Customer Data Management (CDM) projects are mainly driven by customer experience aspirations as Marketers strive to be great at personalization and provide outside-in content to each customer.

A new Research In Action GmbH global survey of 1,500 business decision-makers about their CDM projects discovers not only why they are doing these projects but also which software vendors are the most known and what do the business people think about those vendor’s products and services.

The Vendor Selection Matrix™ is a primarily survey-based methodology for vendor evaluation where 62.5 % of the evaluation is based on a survey of enterprise IT or business decision makers and 37.5 % on the analyst’s opinion. The analyst’s input is fed by a combination of intensive interviews with software or services vendors and their clients, plus their informed, independent point-of-view as an analyst. All of this combines to make Research in Action Vendor Selection Matrix™ reports so unique. This approach is one of the key differentiators of Research In Action in market research. For this report we interviewed 1,500 IT managers with budget responsibility in enterprises globally. We selected those vendors which achieved the best evaluations scores from the buyers but disregarded those with fewer than 15 evaluations.

Report details can be viewed here:
http://researchinaction.de/wp-content/uploads/VSM-CDM-2020-WWW.pdf

Peter O’Neill, Research Director for Marketing Automation at Research In Action GmbH, comments:

• Providing an optimal customer experience is impossible without having a unified Customer Data Management process in place. The Customer Data Management process is the consolidation and aggregation of all data that is being collected in separate systems across the company. This is not an IT-centric data warehouse or data lakes approach, ideally it should be a Marketing-led CDM initiative, helping to ensure the data unification project is focused directly on marketing requirements.
• Nearly 80% of CDM initiatives are marketing-led projects and over two-thirds of the projects are top-down projects that serve the complete enterprise.
• In depth interviews reveal that Consent Management becomes a critical driver for CDM investments. Legislation like the CCPA and GDPR require marketers to be completely transparent on how they use customer data. But, in addition to compliance pressure, another driver of transparency for the marketers is establishing brand trust. I expect data ethics processes to become routine in the deployment of many marketing technologies.
• In our survey, we firstly describe the business process and ask business managers to name vendor(s) they associate with the process. The resulting vendor landscape for CDM is a broad mix of vendors with a wide variety of claims: data consolidation, collecting entire clickstreams, creating a “golden record” through identity resolution, enabling intelligent engagement, and identity tagging. The CDM challenge varies across the B2C and B2B spectrum and also differs by company size, which we describe in detail in the report.
• Account-Based Marketing (ABM) will drives CDM adoption in B2B. Even large enterprises with ABM projects admit that their biggest success inhibitor is “lack of deep customer insights”. Often, they rely on tactical predictive analytics vendors instead of addressing the fundamental CDM challenge. Capable CDM vendors can win more B2B customers with effective thought leadership programs on this topic.
• Who came out on top? Depending on how much you believe the claims, there are between 120 and 150 vendors with CDM solutions, often calling their software Customer Data Platforms (CDP). These are the Top 15 vendors as selected by 1,500 users surveyed based upon their rating of product, company and service quality (listed alphabetically): Acquia, ActionIQ, Adobe, BlueConic, Commanders Act, CXSense, Eulerian, Evergage, NGData, Oracle, Quaero, Redpoint Global, Salesforce, Sitecore, Tealium.

Vendor Selection Matrix™ Disclaimer:

The Vendor Selection Matrix™ is a primarily survey-based methodology for comparative vendor evaluation. Research In Action GmbH does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. The information contained in this research has been obtained from both enterprise as well as vendor sources believed to be reliable. Research In Action GmbH’s research publications consist of the analysts’ opinions and should not be considered as statements of fact. The opinions expressed are subject to change without further notice. Research In Action GmbH disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. All trademarks are recognized as the property of the respective companies.

Press Contact:

Research In Action GmbH
Peter O‘Neill
Research Director
Alte Schule
56244 Hartenfels
Germany
Telephone: +49 174 3210020
E-Mail: poneill@researchinaction.eu
Internet : www.researchinaction.eu

About Research In Action:

Research In Action GmbH is a leading independent information and communications technology research and consulting company. The company provides both forward-looking as well as practical advice to enterprise as well as vendor clients.

This release was published on openPR.