Once a customer data platform is up and running, it’s tempting to consider the work done. However, to truly unlock the full value and take your usage to the next level, it’s important to continuously iterate and optimise your implementation. In this post, I’ll share key tasks and focus areas to level up your customer data platform and drive greater business impact over time. From strengthening measurement frameworks to maintaining executive sponsorship, you’ll find practical tips to improve data quality, increase adoption, scale use cases and maintain a future-proofed foundation. By diligently following these best practices, you can maximise ROI and evolve your customer data platform into an essential driver of customer-centric growth. Read on to learn how to move beyond an initial launch and bring your platform usage to the next level.
Measurement Framework Improvements
After launching and proving the initial value. It is key to iterate on the measurement so that value can be reported as close to business or revenue objectives. In doing so, you will be able to estimate ROI to use cases or user stories to scale up new data sources or extend features.
Maintaining Executive Sponsorship
Regularly engage with your sponsor through informative check-ins, highlighting progress, challenges, and upcoming milestones. This transparency fosters trust and keeps them informed, ensuring continued support for the platform’s growth and alignment with overall business objectives. The sponsor can then re-enforce the value of the program at their level and avoid misaligned competing projects that could eventually duplicate capability or initiatives that are not fit for purpose.
Documentation Updates
Maintaining and versioning a central repository for data mappings and Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) architecture is fundamental for maintaining clarity, consistency, and efficiency. Updating documentation must be a mandatory step to assist the internal and external stakeholders to get up to speed with the current state and any customisations done to execute a use case.
Read more here: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-platform/xdm/schema/industries/overview.html?lang=en
Entities and Naming Audits
Fields, Audiences, and Destinations numbers are bound to increase over time. It is important to have purging criteria to avoid bloating the system. For example:
- Deleting Audiences or Destinations that are unused – reduces UI fatigue and a leaner performant environment.
- Collect usage patterns and look to automate Audience creation to set up building blocks for end users.
- Checking that naming conventions are followed and re-validating that they are working for the end users.
Data Management
Monitoring trends on the license dashboard for both non-production and production sandboxes are key admin tasks that serve as indicators of the ratio of data ingestion to activated use cases via the Audiences pushed to Destinations. For example, if the richness is trending up but the number of use cases is flat, this needs attention.
Read more here: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-platform/landing/license/data-management-best-practices.html?lang=en
Conclusion
By focusing on measurement frameworks, governance, documentation, data quality, and stakeholder engagement, you can continuously improve your implementation over time. Don’t let your platform remain static after launch. Instead, use these tips to drive increased adoption, greater business impact, and enhanced ROI. Squeeze every ounce of value out of your investment by taking a proactive, iterative approach.