There is no denying that customer data platforms (CDPs) are increasingly popular among more and more companies. In fact, recent research anticipates the CDP industry will reach $3.3 billion by 2023. Brands are turning to CDPs because of the increased demand for omnichannel customer experiences and availability of real-time data. A CDP is an effective way to gain visibility into a customer’s path to purchase through an always-on, always-updating golden record of all users across all touchpoints. Brands who deploy a CDP can bring together data throughout the enterprise to know all that is knowable about a customer.

Read More: You Can’t Spell Digital Transformation Without CDP

But like any complex technology, you can’t simply turn it on and expect immediate results. Instead, a CDP presents a unique opportunity to improve processes, including the handling of customer data — which is necessary to gain the most value from a CDP. There are certain steps that you can take to make sure you’re getting the most out of your CDP and ensure you’re delivering the most relevant and personalized customer experience possible. Here are the five steps that you can take to maximize the value of your customer data platform:

Create a Complete Picture of the Customer

Most brands have silos of customer data that are purpose built to serve specific areas of the business. To build a single customer view, you must unify the data from siloed data sources within the CDP. In order for your brand to streamline the process of building a single customer view, your CDP should be data agnostic and support all data sources including batch or streaming, internal or external, structured or unstructured, and transactional or demographic. Advanced CDPs should also allow you to integrate first-, second-, and third-party data.

Read More: Marketers in the Flow: How an Enterprise CDP Fosters Happy, Hyper-Productive Teams

Strengthen your Customer Profiles with More Data

The distinguishing feature of a true CDP is the ability to build and maintain a golden customer record in real time. Each customer’s golden record should include each touchpoint the customer interacts with the brand through, as well as transactional and behavioral data. The transactional data should include the history of all transactions and interactions the customer has had with the brand. Adding the behavioral and transactional data in real time enables brands to proactively engage at the right moments, meeting customer needs with contextually relevant interactions.

Utilize Advanced Analytics and Machine Learning

It is important to take advantage of the advanced analytics, data processing, and matching algorithms a customer data platform enables. You can do this by implementing a crawl, walk, run approach. Start with basic data like names, addresses, and phone numbers. Then, use the CDP to build adjustable groupings like individual, household, segment, and business. From there you can add advanced parsing, normalization, and validation rules. Utilizing your CDP for intelligent data cleansing improves both data quality and timeliness while also reducing the amount of time data scientists spend cleaning up bad data.

Read More: Understanding Customer Data Platforms

Deliver Personalized Experiences Across Channels

In today’s omnichannel age of marketing, 87% of consumers say brands need to put more effort into delivering consistent experiences across all touchpoints, according to a Kampyle study. To unearth a deeper understanding of your customers’ preferences and behaviors, use the insights from your single customer view. These insights will enable you to deliver individualized offers that align with your customers’ expectations, whether they are in your physical location, online, or on their mobile device.

Optimize Throughout the Enterprise

A CDP has the ability to continuously maintain clean, current customer profiles created from unified data. By setting up the CDP to maintain customer profiles in real time, while also allowing marketers and other business users to access the unified data when they need it, you’re optimizing customer data throughout the enterprise. Without access to that updated customer data in their moment of need, marketers and other line of business users can’t act at the speed of the customer.

Customer data platforms can be a powerful tool that empower brands to close the gap between customer experience and expectation. The challenge is how to leverage the power of the solution properly to make the most of it once it has been deployed. Following these five steps will set you on the path to provide better customer experiences and build revenues through the benefits your CDP delivers.

Read More: Customer Profile Management and Customer Data Platform Key to Cross-Channel Business Success