For years, brands have relied on CRMs and CDPs to improve customer interactions. 

Customer Relationship Management software was initially built to enhance offline, one-to-one interactions, which was great for an offline world. 

Then, Customer Data Platforms came along and promised to open up a world of possibilities for brands in a new multichannel world and make offering a personalised customer experience easy.  

But the retail world has evolved. 

Where multichannel and personalised experiences were once enough, customers are now demanding an omnichannel experience to match their shopping reality. 

No matter how sophisticated their features become, or how many add-ons you invest in, neither CDP or CRM systems are going to hit the mark. They were simply built for a different era. 

So, what is built for the omnichannel era? 

A Customer Experience Platform, aka CXP. 

A CXP is omnichannel by design. It doesn’t “join the dots” between online and offline experiences, it flips the playbook by starting with the customer and giving them a single-view-of-brand so they can pick up wherever they left off. 

Let’s step back and look at what exactly makes a CXP different from a CDP and CRM.

The beauty of a CXP: it’s your omnichannel engine room

A Customer Experience Platform (CXP), like Omneo, works alongside CDP and CRM platforms to create the ‘WHY’ for the customer choosing to give you their data in the first place.

It isn’t one tool but rather a suite of tools to provide a connected experience for customers over the lifetime of their relationship with the brand. 

Here’s what makes a CXP such a powerful tool: it’s customer-centric, permission-based, and omnichannel by design. 

Let’s take each of those in turn: 

1. Customer-centric: The primary beneficiary of the data collected is the customer and those that will serve them next time. The CXP focuses on creating a customer’s shopping profile with every transaction and interaction and creates an ecosystem that provides customers with an exceptional omnichannel experience that connects their online and offline shopping experiences. 

2. Permission-based: Customers are willing participants in creating and enriching their profiles, as well as contributing to their transaction and interaction history for their benefit. A CXP does not track customers anonymously – the data is zero-party or first-party data by nature. 

3. Omnichannel: A good omnichannel structure should use your customer data to facilitate a seamless, highly targeted shopping experience across all channels. Integrating it with your existing marketing and commerce platforms will give you a 360° view of your customer information, history and intentions while understanding your brand's inventory, staff and store locations.

How do CRM, CDP and CXP solutions manage data differently?

One of the key differences between a CRM, CDP and CXP is how they manage customer data. 

CDPs automatically collect structured and unstructured data from different devices and touchpoints using APIs and code, resulting in a wide variety of customer data, including behavioural, transactional, and more. 

This means most of the data in a CDP is first-party – it comes directly from the customer through form fills, cookies, and other engagements as they move online. 

As first-party data, the brand owns and controls it. However, the data doesn’t usually provide a service to the customer as they are trying to shop; instead, they watch what they do and save the information for the brand to use later. 

CRMs, on the other hand, are a central record repository for details on all brand and customer interactions. Again, it’s first-party data. However, because staff manually enter information every time an exchange occurs and because each interaction varies, it can be difficult to standardise the data. 

With a CXP, the data is zero-party, which means the customer has actively and knowingly shared information with the brand. All customer data is collected and used transparently, and in accordance with permission and expectations, the customers set themselves. 

Customers have complete control over their data, can trust that it’s fully protected and can opt out whenever they want. Moreover, data accuracy is primarily driven by the customers, with occasional prompts from the brand to ensure it is up to date.  

Have CDPs finally reached their limit?

With so much customer data available, customer data platforms (CDPs) emerged from the need for brands to bring all their customer data from disparate technologies and systems into one hub. This enables the business to use the data to do customer personalisation at scale across multiple channels consistently. 

As such, a CDP coexists with other customer data solutions, such as CRM, contact centre systems, marketing automation, and more, to collate and consolidate data into one centralised, unified customer database. 

Let’s say you are a marketer with access to a CRM, a loyalty program, and an email automation system. Each of those marketing tools has data on a customer. Your CDP brings that data in one place so you can gain insights and keep personalising the customer experience. 

This is also a drawback of CDPs – they primarily focus on marketing data to enable customer modelling and optimise the timing and targeting of messaging and offers. This means it may not include all data types or sources necessary for a true 360-degree view. 

And a 360-degree view is essential for truly omnichannel retail. 

That’s where a CXP delivers. When integrated with your existing marketing and commerce platforms, a CXP like Omneo will give you a 360-degree view of your customer information, history and intentions, all while enabling you to understand inventory, staff and store locations across your own brand.

Why a CRM is no longer enough for brands

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a platform used to manage your brand’s interactions with individual existing and potential customers to help you build and nurture relationships. Most importantly, it enables you to respond in a more personalised way. 

However, this alone is no longer enough for brands. 

People are engaging with brands at a rapid velocity, interacting through multiple channels – physical and digital – sometimes at the same time. Sometimes, customers identify themselves; sometimes, they don’t. 

And this is where a CRM system comes up short. 

CRM systems are fundamentally transactional, designed to capture interactions rather than to create a holistic view of the customer. The data is often siloed and focuses on specific business functions, such as sales, marketing, or customer service, which can lead to incomplete, inconsistent, or duplicated customer data.

CRMs also generally cannot consolidate data from different sources. Customer data is not confined to interactions with your sales team or website. It comes from various channels—social media, online reviews, and more. However, a CRM is not designed to handle this, which means, as with a CDP, you are not getting a true view of your customers. 

CDP vs. CRM vs. CXP — which one should you choose?

The real question isn’t which software you should choose over the other but how you can use them together to provide customers with an exceptional omnichannel experience that connects their online and offline shopping experiences.

Think of it this way:

CDPs provide a big picture of how all customers and platforms interact with your brand, while CRMs log interactions between a specific customer (or account) with your brand. 

But many brands with both a CDP and CRM in place can’t make that data available in real-time to the customers and staff serving them in a way that actually helps them shop – and that’s where a CXP delivers. 

A CXP like Omneo is designed to bring everything together to ensure the brand knows enough about the customer’s profile, transactions, and interactions to pick up where it left off with every new experience. 

With Omneo, the primary beneficiaries of the customer data collected and the platform's features are the customers and the people who serve them individually rather than the brand as a whole. 

While CRMs and CDPs focus on segmentation and reporting for marketing outcomes, Omneo exists to facilitate personalised experiences. It gives customers the utility of a single-view-of-brand, so they can pick up where they left off. In other words, it enables profitable behaviour rather than only driving it. 

But a CXP doesn’t act alone. 

The best results come from how your CXP integrates your marketing technology stack to provide a 360° customer view, planning, reporting and strategy tool. It taps into the intel from your CDP while also helping you get the most from your CRM software. 

Talk to us about how Omneo can help you get the best out of your marketing technology stack to deliver omnichannel experiences.