Glossary
A system that collects and unifies customer data from every touchpoint — web, app, point of sale, marketing, support — into a single, persistent customer profile that other systems can act on.
Why It Matters
Without a CDP, customer data typically lives fragmented across a dozen disconnected tools, each with its own partial, sometimes contradictory view of the same person. A CDP is what makes personalization, segmentation, and a coherent customer experience technically possible in the first place — everything downstream depends on this layer being right.
This is part of our Customer Ecosystems capability — the layer that gives a brand one consistent view of a customer across every channel they use.
See the full Customer Ecosystems capabilityIs a CDP the same thing as a CRM?
No — a CRM is typically built for sales and support teams to manage relationships; a CDP is built to unify behavioral and transactional data across every system for use by any team or application, often at much higher data volume and granularity.
Do we need a CDP if we already have analytics tools?
Analytics tools typically report on aggregate behavior; a CDP builds a persistent profile per individual customer that other systems — personalization engines, loyalty platforms — can query and act on directly.