CDP Week Day 4: Making your customer data strategy a success

From October 19 to 22, CDP Week brought together inspiring keynotes, practical sessions, and digital networking experiences that highlight the impact a CDP can drive for every business. View all the sessions on-demand here.

On the final day of CDP Week 2020, we went out with a bang. 

If Day 1, 2, and 3 were all about strategy, Day 4 was all about tactics. How do you actually build a single view of the customer? How do you implement a privacy-first approach to customer data collection? How do you develop your first tech stack as a startup?

Let's take a quick look at some of the main highlights from the day.

Achieving the elusive single view of the customer

First up was Josephine Liu, Product Manager at Segment, with two sessions discussing how retail and B2B companies can accelerate personalized experiences with a single view of the customer.

As the number of touchpoints customers can have with your business has exploded in the last decade, getting a single, connected view of all a customer's interactions with your business has remained elusive.

According to Josephine, this is both a technology problem and a people problem. No single technology can solve misalignment and inefficiencies in data management at a company, so it's vital you tackle both.

A privacy-first approach to customer data collection

If Josephine's session touched on a digital world in a constant state of flux, our next session touched on more constant matters – customer privacy. No matter what type of business you're running or what type of data you're collecting, a privacy-centered data strategy framework is essential.

Cian Martin, Senior Corporate Counsel at Segment, gave us a whistle-stop tour of the regulatory shifts over the last decade. This was before Segment Product Manager Rachel Landers shared some simple tips any business can adopt to develop a privacy-centric approach to data collection.

Avoiding "analysis paralysis" with your tech stack

If there's one thing we've learned over the last decade, it's that companies obsess over picking the right analytics and growth tools.

This quest for the perfect tool often clouds their judgment. Instead of quickly adapting their stack to changing business requirements, they end up with outdated tools that don't help them grow.

Anand Deshpande, Head of the Startup Program at Segment, walked us through his lessons learned from working with 1000+ startups on the right tools to choose and simplified it into three steps.

From idea to reality: making CDP a success

So you've decided a CDP is right for your business….

You've gathered your requirements, you've chosen the vendor that best meets your needs. But how do you make sure your CDP implementation is a success? 

This was the question answered by three Segment experts who walked attendees through organizational readiness, mobilizing the right teams, and maintaining and reporting success long term.

One of the most startling insights was the discussion around why most CDP projects fail. It turns out it's rarely to do with the technology and more to do with a lack of adoption. A lack of adoption, driven by a lack of ownership, can sink your CDP project before it's even off the ground. 

To combat this, our panel recommends a step-by-step formula for achieving customer data maturity long after your CDP has been implemented.

If you were one of the 5,000 attendees who joined us at CDP Week, thank you for joining us, supporting us, and engaging with us over the four days. Your attendance and contribution mean so much to all of us Segment, and we can't wait to do it all again next year.