This article was provided to GreyMatters by The Hileman Group. 

When building a successful data strategy for marketing, it’s vital to know when to use specific tools in your tech stack. This can get confusing when thinking of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), Customer Relationship Management (CRMs), and Data Warehouses. The lack of clarity around these tools is understandable. While they serve different purposes, they share similar features when it comes to performance reporting.

Keep reading to learn how these marketing tools differ and how using them the correct way for the correct job can make all the difference in your marketing strategy.

CRM

Customer Relationship Management tools help organize and manage patient-facing interactions. For this reason, this tool best helps those who work directly with your patients, like members of your call center, health access teams or even patient navigators. CRMs can help the process of managing individual patient relationships.

For example, CRMs can track a single person’s history of support tickets and how quickly they were addressed and can consolidate communications like emails, SMS, outbound calls and more. This can help your marketing team and patient coordinators and call center agents follow up at the right time, creating consistency in your patients’ journey. This can also help your business look at historical data and make informed decisions when strategizing future interactions with an individual patient.

In short, CRMs help improve personal interactions your team has with your audience.

CDP

A Customer Data Platform helps create a customer database that is accessible to other systems. This database can be segmented in countless ways to help create customized and more personal marketing campaigns.

Using a CDP can help with advertising by creating an audience based on a group of people who have used a chat feature, abandoned carts, or visited a certain webpage. CDPs offer a broader view of how your customers engage with your business.

 A CDP is designed to unify customer databases like websites and mobile apps so you can get a more streamlined view of how your customers interact with your business across a multitude of sources. By viewing a customer journey step by step with help of a CDP, you can then decipher how a customer behaves with your product or service.

CDPs vs. CRMs

In the most basic breakdown, the significant difference between CDPs and CRMs is in their names. CRMs help manage customer relationships while CDPs manage customer data. It is also important to note that CRMs collect data manually, while CDPs collect data automatically.

Data Warehouses

Data Warehouses differ from CRMs and CDPs in that they aren’t made solely for customer interactions. They are designed to help intelligence infrastructure by making a centralized repository of data used to make informed decisions.

Roles that use data warehouses include data scientists, business analysts, and data engineers. The data collected is not standardized and doesn’t support identity resolution. Instead, it supports data analysis by periodically pulling data from various apps and systems. Data warehouses pull and store information from multiple databases to analyze a large amount of data faster.

Not all data warehouses are the same, however. Enterprise Software, like Google’s BigQuery, Snowflake, or Amazon Redshift, are tools that cover a large requirement base. This software stores a large amount of complex data and helps in business processes.  The scale of Enterprise Software is often much larger than that of a custom data warehouse. Custom data warehouses may be specific to a business department.

The connection between CRMs, CDPs, and Data Warehouses lies in their ability to process data to make business more accurate and make strategies simpler. But, as you can see, their applications vary and can help different positions within a business in different ways.

Not sure which data tool is right for you? Utilizing a ‘use case first’ approach can help determine the right technology for your business. Are your primary use cases minimizing readmissions and closing gaps in care? Perhaps you’re looking to increase physician engagement and net new patient acquisition?

Becoming clear on your primary use cases can then help inform what technology will work best for your organization’s goals. To learn more about this approach, download the full guide from Hileman Group to dive even deeper into how to move your patients, workplace, and industry into the future.