Customer data glossary
Customer data platform (CDP)
By Art Kukharenko · Published · Updated
Browse learn glossary resourcesA customer data platform (CDP) is software that builds and maintains a persistent, unified record of each customer and makes it available to other systems.
Part of the Learn hub and the customer data glossary.
What it means in practice
The wording above follows the CDP Institute's current definition, which adds that the platform takes primary responsibility for customer identity, can retain the detail of the data it ingests, and offers other systems access through APIs, queries or file extracts. In practice a customer data platform does four jobs. It collects data from websites, apps and back-office systems. It resolves identifiers into one profile. It stores that profile with its history and consent status. And it makes the profile or its segments available to other systems through APIs, file extracts or synchronisation to tools such as email and advertising platforms.
It is not a CRM, which records sales and service interactions; a data management platform (DMP), which mostly handles anonymous audiences; master data management (MDM), which governs reference records; or a data warehouse, which stores data for analysis. The comparison article sets these side by side.
The acronym is crowded. Cloudera's CDP and the Carbon Disclosure Project use it too, so contracts, searches and internal documents should use the full phrase at least once.
Example (retail banking): a bank joins product holdings, mobile-app events, branch visits and marketing consent into one profile. Before a campaign, marketing can exclude customers who have withdrawn consent or have an open complaint, instead of reconciling lists tool by tool.
Related terms
- Identity resolution: how separate identifiers become one profile.
- Single customer view: the complete view of one customer that a platform aims to deliver.
- Composable customer data platform (CDP): the same functions assembled around a warehouse.
- Packaged customer data platform (CDP): the all-in-one product form.
- Self-hosted customer data platform (CDP): running the platform on infrastructure you control.
Where it matters
- What is a customer data platform?: the plain-English guide with an architecture diagram.
- Customer data platform architecture: ingestion, identity, decisioning and activation.
Frequently asked questions
What does a customer data platform do?
It collects customer data from many sources, links identifiers to a single profile, stores that profile and shares it with the systems that message, advertise to or serve customers. Some platforms add decisioning, such as choosing the next offer, and consent enforcement.
Is a customer data platform the same as a CRM?
No. A CRM manages sales and service interactions and is usually one source of data for a customer data platform. The platform unifies that data with behavioural and other data and serves the resulting profile to many tools.
Does a customer data platform have to be SaaS?
No. The CDP Institute's definition describes what the system does, not where it runs. Platforms can be multi-tenant SaaS, single-tenant private cloud, self-hosted in your own cloud account or on-premise, and composable designs run on your own warehouse.
Back to the customer data glossary or the Learn hub.
Further reading
- Customer Data Glossary: 50 Terms
- Learn about CDP
- CDP vs CRM, DMP, MDM, Data Warehouse
- CDP Architecture: The 3 Layers
- Composable CDP — definition
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