The Forrester Wave for Customer Data Platforms 2024: Top Takeaways

ActionIQ, Adobe, Salesforce, and Treasure Data perform best.

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Published: October 3, 2024

Rhys Fisher

The latest Forrester Wave Report unpacks and analyses some of the biggest B2C customer data platforms (CDPs) on the market.

Having grown quickly from new kid on the block to must-have tech solution, CDPs have undergone a lot of change in a short span of time.

Naturally, this has led to some common pitfalls that today’s offerings have had to overcome by finding ways to provide users with quick access to curated, high-quality customer data.

Forrester has rated “12 of the top vendors in the market,” evaluating them on a set of 29 criteria and ranking them as either Leaders, Strong Performers, or Contenders.

So, without further ado, let’s see how this year’s CDPs performed.

ActionIQ (Leader)

ActionIQ’s focus on composability makes it a “top choice” for enterprises looking for a balanced CDP that can provide support for both marketing and IT stakeholders.

This all-in on composability strategy was also key in helping the company to achieve “top marks” in data ingestion, data management, and data governance.

The vendor also garners praise for its sophisticated product roadmap, AI-powered functionality, and data-handling capabilities.

Adobe (Leader)

Adobe’s Experience Platform enables the company to combine real-time CDP with analytics and journey orchestration capabilities.

In doing so, the tech firm delivers a CDP offering for the “entire marketing lifecycle,” alongside an enviable list of partners.

In addition, Forrester highlighted Adobe’s impressive policy management functionality, which allows the vendor to excel at journey orchestration and data governance.

Salesforce (Leader)

The Report commends Salesforce’s Data Cloud CDP for going beyond marketing to including customer experience functionality.

Described as having an “ambitious vision,” Data Cloud delivers centralized data management, warehousing, workflows, and AI, within the Salesforce ecosystem.

Moreover, the vendor’s customer audience targeting is highlighted, with Forrester outlining the company’s use of both traditional and AI-driven tools; its reporting and dashboard capabilities, powered by Tableau technology; and its extensive global reach.

Treasure Data (Leader)

Like Salesforce, Treasure Data also receives praise for extending its CDP capabilities into other areas, including the contact center.

Additionally, Forrester believes that the vendor “distinguishes” itself from its competitors via its robust integrations for insights and engagement, and superior data ingestion and management capabilities.

Features such as generative AI (GenAI) functionality, expanded journey orchestration capabilities, and real-time engagement support are also spotlighted.

Zeta Global (Strong Performer)

Zeta’s strongest CDP credentials lay in its data enrichment infrastructure. In particular, the Report praises the company’s data hygiene, data enhancement, and identity resolution capabilities as “some of the strongest” in the evaluation.

Elsewhere, the vendor’s customer targeting and journey orchestration features also receive favorable feedback.

However, as something of a newcomer to the space, Forrester suggests that Zeta needs to make a stronger case as “a standalone CDP.” The Report believes that the tech firm’s “most significant strategic gap” is its limited partner network and global coverage.

Tealium (Strong Performer)

Described as a “master” of data connectivity, Tealium combines this skillset with a strong partner ecosystem that allows it to deliver far-reaching data and activation optionality.

The vendor also provides users with robust consumer consent management features and a wide range of data ingestion and integration options.

Despite these impressive features, Forrester believes that the company has considerable customer journey shortcomings, claiming that it “significantly lags” its competitors in the journey orchestration functionality category.

mParticle (Strong Performer)

The major mParticle takeaway is the company’s “category-leading” customer success support capabilities.

The vendor also drew praise for its intuitive customer and journey analysis tools, strong data ingestion management – especially for event data – and AI-powered model generation.

Unfortunately, despite doubling down on AI through the acquisitions of Vidora and Indicative, mParticle has failed to adequately maximize the benefits of the tech, with Forrester describing its innovation releases as “inconsistent.”

BlueConic (Strong Performer)

As a stalwart in the CDP space, unsurprisingly, BlueConic offers particularly impressive marketing features and support, with Forrester stating that it “sets the standard” for CDP marketing use cases.

The vendor also provides good functionality for consent, zero-party data, and privacy management – an area that has been bolstered by the company’s recent purchase of Jebbit.

While it was unsurprising for an “OG” CDP to prioritize marketing, it was equally predictable that the company may struggle to keep abreast of its peers in adopting new tech.

The Report claims that BlueConic was too slow in recognizing the importance of GenAI and is falling behind industry leaders in AI innovation.

Redpoint Global (Contender)

Forrester praises Redpoint Global for its “strong” customer-targeting with AI-driven queries, flexible data management, and a wide variety of deployment options.

In addition, the vendor benefits from a “diverse” list of partners and a straightforward, marketing-friendly pricing model.

However, the Report states that the company’s sub-par usability, media activation, and anonymous audience targeting “throttles” its capacity to be a major CDP player.

Amperity (Contender)

Amperity differentiates itself from the other vendors in the Report through its “core value proposition” of building the most comprehensive and accurate customer profiles in all aspects of its operations.

This focus on customer profiles is coupled with “top marks” for its professional services offerings, a strong selection of partners, and impressive data source flexibility.

Despite these strengths, Forrester claims that the company’s lakehouse CDP approach is “overly technical”, and that it has sub-par processing options and journey orchestration functionality.

Twilio (Contender)

The Report praises Twilio for its “unique” strategy of combining CDP capabilities with customer communications.

The company’s data-routing foundation also enables its product roadmap to improve customer profile creation, automate data integration and quality control, and deliver new AI-powered decision-making features.

Where the vendor struggles, is with its “nonintuitive approach” to pricing, and its narrow DCP vision, which focuses too heavily on customer profiles for Twilio products.

Microsoft (Contender)

Microsoft and Twilio share several similarities in their CDP offerings.

Like Twilio, Microsoft pairs its CDP with another customer service capability, its Customer Journey Orchestration product. The company also suffers from the same issue of focusing “overwhelmingly” on integrations with its own solutions.

In spite of this, Forrester still outlines the affordability of Microsoft’s offering, as well as its “attractive” scalable pricing model and “unique” data enrichment capabilities.

However, the Report believes that the company’s reliance on Azure-based infrastructure and the Dataverse unified data platform restricts options for data sources, management, governance, and integration.

What Should Buyers Look for in a CDP?

In addition to outlining the advantages and disadvantages of each solution in the report, Forrester offered general advice for users considering the implementation of a new CDP.

First and foremost, Forrester advises companies to look at a CDP’s customer profile capabilities, arguing that the solution’s primary goal is to create detailed, scalable customer profiles that drive engagement.

These profiles must be tailored to each firm’s specific needs and integrate data from multiple sources, transforming it into consistent attributes.

The Report also stated that the best CDPs incorporate third-party identity services and accurately match data at the required resolution.

In addition, businesses should look for a CDP that supports a wide range of customer engagement use cases across the entire customer lifecycle.

The Report explains how companies are now expanding CDP usage beyond marketing, leveraging it for CX across e-commerce, contact centers, and sales.

Leading solutions extend beyond traditional campaign management, enabling personalized marketing, customer acquisition, and paid media strategies – according to Forrester.

Finally, like many customer service and experience tech solutions, one of the key strengths of a CDP is its flexibility to evolve without the need for re-platforming.

As firms adapt to new use cases and market shifts, such as privacy regulations, top CDPs offer high configurability, custom integrations, strong data governance, and flexible architectures.

The Report claims that this flexibility will help to future-proof companies against changes, while ensuring security and consent management are maintained.

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