implemented and signed by all invited suppliers.

Evaluation and Decision Making

After starting the request for proposal process, the next phase focuses on analyzing and evaluating all suppliers' responses to the request and then defining a shortlist of suppliers to invite to demo sessions. After reviewing demos, there are three main proposed categories of factors to evaluate regarding the suppliers' demos and value propositions to ensure the best CDP for your company is decided:

• The evaluation category of functional coverage involves what the CDP can offer in terms of data management, analysis and scoring, campaign management and activation, orchestration and optimization, reporting and optimization, etc.

• The evaluation category of non-functional coverage includes what CDP providers can offer in terms of performance, training, support, and integration capabilities.

• Technology - how does their technology base match your overall roadmap? For example, if you are investing in an event-driven CDP, what demands does that place on your other technology stack? Will the event-driven solution flourish if all your other systems are batch-oriented?

• The second evaluation category considers aspects such as the geographical location of customer support, resources and expertise, experience and references, price, and cultural match.

• Price is a crucial factor, but remember that negotiating the price to a level where the supplier sees you not just as a customer but as a partner could lead to something counterproductive for your success. Also, how the pricing model is structured is important. For instance, if you plan to enter a new market, how does that affect your pricing?

After carefully matching and mapping these categories with the company's goals, visions, and capabilities, the best possible decision-making for the right CDP can be facilitated.

By establishing a clear vision, conducting proper preparations, and finally including a strategically developed evaluation and decision-making process, your company will be able to procure the best possible CDP based on your ambitions and requirements. As a leading company in data-driven communication in Scandinavia, we at Remotion know from experience that these summarized actions and considerations will lead to great success for your company in procuring a CDP, enabling your company to deliver cohesive and holistic experiences for your customers.