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Report

The State of Customer Data Architecture 2024

By Twilio Segment

The State of Customer Data Architecture 2024

By Twilio Segment

For 62% of organizations, the Data Warehouse has become a key source of truth.

Having a trusted source of truth is essential for making informed business decisions. However, here’s where things get tricky: while the DW is great for storing vast amounts of historical data, it often falls short in terms of real-time data activation.

Think of a data warehouse as a library. It’s meticulously organized, holds a treasure trove of information, and allows you to check out books on demand. But when you need an answer immediately, navigating through the Dewey decimal system just won’t cut it. 

CDPs, on the other hand, are the librarian—real-time and interactive, giving you immediate access to what you need, when you need it. Together, these systems let you tap into the library’s deep resources and provide the answers you need with speed and precision.

 

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“Rather than build a completely bespoke toolset to unlock and unify data scattered across the stack, companies can stitch together a set of existing tools to accomplish their goals and meet their data needs. But not all "composable" tools are created equal, offering different levels of out-of-the-box capabilities, technical features, and user experiences (e.g. some tools are able to merge event and static data, while others make it easier for marketers to create audiences). The choice of which tools to stitch together often affects time to value, total cost, and user accessibility"

Dio Favatas Head of Identity Solutions & Marketing Clouds, Tredence

 

How organizations leverage their warehouses varies significantly, highlighting different priorities and capabilities across the board.

Among our respondents, the most common use (66.7%) of Data Warehouses is for regularly querying data to generate daily, weekly, or monthly business insights. This practice is fundamental for data-driven decision-making, enabling businesses to track performance metrics, identify trends, and make informed strategic decisions (albeit not in real time).

Nearly half (44.2%) of the respondents are leveraging their Data Warehouses to build predictive or generative AI models. This application represents a more advanced use of data, where historical context stored in the warehouse is used to train machine learning models. While these models can predict future outcomes, and automate decision-making processes, the inclusion of real-time data and accurate customer profiles (federated by a CDP) can strongly improve the efficacy of these models.

"The argument of CDP vs Warehouse was always a marketing play by vendors to help them stand out. It’s like creating a category to have the mirage of no competitors and being number one. Over time the marketing plays die, the truth comes out, and we fall back into a paradigm not based on reality. CDP + warehouse has always been the path to success."

Dan McGaw CEO & Founder, McGaw

 

Nearly half of the businesses integrating a CDP with their data warehouse are tapping into the powerful capability of real-time personalization.

This ability to tailor experiences as they happen gives these businesses a competitive edge, allowing them to respond dynamically to customer behaviors and preferences. 

Whether it’s sending personalized product recommendations, targeted offers, or adjusting marketing messaging on the fly, real-time personalization can significantly enhance customer engagement and drive conversions.

However, this also means more than half of these businesses are missing out on the opportunity to leverage real-time data to create highly relevant, in-the-moment customer interactions.

“Twilio Segment has enabled us to implement a data warehousing solution almost effortlessly. It’s been a real game changer for us as we suddenly have access to a wealth of historical, trackable data. We can go back and look at trends, such as revenue and retention, over a long period and this is having a huge impact on the way we approach our customer communications.”

Robert Lacok Product Manager, Deepnote

 

Just under 40% of companies report that their marketing teams have direct access to the relevant customer profile data in the warehouse.

This bottleneck means marketing teams are stuck waiting on technical teams for data, slowing down campaigns and preventing quick pivots.

When marketing has direct access, they’re free to analyze and act on data without the delays. Integrating a CDP with a data warehouse unlocks this self-serve power.

 

 

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