What Is an Experience Data Platform and What Are Its Benefits?

A total of 5.16 billion people around the world use the internet as of 2023, which is equivalent to 64.4 percent of the world’s total population, as per reports! As digitalization continues to skyrocket, consumer demands and expectations are evolving ever so rapidly. To win market share and retain customers in today’s highly competitive, digital-first landscape, retailers and brands must deliver a strong unified digital experience: with contextual relevance and customer experience at the forefront of their business.

In this article, I will talk about ‘Experience Data Platform’, what experiential data is, and outline how it enables you to leverage your existing CX data, resulting in a highly competitive customer experience.

What is an Experience Data Platform?

An Experience Data Platform acts like a magnet in your tech stack, pulling experiential data from all sources to create an experience that’s truly relevant. It provides a holistic view of the customer across all touchpoints, allowing for a more personalized and contextualized customer experience. By leveraging data from multiple sources, including customer feedback and preferences, retailers and brands can deliver a more relevant and personalized experience to their customers.

It unifies data and assets from CRM, PIM, DAM, ERP and other backend systems with behavioural and contextual data from digital destinations. All this data is instantly available for digital teams to create real-time APIs, without having any coding skills: meaning they can build new digital experiences for any channel at lightning speed and with lower cost. This means your organisation can build digital experiences faster.

An Experience Data Platform is data type, and data model agnostic. Examples of data you can instantly access and combine are:

Customer data: Age, address, purchase, gender, size etc
Product assets: Brand assets, product images, campaign assets
Context data: Location, device, weather, category, price range etc

An Experience Data Platform enables businesses to create a more personalized and relevant customer experience by leveraging data from multiple sources, without the need for costly and time-consuming integration projects. Additionally, an XDP also collects new data from digital destinations, allowing businesses to continuously improve and refine their customer experience over time.

Seven benefits of unifying your experiential data through Experience Data Platform:

1. Reduce data silos - One of the key benefits of an Experience Data Platform is that it reduces data silos, which creates barriers and slow down businesses. An Experience Data Platform unifies data from various backend systems and digital destinations, bringing it to life for customers using purpose-built real-time APIs. When you use Occtoo’s Experience Data Platform, your digital team can instantly access all data they need without any need for time-consuming and costly integration projects. This enables them to pick and choose the assets they need to build a specific experience or application for a specific channel and frontend, accelerating the time-to-market and reducing costs. By reducing data silos, businesses can create a more personalized and relevant customer experience, which ultimately leads to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
2. Become digitally agile – Businesses need to adapt to changing customer needs and preferences quickly and an Experience Data Platform is the answer to this challenge. By unifying data from various backend systems and digital destinations, an Experience Data Platform provides a holistic view of the customer, enabling businesses to create more personalized and relevant customer experiences
3. Strengthen your customer experience - An Experience Data Platform allows you to build a complete custom data model tailored to your customer base and business, without being restricted by the data models in your existing platforms. An Experience Data Platform allows you to build a complete custom data model tailored to your customer base and business, without being restricted by the data models in your existing platforms.
4. Spend more time on creativity and less time on integration - An Experience Data Platform reduces the time and effort required for data integration, freeing up your marketing team to focus on more creative and impactful initiatives. With all data available in real-time, your team can spend more time and energy on identifying friction points in the customer journey and making improvements to existing experiences to drive more revenue. This increased focus on creativity and innovation can help businesses to stay ahead of the competition and build stronger relationships with customers.
5. Accelerate your go-to-market speed – As per research by MACH alliance, the average time it takes to launch a digital experience with a traditional approach is 6 months! With an Experience Data Platform, you can significantly cut down this time and focus on shipping more customized and relevant experiences. With the ability to unify data from various sources and create purpose-built APIs, businesses can quickly build new digital experiences and launch them to the market. This can result in a significant competitive advantage, as they can respond to customer needs and market changes in real-time, without the time and cost associated with traditional integration projects
6. Scale your experiences globally in milliseconds - With a serverless architecture and purpose-built APIs, an Experience Data Platform can provide a scalable and flexible solution that can adapt to the changing needs of your business. This means that you can quickly and easily add new data sources or modify existing APIs without having to worry about managing infrastructure or scaling up resources. It also means that your digital team can focus on building the best customer experience possible, rather than getting bogged down in complex technical details. Ultimately, an Experience Data Platform can help you build better, more personalized customer experiences faster and more efficiently than ever before.
7. Build experiences for any channel and context - With an Experience Data platform, you can ensure consistency across all touchpoints and channels, delivering a seamless and personalized experience to your customers, no matter where they are in the world. This not only improves customer satisfaction and loyalty but also drives revenue growth for your business.
   

/Jimmy Ekbäck – Connect with Jimmy on LinkedIn.

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