Don’t let your customer data get away; make customer data platforms the new backbone of CX insights

Before generative AI (GenAI) came swooping onto the scene, customer data platforms (CDP) were among the hottest game-changing technologies making waves in the industry, picking up the slack where CRM struggled with scale and speed for present CX management. Despite GenAI’s increasing influence, CDPs are more relevant than ever. They are a critical vehicle for bringing data together across organizational silos around customer information from CRM, social media, interaction channels, loyalty program history, behavioral data, etc. CDPs’ ability to ingest customer data across different sources in real time makes it easier to develop personalization, predictive analytics, proactive outreach for advertising/promotions, and to measure sentiment. The growing importance of data privacy is driving the adoption of CDPs, which are becoming indispensable tools for contact centers and brand marketers. Financial services firms are taking note and making the investments needed to deliver personalized experiences and campaigns.

CDPs’ promise of faster and more efficient campaigns and more customer-centric orchestration prioritizing calls and routing callers to the right agent comes with the demand for heavy technology and data overhauls. HFS Research spoke with Capgemini, its partner Google Cloud, and a leading banking client to uncover how this partnership can develop CDPs to help contact centers and marketers in financial services progress through the data and technology weeds to fulfill customer journey goals and prepare for emerging privacy regulations.

Understanding the customer journey is imperative for marketers, but evolving privacy regulations are reshaping data collection practices

The ability to understand and track the complexity of online and offline customer journeys across channels remains a top priority for contact centers and marketers. Accurate measurement is essential for making the right decisions about investments.

Historically, organizations have had relatively free rein to collect and use consumer data across channels. However, mounting concerns about data privacy and consumer rights have ushered in a new era of stringent regulations and heightened consumer expectations around data protection. From GDPR in Europe to CCPA in California, consumer duty in the UK, and similar regulations emerging globally, organizations face an increasingly complex landscape of privacy and customer care requirements. These regulations mandate transparent data collection practices, explicit consumer consent, and transparency of information. They also give individuals greater control over their personal information and better overall customer outcomes through rights such as data access, portability, and the right to be forgotten. That’s where CDPs come in.

Customer privacy and protection regulations have transformed the front office; CDPs must rise to the challenge of compliant data management

Financial services organizations must walk a tightrope to deliver respectful personalization by balancing the need for personalization with data privacy and regulatory requirements. They must ensure they collect, store, and use customer data in a compliant and ethical manner while simultaneously delivering on customer expectations for personalized experiences.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google Marketing Platform are the building blocks of such a CDP that is helping enterprises navigate this balancing act; the bank we spoke to is migrating all of its data assets to GCP over the next 2-5 years. Capgemini, a Google Platinum partner, brings domain and industry expertise (in the form of advisory, assessment, evaluation of platforms and market stack, implementation, and execution of use cases), while Google Cloud provides the platform and product suite. Building a CDP on Google Cloud means financial services companies can capitalize on their existing investments in the Google product suite to build the CDP incrementally.

CDPs will collect, manage, and identify data while becoming an operational layer, enabling the front office to activate insights. Capgemini and Google Cloud are working with the bank to develop a CDP solution in response. It is intended to deliver:

• Compliant data collection and integration: Capturing and integrating data from disparate sources into a comprehensive customer profile leveraging technologies, such as web analytics, tracking pixels, APIs, and data connectors, to gather and stream data in real time. It will do all this while implementing robust mechanisms to collect, store, and honor consumer privacy preferences.
• Data storage and management: Establishing a scalable and secure infrastructure to store the data, ensuring high availability, data integrity, ease of retrieval, and analysis.
• Identity resolution and unified customer profile: Implementing identity resolution techniques to merge and match customer records using deterministic and probabilistic matching to identify and link customer profiles to create a comprehensive and reliable customer database.
• Real-time data segmentation, activation, and orchestration: Real-time processing, segmentation, and activation of data to deliver targeted messaging, recommendations, and offers across various channels through integrations with decisioning, marketing automation systems, and other customer-facing tools.
• Data governance and compliance: Establish robust data governance policies and ensure compliance with privacy regulations, as well as data access controls, encryption, and audit trails to protect customer data and maintain transparency.

These initiatives aim to improve customer experience and maximize revenue potential while maintaining data privacy and regulatory standards.

GenAI plus customer data platforms highlight the potential power of “and”

The combination of generative AI (GenAI) and customer data platforms (CDPs) presents a powerful opportunity for brands to deliver highly personalized content and campaigns at scale to consumers. CDPs are a central hub for collecting, unifying, and activating customer data across an organization. By leveraging this rich customer profile data through advanced GenAI models, brands can automate the creation of personalized content tailored to each individual’s interests, behaviors, and preferences.

GenAI can help generate countless variations of marketing assets by dynamically adapting the content, messaging, imagery, and calls to action. This enables brands to move beyond one-size-fits-all campaigns and deliver truly personalized experiences at a scale that would be difficult with manual content creation. The CDP’s ability to ingest real-time signals on customer engagement further empowers GenAI to continuously optimize content in the moment.

The Bottom Line: Front office leaders must embrace the combination of GenAI and CDPs to improve CX and ensure future privacy compliance.

Together, GenAI and CDPs enable marketers to create customer campaigns that drive stronger emotional connections, higher engagement, and greater conversion rates through respectful and compliant personalization. This powerful combination is quickly becoming a competitive necessity for brands seeking to thrive in the era of the empowered, individualized consumer.