The Role of CDP Data in Improving Customer Support and Satisfaction

Keeping your customers happy is one of the most crucial — and trickiest — tasks you must tackle as a business. Beyond the product itself and pricing, 83% of customers say that excellent customer service is the most significant factor determining what they buy. They’re also willing to spend more on companies that provide excellent customer support and satisfaction.

In other words, it’s worth investing the time and effort to ensure your customer support is as strong as possible. Being able to rely on quality, up-to-date data can make all the difference in improving your customer support, and that’s where CDP data comes into play.

Learn how to enhance your customer support with a customer data platform (CDP) below. 

How Businesses use Customer Data Platforms as Part of Customer Experience Management

Typically, people associate customer data platforms with marketing. And while CDPs are undoubtedly helpful for marketing efforts such as cross-channel campaigns and segmenting customers, they’re also ideal for customer experience management. 

Customer data platforms, or CDPs, bring all your customer data from various systems into a single, unified database. The CDP takes data from systems like your company website, social media pages, email, customer support desk, and others and combines it all. In the end, you have a centralized database that contains all of your first-party customer data. You can see each customer’s various interactions with your brand in one place — even if those interactions occurred over different systems. 

So how do companies use these customer data platforms as part of their customer experience management? Having all the data about your customers together in one place makes customer support much easier and more efficient. Your customer support agents will have all the information they need to help your customers readily available with just a few clicks. They’ll never have to hunt down team members in other departments like sales or marketing to find out relevant details about the customers they’re working with.  

Use Cases for CDPs in Customer Support

Using a CDP will open up all new avenues for data-based decision-making in your organization, including in customer support. To dig deeper, here are some of the top use cases for customer data platforms in customer support and satisfaction:

Eliminate Data Silos

One of the major obstacles to optimal customer support is the presence of data silos in your organization. Data silos happen when one department or group in your business has access to a collection of data that’s inaccessible to the rest of the team. 

For example, if your sales department collects and stores detailed data about each customer’s purchase history, but the other teams — marketing, accounting, customer support, etc. — cannot access this data, that’s a data silo. 

A customer data platform breaks down these data silos and ensures all your business departments have access to all relevant customer information. Sales agents can view marketing data on customers and vice versa, customer support agents can view sales and marketing data, and so on. With a CDP, everyone is operating with the best, most in-depth information possible about their customers. Eliminating these data silos is crucial to creating a data-driven, efficient operation. 

Faster Response Times

Part of providing a greater customer support experience is offering that support without delays. No one wants to sit on the phone, in digital chat boxes, or any other means of communication and wait extended periods to hear back from customer support. Unfortunately, that’s what can happen when customer support agents have to toggle between many different apps and systems to find important information.

Customer data platforms eliminate that problem by bringing together all of the information support agents need. They’ll have access to all of the aggregated data from a single platform. The convenience and accessibility of data in a CDP are unmatched, leading to faster response times and happier customers. 

Decrease Customer Churn

Customers today crave personalization. They expect brands to know and understand their preferences and then provide experiences that match those preferences. If you fail to provide personalization as a part of strong customer support, you may end up losing customers to your competitors. 

Customer data platforms make viewing all the information necessary for personalizing customer experiences easy. Your customer support reps can see all the data your company has on each customer they’re interacting with and tailor their support according. The result? Happier customers who are more likely to stick with your business over turning to one of your competitors. 

Beyond that, using a CDP can also help your support team determine which customers are at the highest risk of leaving. By analyzing all your customer data, you can find patterns that help you predict when and under which circumstances customer churn occurs. Once armed with this information, your support team can intervene and take steps to keep your customers with your business. 

Improve Data Security and Transparency

Customers know that their data is valuable and worth protecting in a world that increasingly emphasizes data. Governments and regulatory agencies have also taken steps to protect consumer data (and will likely release additional regulations and guidance in the future). These shifts have left some businesses scrambling to ensure the security of the customer data they select. 

When many different systems collect and store data separately, ensuring total data security is a significant challenge. Using a customer data platform makes data security and transparency much more manageable for companies. With all the data in one place, it’s easier to manage permissions and, upon request, share with each customer the data you’ve collected on them. 

Your customers will be happier knowing they can trust you with their data. Additionally, your support team will spend less time dealing with data security and transparency requests. 

Data-driven Customer Support

Even if your product and pricing are top-of-the-line, you need excellent customer support to ensure ongoing success. Using a CDP is one of the best ways to improve your customer support and keep your customers happy. Contact Live Earth to learn more about the ways you can use a CDP throughout your enterprise.