The Rise of the Composable CDP

In many ways, the massive growth of investments in customer experience (CX) systems parallels that of data infrastructure, and represents investments being made directly by the customer-facing teams – marketing, sales, and support. Teams in these customer-facing groups, separate from IT, have been building technology infrastructure to support the fast-changing landscape and respond to real world events. The data layer that supports the operational complexity is often a CDP. 

Historically, CDPs are magic wands mostly waved by the marketing specialists at large organizations in the name of customer segmentation and identity resolution for more accurate ads. They wanted better targeting and online engagements.  

Today, the promise of the CDP is to unify, analyze, and activate customer data, and to break down traditional data, technology, and channel silos within an organization. The platform that was predominantly adopted by marketing teams for targeting and engaging with audiences is now expanded to the entire customer journey, from first touch to post sales. Rather than teams having to manage dozens of data silos that exist in each of their martech applications, CRM, or primary user data stores, the CDP can unify that data, help teams slice and dice audiences, enrich customer profiles, and paint an overall customer profile for the business team to act upon.

Read more on a16z’s take on CDP’s here.