If you want consistent Customer Experiences, you need both data and process automation synchronized both online and offline.  Customers want optimal experiences all the time and it takes only a couple of bad incidents to ruin a carefully laid out Experience programme.

In recent times there has been a lot of drama about 3rd party cookies.  Their end-of-life has implications on re-marketing, data enrichment, etc., all of which affect Experience  This development leads to a more poignant question:

“Is the uncertainty about 3rd party cookies a bigger problem than the management of 1st party cookies?”  Everyone can still set 1st party cookies, after all.

The reality for most organisations is that, as focus swings back to 1st party data handling, the strategies to handle data that have followed different paths may now be in danger of becoming asynchronous.  Consider that:

Offline	Online
You can tell who the Customer is but very little is known about non-Customers	You cannot always tell who the Customer is (sometimes can infer it).  There is plenty on non-Customers online behaviours
You always know what products your Customer holds	Even when your Customer is identified, it is rare that their product holding is available during their online visit

There are plenty more scenarios that point to a need to:

• Have an approach to figure out whether an online visitor is a Customer; it does not need to be a perfect match.
• If it is a Customer then it is worthwhile combining their online and offline activity.  From a Brand Experience perspective the Customer rarely differentiates the two.

At DA we use a CDP (Customer Data Platform) to mix the above.  Some consider CDPs to be “another DWH (Data Warehouse

)”.  They are not and nobody really builds DWH for digital data.  But it is a useful chamber where scenarios such as the above can be managed.  As organisations get better working in real-time (digital Events) and with uncertainty (deterministic IDs) then other options open up such as rich, automated API libraries, integrated apps, etc.

CDPs are a good investment because

• They have some DWH elements so existing resources can be repurposed to work on them.
• They can be as “open” as one likes so a quick start and agile methods are the norm.

The following McKinsey article from 2019 provides their research perspective. here