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Customer data platform vs. data warehouse—if you’ve heard this apples-to-oranges comparison, you’re not alone. Enterprise data warehouses (EDW) like Snowflake, Google, BigQuery and Amazon RedShift have become the foundation for the modern tech stack – but while EDWs are a must-have for enterprise companies, they’re very different from (and are intended to work jointly with) customer data platforms (CDP).
At their core, EDWs are a system of record. Think of it as data at rest. CDPs integrate directly with them, add additional data sources and provide business users with direct (but controlled) access to data for insights at activation. That’s data in motion.
Read on to learn everything you need to know about CDPs versus data warehouses — especially how they can unlock business value for you when working together as a unit.
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CDP vs. Data Warehouse: The Evolution of Data Storage
To understand EDWs, it helps to start with another technology: data lakes.
What is a Data Lake vs. Data Warehouse?
A data lake is a centralized archive where a company can store all its raw, unfiltered data. This can include customer data as well as transactional, product, service, store, financial and human resources data.
Data lakes are used by IT & Dev teams to support and run enterprise-wide machine learning, analytics, data science and more. The downside to business users is that this data is only accessible via programming languages such as Java, SQL, Python and R.
While data warehouses are similar to data lakes, EDWs are used to store structured and filtered (not raw) data that’s already been processed and filtered for certain use cases. Unfortunately, data lakes and data warehouses share the same disadvantage: They are built for and only accessible by technical professionals, not everyday business users. In other words, both leave business users at a loss and IT teams overburdened.
Drilling Deeper: CDP vs. Data Lake vs. Data Warehouse
So, what is the difference between a CDP and a data warehouse or a data lake?
Simply put, an EDW and a data lake are both repositories for data. A CDP is a tool for business users to access and activate that data into customer experiences.
CDPs directly integrate with a data lake or data warehouse and make it available to business users for analysis and experience orchestration. That means marketing, sales and customer service users can develop new use cases independently, leaving IT teams to focus on business-critical priorities.
Enterprise organizations with world-class marketing technology stacks should always have data lakes or EDWs for enterprise data storage and analytics — and a CDP on top of it to create a single customer view and serve as the omnichannel hub. This allows marketers to run advanced data-driven campaigns that enhance customer experiences across all touchpoints.
In terms of data sharing, EDWs and data lakes often send deep customer profile and transaction data to CDPs. And in turn, CDPs often send their customer activation data back to data lakes and data warehouses to allow for greater precision and accuracy when performing enterprise-wide analysis.
The Democratization of Data
To democratize data means to make it readily available and accessible to everyone who needs it in your organization, whether they are technical or business users. Customer data platforms are precisely designed to put valuable customer insights into the hands of the people who can act on them.
Because data lakes and EDWs are built for IT and analytics professionals, they lack the intuitive user interfaces necessary to make customer data usable by everyday business users. By contrast, CDPs are uniquely positioned to democratize data for your organization. With a CDP, more teams – such as marketing, customer service and sales – can self-service and make data-driven decisions that drive profits rather than wasting time throwing strategies at the wall and seeing what sticks.
For example, a CDP like Uniphore’s can quickly export your customer and interaction history from an EDW. Then, business teams can use it to personalize customer engagement across different channels as part of a segmented marketing campaign.
As a result, CDPs can enhance the performance of your martech stack and eliminate time-consuming manual processes. This frees up your IT team and speeds up the usefulness of data company wide.
Customer Data Platform vs. Data Warehouse: The Best of Both Worlds
It’s important to note that CDPs are not intended to be the system of record for enterprise companies.
CDPs are designed to take the data from your EDW and help marketing, sales and customer service teams transform it into personalized, memorable customer experiences that let your brand stand out in a saturated marketplace.
CDPs and data warehouses should work in concert, with your EDW feeding your CDP data that business teams can easily access, analyze and activate across all online and offline channels whenever they need it.
Until recently, this has been easier said than done. That’s because integrating traditional CDPs with EDWs often required complex data migration and/or duplication efforts. Fortunately, that has changed with the development of composable architecture. Now, enterprises can access their warehouse data where it is—without the integration, latency or security concerns of migration/duplication—with a composable customer data platform.
The beauty of a composable CDP is that it allows companies to sidestep the classic challenges that prevent them from:
- Creating and continually updating an accurate view of the customer by unifying and deduplicating customer profiles
- Streamlining advanced audience segmentation to allow for highly targeted engagement across marketing, sales and customer service channels
- Generating predictive insights to inform strategies surrounding churn prevention, customer growth and more
- Orchestrating real-time customer experiences and sophisticated omnichannel journeys across the entire customer lifecycle
But remember that not all CDPs are created equal. To eliminate the technical bottlenecks everyday business users face with EDWs, your CDP must give non-technical teams an intuitive user interface they can leverage for accessing and activating customer data.
Bringing it all together
It’s time to stop thinking of the customer data platform vs. data warehouse as an “either/or” decision. Data warehouses and data lakes should all be present in addition to your CDP. And your CDP should be usable by all channels (not just one specific channel such as email) to gather omnichannel data and facilitate seamless CX across the board. That’s how you use data—at rest and in motion—to your full advantage.
Learn More About CDPs vs. Data Warehouses
Download our CDP Market Guide to navigate the different types of customer data platforms and how each can join forces with your enterprise data warehouse to deliver extraordinary customer experiences.
Want to learn more about Uniphore’s CDP? Contact our experts today.