02 Dec 2025
If you’ve ever wondered “what is a CDP and why is everyone talking about it?” you’re not alone.
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is software that collects customer data from all your different tools, connects it together, and builds a single, consistent profile for each customer. That trusted profile can then be used by your marketing, product, analytics and customer service tools.
In other words: a CDP gives you one clear picture of each customer, instead of scattered data living in dozens of systems.
Modern businesses rarely use just one system. You’ll often have:
A website or app tracking behaviour
A CRM used by sales
An email platform used by marketing
An ecommerce platform handling orders
Analytics tools tracking performance
Ad platforms running campaigns
Support tools handling tickets or chats
Individually, these tools are powerful. But they don’t naturally work together. Data is fragmented, reporting is inconsistent and it’s hard to deliver a joined-up customer experience.
A CDP solves this by becoming your central hub for customer data. Its job is to:
Collect data
Unify data
Make data usable across your stack
To properly answer “what is a CDP?” it helps to look at what it actually does day to day.
A typical Customer Data Platform will:
A CDP ingests first-party data – information you collect directly from your customers and prospects via:
Websites
Mobile apps
Ecommerce checkout
Email interactions
Support and chat tools
In-store systems (if applicable)
This includes events (page views, clicks, purchases), attributes (location, preferences) and identifiers (email addresses, user IDs, device IDs).
Different tools use different naming conventions and formats. A CDP:
Normalises event names and properties
Deduplicates records
Fixes obvious inconsistencies
This makes data easier to analyse and use.
Identity resolution is at the heart of a CDP.
The platform connects anonymous behaviour (like browsing) with known information (like an email address) and merges signals from different devices into one persistent customer profile.
Instead of “Website User 123” and “CRM Contact A” being separate, the CDP knows they are the same person.
All of that cleaned, connected data becomes a single profile per customer, containing:
Behavioural history
Transactions
Channel interactions
Attributes and preferences
Consent status
This profile is the “source of truth” that the rest of your stack can rely on.
Once profiles are in place, a CDP can send the right data to:
Email and marketing automation tools
Advertising platforms (for targeting and suppression)
Personalisation engines and CMSs
Analytics and BI tools
CRM and sales tools
This is what lets you run consistent, personalised experiences across every channel.
A CDP is not a one-off integration project. It continuously ingests new events, updates profiles and refreshes audiences so campaigns and reports are always based on the latest picture.
Customers don’t think in channels. They expect a brand to recognise them and understand their context whether they’re:
Opening an email
Browsing the website
Speaking to support
Seeing an advert
If one part of your business treats them like a VIP and another treats them like a stranger, the experience feels broken.
A CDP helps avoid this by:
Giving every team access to the same customer truth
Enabling relevant, timely personalisation
Supporting better targeting and reduced ad waste
Improving measurement and attribution
Once customers experience truly joined-up, relevant experiences from one brand, they start to expect it everywhere.
Regulations like GDPR and CCPA give customers rights over their data – including the right to access it and the right to have it erased.
If customer data is scattered across ten different tools, it is:
Hard to find
Hard to update
Hard to delete
Easy to miss something
Because a CDP centralises customer data, it becomes much easier to:
Honour data access and deletion requests
Keep an accurate record of consent and preferences
Control which downstream tools can see which data
Stop data being shared with a tool or partner when consent changes
Many CDPs also offer built-in tooling to help enforce data policies, so only data that meets your compliance rules is sent downstream.
A CDP doesn’t replace security and governance, but it makes them easier to manage.
By providing a single controlled layer for customer data, you can:
See where customer data is flowing
Quickly identify which systems hold which data points
Stop sending data to a destination if a customer withdraws consent
Ensure only the minimum necessary data is shared
Instead of dozens of point-to-point integrations, you have one central platform orchestrating how data is collected, processed, and distributed.
Putting it all together, here’s a simple flow of how a Customer Data Platform works:
Capture customer interactions across channels (web, app, email, offline).
Ingest the raw events and attributes into the CDP.
Standardise the data model (consistent events and properties).
Resolve identities into unified customer profiles.
Enrich profiles with extra attributes or scores if you choose.
Segment customers into audiences (e.g. lapsed, high value, at-risk).
Activate those audiences and profiles in tools like email, ads, and personalisation.
Measure performance using the same trusted data across reporting and analytics.
That’s the answer to “what is a CDP?” in operational terms:
It’s the brain that keeps your customer data consistent, compliant and useful across every part of your business.
In marketing, a CDP (Customer Data Platform) is the system that creates and maintains a single view of the customer, enabling more accurate targeting, personalisation and measurement across channels.
No. A CRM is usually used by sales and service teams to manage individual relationships and pipelines. A CDP collects behavioural data from multiple channels, unifies it and then feeds systems like the CRM with richer profiles and insights.
Not always. Very small businesses with only one or two tools might not need a full CDP. But as soon as you’re using multiple systems, running multi-channel campaigns, or working across teams, a CDP can quickly become the backbone of your customer data.
A CDP uses databases under the hood, but it’s more than that. It includes:
Data collection
Identity resolution
Profile building
Audience management
Activation to downstream tools
Privacy and consent controls
It’s a packaged platform, not just storage.
