CDP Scenario 5: Omnichannel & Offline Aggregation

The fifth scenario or business use case for Customer Data Platform (CDP) technology is "Omnichannel & Offline Aggregation." (The other four scenarios are described here: Scenario 1, Scenario 2, Scenario 3, Scenario 4.)

Beyond Multi-Channel

The ability to deliver content and services across multiple channels and devices is now taken for granted.

But omni-channel is much more than this. The term refers to the ability to provide a seamless experience across multiple channels. These channels could be different types of devices (e.g., mobile or IoT devices), or different applications or even different physical or offline channels such as a storefront.

One of the key requirements then for such an omnichannel strategy is to have a unified profile of your prospects and customers from across different channels. And then use this profile to personalize and target content across channels, integrate customer profiles across interactions, define cross channel journeys, and so forth.

How do CDP tools fare?


Connectors become important.  Source: mParticle

While most CDPs can handle data and campaigns for digital marketing, not all of them are as good for integrating the following types of data:

  1. Offline customer data from stores and point of sale (POS) terminals
  2. Data from mobile apps
  3. Data from other internet-connected devices such as Apple TV, gaming consoles, smartwear and so forth

Platforms that excel at this scenario offer at least some of these capabilities. They also ideally offer capabilities for managing physical address formats, and different SDKs for different computing environments like IoT devices.

Next Steps

RSG can help you with your analysis. If you are a subscriber, you can use our RealQuadrant Shortlist Generator to find out which CDP vendors excel at this scenario. Our evaluations also call out specific capabilities for this scenario for each vendor.

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