In the modern digital age, data is one of the greatest assets that a company can have. With so much of commerce and customer interactions moving to the digital sphere, the amount of data that can be created can be astounding. Every interaction creates new data and that data is important and valuable for a company’s growth and trajectory. One of the greatest problems facing this new era of business is simply the fact that data is created at a rate that is hard to manage.
In fact, when it comes down to it, one of the biggest problems that companies tackle is simply being able to access their data in meaningful ways. A data silo is a collection of data that accumulates and is either hard to access or unrecognizable. This means that it is a storehouse of data that the company cannot use to drive its analytics and facilitate real, data-driven decisions. Data warehouses and lakes have provided a good solution to helping extract data from silos and make it useful, but there can still be a disparity in data locations across a company.
What is a CDP?
Different tools, destinations, and interactions can still produce a problem where data is still spread out between disparate sources to be truly useful. That’s why Customer Data Platforms (CDP) has become so popular. These tools allow companies a solution to their data problems by helping different departments access data with a relative amount of ease. This tool, a custom data platform, helps to bring all data related to customer interactions to the departments that need it the most.
One of the biggest benefits of this kind of tool is that it allows for marketing and other departments to access data with relative ease. This allows for a platform that really moves data-driven decisions forward and allows departments to be enriched with data without having to tie down a data engineer and have a complicated system.
What is Segment?
Segment is a popular CDP that helps businesses collect valuable customer-related data. This CDP offers companies the ability to capture customer-related data and then send it to the various departments and SaaS tools that need it. Segment is a valuable tool and is considered to be one of the best CDPs on the market and has seen a high level of success.
Segment is most often used by data engineers or marketing departments. This is because its easy user face allows for marketing departments to track the data they care about. That could be something like page views, and it also allows for a certain level of automation with easy programming to initiate certain steps upon activation. Engineers love Segment because it allows them to seamlessly perform event tracking without having to write their own code and get bogged down with the tediousness of this task.
Segment also offers a warehouse feature that allows companies to communicate with the biggest data warehouse providers on the market. This is a vitally important and useful tool because it allows for total integration with a company’s data.
What Are Some Alternatives to Segment?
Because this field of science and technology is young, there are several alternatives to Segment that are up and coming. While Segment is by far one of the most popular, here are some Segment alternatives to consider.
CDPs for Enterprise Size Companies
The first Segment alternative is mParticle. This competent tool is designed to help facilitate a customer data tool for companies that are larger than what Segment can service. This is a powerful tool for enterprise-sized companies and it sets itself apart from the competition by focusing on data integration. This makes it a CDI, which stands for customer data integration, and it helps companies accomplish data integration, governance, and audience management.
CDP That Focuses on Marketers
A CDP that is designed to be of more use to marketers than developers is Tealium. This CDP is designed to help give marketing departments the tools they need and has a relatively user-friendly interface. What sets it apart from the competition is that it is HIPAA compliant and can work with BAAs. This emphasis on added security makes Tealium unique as a tool for marketers to help understand and use data efficiently.
CDP for Developers
If you are looking for a completely open-sourced CDP that is tailored for developers then RudderStack is your best bet. Designed to help developers create pipelines between various data resources, RuddStack is a great tool for a developer-driven CDP.
Conclusion
Finding ways to use data to drive a company forward is no easy task. This is something that takes a lot of time, effort, and the proper tools in order to accomplish. Finding the right CDP for you might seem overwhelming, but with a CDP that makes sense for your company, you can move towards utilizing data in a powerful and effective way.
