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Adding the BlueConic customer data platform (CDP) to your existing systems offers your organization enormous opportunities for efficiency and innovation. 

For growth-focused CDP teams, running a CDP implementation is an exercise in change management. Your BlueConic implementation can help you accomplish a range of critical goals:

• Break down data silos
• Mitigate tech stack bloat
• Spur cross-functional cooperation, helping your organization get things done faster, in a more automated way
• Drive digital transformation, reducing the gap between having customer data and acting on it

We've seen this up close in a range of industries:

• Consumer goods companies are launching DTC campaigns for the first time and gain deep insights into their buyers.
• Retail brand teams are creating segments in less than two minutes to evaluate whether launching a targeted campaign is worth the investment. (It formerly took weeks and cost them thousands in data fees.)
• Publishers are using BlueConic to leverage look-alike modeling on top of their first-party data to expand their target audiences for advertising partners.
• See our industry and customer examples for testimonials to the many ways BlueConic can transform your organization with first-party data.

Successful CDP implementations depend on three pillars of change: people, processes, and technology.

Pillar #1 CDP Change Management: People

Your team will be the key driver of a successful CDP implementation. Start by determining which executive team member(s) can lead the charge at your organization. Your executive sponsor will play a key role in establishing the importance of the CDP in the minds of individuals up and down the org chart.

Next, select a primary CDP implementation leader to run the project. This person will gather a list of teams or departments currently working with customer data – and those who can benefit from the unified first-party data in BlueConic. They can tap team members from each department or group who should sit on a cross-functional CDP team.

You'll want to include team members who are strategic business CDP users, as well as tactical, hands-on CDP users. To be successful, your team needs both types of users.

See the BlueConic path-to-value framework below for ideas on staffing your CDP project.

Strategic CDP team members

Strategic team members can help manage cross-functional tasks and ensure project tasks that cross teams and departments get prioritized correctly. Governance or strategic CDP users are involved in the ongoing management, oversight, and communication of CDP roadmap progress. These roles tend to fall into one of four common categories:

• Steering committee should include at least one stakeholder from the core functional groups that will using or directly impacted by BlueConic. 

• Project leads coordinate the BlueConic implementation and adoption on behalf of the steering committee.

• Project managers include adjacent stakeholders across the organization whose expertise is leveraged to aid implementing BlueConic. These team members include but are not limited to: Data science analysts, analytics reporting specialists, web developers, product engineers, and so on.

• Product owners often serve as liaison to the brand team and may work internally with the brand team to prioritize your BlueConic CDP use cases.

Hands-on functional CDP team members

Functional or tactical CDP users are deeply involved in the day-to-day CDP implementation. They have specialized skillsets that enable them to learn the ins and outs of the platform. It's highly advisable to divide functional users into role-based categories.

Functional CDP users fall into these four categories:

• Power users include BlueConic CDP subject matter experts (SMEs) who work in the platform every day. 

• Capabilities specialists are BlueConic users focused on particular uses or use cases, such as segmentation, orchestration, or modeling.

• Adjacent stakeholders come from different roles across the organization and apply their expertise to aid in CDP implementation. Titles include but are not limited to: Data scientist, data analyst, analytics reporting specialist, web developer, product engineer, and so on.

• Partners and agencies include data or agency partners who are often consultants, employees at ad agencies, third-party providers, or system integrators.

RACI and your CDP roadmap

Once you’ve identified which  team members can do what and which responsibilities still need to be staffed, you can divide the RACI so that CDP staffers can communicate both value-based outcomes and CDP roadmap updates to key stakeholders across the organization.

With your teams in place, it's time to consider the ways BlueConic can improve your workflows and customer data processes.

Pillar #2 CDP Change Management: Process

When considering how workflows and operations will change with CDP implementation, we recommend mapping your CDP’s core capabilities to the core business processes that will be impacted by CDP implementation — we do this in the context of a Core Process Assessment. At BlueConic, this means being keenly aware of how data unification via unified customer profiles activates multidimensional segmentation, modeling and analytics, and lifecycle orchestration — each of which aligns with key marketing processes.

Questions to answer in streamlining your internal processes for core CDP capabilities of data collection, segmentation, analytics, and orchestration:

• How do I run each of these capabilities/processes today?

• How will it be different to do each of these processes with the CDP?

• How will aspects of the customer’s journey change with the implementation of a CD or change in capability?

• How does that change your daily/weekly/monthly workflow?

• Who is involved and how is that different from who is involved today (added or removed, increased or decreased)?

Your ROI from a CDP can come from reducing reliance on IT, analytics, and agencies from pulling data for segmentation, giving marketing teams richer insights into customers, and helping teams test and iterate more quickly. That all comes from changing existing internal processes with a CDP.

Example: Segmentation

Look at how you're building and using customer segments today. 

• Where do you build lists, audiences, or customer segments today?
• What does that process look like?
• How will building one set of segments for all marketing systems change your workflow?
• Will it have upstream impact (e.g. campaign planning, creative development, measurement) and/or downstream impact (e.g. activation system configuration)?

With BlueConic, you can build and activate customer segments in minutes. Learn more about Multidimensional Segmentation in BlueConic.

Pillar #3 CDP Change Management: Technology

A successful CDP change management strategy maximizes your use of the existing tech stack while integrating BlueConic into your workflows. Three critical dimensions of the technology benefits to your organization include:

• Data utility, improving your confidence in the customer data you hold. How complete is it relative to the number of potential data sources? How up to date is it? How accurate is it? Is it an individual level? Does it account for known and anonymous data?
• Data accessibility, proving the accessibility of the data to other platforms so your teams can activate the data in their programs and campaigns.
• Marketer control over the data, so your teams can build segments, run models, and export data to other systems without the help of IT, analytics, or an outside agency to pull or query the data for them. Designed for marketers, business users, and growth-focused teams, BlueConic reduces your dependencies on other departments, such as IT.

Partnering with BlueConic

Above all, the secret weapon that will yield success when kicking off an organization-wide CDP change management strategy is your partnership with BlueConic. A partnership built on trust and a deep understanding of your business needs is, without a doubt, the most important tool in your CDP change management toolbox. As one of our enterprise clients puts it: “We are a great company, and we want to work with great vendors… working with BlueConic was almost like working with family.”

Contact your Customer Success Manager to learn more best practices for implementing BlueConic.