Customer Data Platform

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Market Summary

Market Overview

Managing the information associated with your customers, guests, patrons and prospects is a cornerstone to nearly any accommodation or restaurant business. Digital customer, prospect and partner data is now applicable across all channels and functions, whether it drives campaigns in sales and marketing or supports customer service touchpoints across an organization. Companies usually go to great lengths to collect and protect their customer data, but along with this comes the need to manage it responsibly. Most data storage and management methods carry a level of regulation with them as a result of the increasing laws addressing consumer privacy.  Customer Data Platforms play a unique role in simplifying and automating selected aspects of importing and coalescing this data to make it quickly accessible to the business.

This Capsolve report emphasizes the solutions that address customer data platforms across the restaurant, vacation rental and hotel industries, with inclusion of vendors also providing solutions to industries beyond the scope of Capsolve’s coverage. A Customer Data Platform is a newer concept to many businesses even within the technology field.  This category is more uniform than many others, but the solutions are often quite different due either to how they are combined with other technologies or when uncovering the details as it relates to an implementation.  It is also noticeable that the vendors often differentiate themselves by where they draw the boundaries around the functionality of their software.  The barrier that keeps many vendors from entering the space with a serious contender of a product, is the fact that Customer Data Platforms become much more useful when they are easily connected to many other solutions and play a role in the data interconnectivity of these solutions.

Capsolve identified Customer Data Platform Solutions designed for these specific industries and classified the category size as Small. This analysis includes numerous solutions from the accommodation and restaurant industries, but if expanded to a multi-industry view, this category quickly becomes Large in size. The report specifically excludes many CDPs that have this multi-industry perspective, but not all.  Those multi-industry CDPs that are part of this analysis typically have a core set of functionalities well-suited to application within our coverage industries.

The Customer Data Platform companies in this research are located in only certain parts of the world.  Given these pockets of concentration, Capsolve classified this category as having Low geographic dispersion given only 6 countries are represented in the data.

Marketplace Context

This category is diverse when viewing the comprehensive feature set across all products and also addresses a plethora of needs within each industry. However, despite a certain amount of uniformity due to the nature of this type of solution, there are often key differences you will want to understand before an implementation gets underway.  An example of these details is understanding how data from various sources is ingested.  This data processing may be rather simplistic or extraordinarily complicated and play an important role in the quality and validity of your resulting customer information.  This leads us to classify this category with a Medium requirements complexity. However, creating software to perform these tasks on your own will typically generate an extensive list of requirements and reach a rather High complexity.  The simplifying functionality that CDPs provide usually dissipates this complexity, but it has to fit your business.  Whether the system needs to process business or person level data is one key example to consider.  Variations in the scope of these solutions introduce a level of intricacy when considering how they fit into an existing technological infrastructure as does the centralized position of these systems when it comes to managing customer data.  It is also common to identify a somewhat different array of needs when considering the requirements for a brand or chain as compared to an independent property or a small group of properties. This research, combined with other reports, will provide context regarding where other technologies, such as Customer Relationship Management, Marketing Automation and Loyalty solutions fit in relation to CDP software.

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About this Report

This document details a review of the marketing information and capabilities associated with this category’s solutions and the surrounding technology ecosystem. It contains original content written by Capsolve to provide a perspective of current trends affecting one or more of the hotel, restaurant and golf & country clubs industries. The analysis covers a statistically significant portion of the previously defined category marketplace.