Customer data should be your brand's most valuable asset. But for most organizations, it's also the hardest to activate effectively. When customer information is scattered across booking engines, loyalty platforms, CRM systems, point-of-sale terminals, and mobile apps, you end up with incomplete profiles, inconsistent insights, and missed opportunities for personalization.
The promise of a Customer Data Platform is simple: unify fragmented data, make it accessible across teams, and turn it into experiences that drive measurable growth. But evaluating CDP vendors? That's where things get complicated.
Most RFP processes for customer data platforms focus on technical capabilities without addressing the fundamental questions that determine long-term success. Can this platform handle our data complexity? Will our marketing team actually use it? How do we ensure compliance across multiple regions? And most importantly, how do we know if we're getting real business value?
Why most CDP evaluations miss the mark
Here's what we've learned from working with hundreds of brands on CDP selection: the difference between a good implementation and a transformational one comes down to asking the right questions upfront.
Too many companies approach CDP evaluation as a feature checklist exercise. They compare integration lists, ask about identity resolution methods, and request pricing sheets. But they miss the strategic considerations that separate platforms built for operational efficiency from those designed to deliver compounding returns over time.
The reality is that customer data maturity isn't binary. Organizations don't go from zero to personalization overnight. They progress through stages: from marginal improvements in campaign targeting, to stable and predictable performance, to best-in-class capabilities that competitors struggle to match, and eventually to transformational outcomes that reshape how the entire business operates.
The CDP you choose needs to support that journey, not just solve today's immediate pain points.
A better framework for CDP selection
That's why we built a comprehensive CDP RFP guide that reorganizes vendor evaluation around what actually matters: Unified Customer Views, Usability and Access, Business Impact, and Privacy and Compliance.
Unified Customer Views goes beyond basic identity resolution. Yes, you need deterministic and probabilistic matching. But can the platform handle complex scenarios like multiple loyalty accounts per guest, household profiles across brands, or fragmentary data from booking systems and third-party channels? Advanced platforms use AI and machine learning to identify connections others miss, provide confidence scoring for every match, and track profile change history for complete transparency.
Usability and Access determines whether your investment becomes a data democratization tool or another system only engineers can use. The best customer data platforms meet users where they are: offering SQL access for data scientists, no-code audience builders for marketers, and real-time streaming APIs for activation systems. They also provide governance controls so you can grant property-specific or region-specific access without compromising your global data strategy.
Business Impact separates vendors who deliver software from partners who drive outcomes. This section helps you evaluate implementation approaches, time to first value, ongoing customer success models, and how vendors measure ROI. Because deploying a CDP isn't the goal. Increasing direct bookings, improving guest satisfaction, and generating measurable revenue lift is the goal.
Privacy and Compliance addresses the governance complexity that keeps legal and security teams up at night. Beyond basic GDPR and CCPA compliance, you need full data lineage tracking, regional hosting options, automated deletion request fulfillment, and the ability to handle billions of profiles without commingling data across customers.
Table stakes vs. next-level capabilities
For each evaluation area, our guide distinguishes between table stakes (baseline capabilities any serious CDP vendor should provide) and next-level features that indicate a platform built for enterprise scale and sophisticated use cases.
This framework helps you avoid two common mistakes: selecting a vendor that can't support your growth trajectory, or overpaying for enterprise features you won't use for years.
Get the complete CDP RFP guide
Our guide includes specific questions to ask vendors, evaluation criteria for comparing responses, and recommendations for validating claims through live demonstrations with your actual customer data.
Whether you're launching your first CDP evaluation or replacing an existing platform that hasn't delivered expected results, this framework will help you ask better questions, spot capability gaps early, and ultimately select a customer data platform that turns your data into a strategic asset rather than just another operational system.
Download the complete CDP RFP Guide to access the full evaluation framework, vendor questionnaire templates, and implementation best practices that help leading brands transform customer data management from a technical requirement into a competitive advantage.