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Customer Data Platforms *

Market Summary – Customer Data Platforms

Market Overview

Managing the information associated with customers, guests, patrons, groups, and prospects is a cornerstone of nearly any accommodation or restaurant business. Digital data now applies across all channels and functions, whether it drives sales and marketing campaigns or supports customer service touchpoints. Companies usually go to great lengths to collect and protect their customer data, but the need to manage it responsibly and comply with privacy regulations comes along with this.

Customer Data Platforms play a unique role in simplifying and automating selected aspects of importing and merging 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 the inclusion of vendors also providing solutions to industries beyond the scope of Capsolve’s coverage.

A Customer Data Platform is a new concept to many businesses, even in technology.  This category is more uniform than many others, but the solutions are often quite different due to how they are combined with other technologies implemented.  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 is 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 23 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. The report specifically excludes many CDPs that have this multi-industry perspective, but not all.  Those multi-industry CDPs in 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 only in certain parts of the world.  Given these pockets of concentration, Capsolve classified this category as having Low geographic dispersion given the six countries represented in the data.

Marketplace Context

This category is diverse when viewing the comprehensive feature set across all products and addresses many 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 the progression of data from various sources.  This data processing may be somewhat simplistic or extraordinarily complicated and plays 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.  One key example to consider is whether the system needs to process business or person-level data.  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 managing customer data.

It is also common to identify a somewhat different array of needs when considering the requirements for a brand or chain 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.

All the solutions in this research are designed to cover the needs of our covered industries and the data originating from their associated amenities and systems. The study uncovered two primary themes in the types of software.  First was the general CDP, which has sophisticated capabilities but may need to be customized to a particular industry for implementation.  Second, are those solutions more specific to an industry.  These solutions often create functionality for an industry and sell it as part of their product.  An example might be an automatic connector to POS solutions bundled with a CDP to ingest data from this type of source.

Current Trends

1. Centralization: Customer data is helpful to most businesses as they invest in the future, such as their product portfolio and the number of customer data inputs and consumption points.  Managing this data centrally creates a solid foundation to build upon but may also increase the overhead associated with adding a new capability.
2. Data Privacy: Legislative changes worldwide continue to influence the responsible use of consumer data. A CDP is central to managing this data and ensuring it is compliant with the data privacy environment. However, some CDPs may rely on data privacy or governance software to do this well.
3. Interconnectivity: Many technologies benefit from the foundational CDP software within a technology infrastructure.  Connecting your systems at the front of their business processes may be a crucial part of your implementation plan.
4. Governance: A CDP plays an important role in managing data compliantly and responsibly across your company. Understanding the details of regulatory, data access, and other areas will help create success within a governance program.

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About this Report

This document reviews the marketing information and capabilities of 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, golf course, and country club industries. The analysis covers a statistically significant portion of the previously defined category marketplace.