Industry Leaders Explored How CDPs Are Accelerating Connected Customer Experiences

Customer experience—especially one that is personalized, seamless, and measurable across (offline and online) channels—is now central to brands vying for the attention of today’s consumers from a variety of industries. On 15 December 2023, Resulticks, a leading provider of real-time audience engagement solutions, brought together a start-studded group of business leaders from major Indian corporations at Google’s office at Gurgaon for a roundtable discussion on how CDP is shaping the delivery of the future of customer experiences. The wide-ranging discussion provided eye-opening insights on CDPs as a ROI-oriented CX engine and first-hand accounts of the many challenges and opportunities related to its utilization.

The roundtable panelists were:

• Manish Panjwani, CTO at Shriram Automall India
• Jasmeet Bedi, DVP of Digital Marketing at Canara HSBC Life Insurance India
• Sachin Saurabh Saxena, CTO (Vice President Engineering) at Heads Up For Tails
• Ashish Goel, CTO at Ferns N Petals
• Sourabh Lohtia, Director & Business Head (Bancassurance Retail & Head of Business Development) at PNB Metlife
• Sanjay Rai, Senior VP of Sales & Marketing at Sarovar Hotels & Resorts
• Vini Soni, Deputy Vice President at Aviva India
• Prashanta Mukhopadhyaya, Vice President - Analytics Centre of Excellence at Aviva India
• Shubham Srivastava, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Eureka Forbes
• Nitish Bansal, Manager of Digital Marketing at Maruti Suzuki India Limited
• Rohit Jindal, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing at Maruti Suzuki India Limited

With proven experiences in leading data-driven CX transformations across sectors such as banking, travel, automotive, healthcare, retail, and more, the panelists dug past the usual buzzwords of CDP to explore the practical considerations, difficulties, and potentials often left out in conversations.

• It is important to select a CDP whose capabilities are in alignment with the customer experience the brand wants to introduce.
• CDP’s rise is occurring in conjunction with the evolution of the consumer. As a result, CDP on its own is no guaranteed solution to a brand’s data and CX challenges. Its implementation and activation must happen in the context of an overall push for customer centricity across all organizational levels, customer lifecycle stages, and touchpoints. This holistic, brand-specific view will in turn determine the most relevant CDP-related use cases as well as their timelines.
• Executive leadership needs a clear expectation of what outcomes the CDP can deliver and how it will improve the organization’s operations, especially since such data initiatives tend to be costly.
• An effective CDP is indispensable to the lifetime engagement of individual customers, since it enables the creation of a consistent experience—over time, across locations, and at different touchpoints. The singular customer view CDP delivers—through data consolidation and identity resolution—is key to an unfailingly personalized journey.
• Customer centricity as an initiative is becoming progressively more complex due to the volume (and variety) of data and the technology suited required.
• One reason for the failure and faltering of CDP projects is the lack of cross-departmental collaboration. The various stakeholders involved in a CDP initiative follow divergent protocols and KPIs, while prioritizing different pain points; they also sometimes employ inconsistent tech stacks and processes, devoting their energy to largely short-term considerations.
• Multiple management levels need to A brand’s strategies for CRM, database, sales, distribution, and other initiatives need to be in harmony. The metrics used to determine ROI should also be determined by all relevant teams together.
• A solid understanding of the CDP’s applications, outcomes, and objectives across the C-level—short and long-term alike—is imperative.
• The implementation of a robust CDP needs to be accompanied by the modernization of the organization’s technology infrastructure, one that can support the scale and speed of the solution’s operation at full capacity.