Twilio Segment, the world’s leading customer data platform (CDP), published “The 2030 Today Report,” a future-looking survey that shares new data about the current and future state of the CDP industry. Surveying over 4,000 decision-makers and drawing on expertise from leading marketers at HubSpot, AWS, Peloton, FOX, Okta, and more, the report finds that 73% of respondents believe a customer data platform will be critical to their customer experience efforts.

“Customer data is the new currency for any serious digital-first business because it underpins all meaningful customer experiences,” said Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Twilio Segment. “Fifty-eight percent of respondents expect customer data to drive revenue growth for their company. To do that, the data must be accurate and real-time, so they can deliver hyper-personalized experiences that exceed expectations in the digital era.”

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Customer Data Will be Key for the New Digital-First World

The COVID-19 pandemic drastically changed the way we do business and accelerated most companies’ digital transformation roadmaps by at least ten years. This permanent shift is forcing companies to navigate across digital channels and devices, while managing an influx of direct customer interactions at a scale previously thought impossible to handle.

This shift was highlighted during 2020’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which saw record-breaking online spending, while traffic at stores fell by more than half compared to last year. This behavior underscores that customers’ expectations have evolved, making it crucial for companies to deliver memorable and personalized experiences on digital. This trend is reflected in Segment’s report, which found customer experience is the number one priority for businesses.

Driving successful digital experiences requires an up-to-date, real-time view of customers, making CDPs a must-have infrastructure for any business aiming to meet these new realities.

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Segment’s recent survey uncovered a number of insights about how and why companies are turning to CDPs, including:

• Data silos are being torn down: Companies see accurate, real-time customer data as central to their digital transformation efforts, and they are hungry for data accessibility and unification. Sixty-one percent of respondents said they would like increased access to data across the organization.
• Personalization takes on a new urgency: Businesses are turning to CDPs for personalization, real-time customer profiles, and multi-channel campaign orchestration. More than 60% say that a CDP will be critical to their personalization efforts.
• AI use cases are proliferating: Marketers are looking for new ways to deploy their customer data. Nearly 50% say they will use a CDP for AI and machine learning. CDPs are crucial in preparing data for AI/ML applications, which will drive the future of cutting-edge and personalized customer experiences, such as automatically ranking content or putting the right products in front of each customer.

CDP budgets have increased due to COVID-19, and the technology is expected to remain a strategic priority in the years ahead. Sixty-two percent of respondents say they will spend over $100,000 on their CDP this year, and 47% say they will increase their CDP budget by 25% in the next five years.

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