The past couple of months I’ve seen an increasing number of very interesting products which leverage the “user events” data of a company to operationalize it.
For example Correlated enables your sales or support teams to take action based on how people are using your product. The way it works is that you connects Correlated to tools such as Segment which store your user behavior data, a.k.a all the actions that a user does on your product, and then based on their in-product behavior it automatically triggers specific actions or alerts for the sales and support team. For example it can be used by the sales team to convert more free trials users into paid customers, or like with Pocus, by the success team to detect and empower the product champions . Lago on its side lets marketers fetch customer data to feed their favorite marketing tools.
If we step back a second, the past decade we have witness the democratization of customer data platforms. More and more businesses now track these product user events with in-house solutions built on top of Snowflakes for example, or with specialized CDPs such as Segment or even with more general purpose tools such as Intercom which offers a Customer data platform for small businesses.
Historically Customer Data Platforms were mostly used by the marketing department to segment and communicate with users, but what is happening now is that this customer data starts to be operationalized by the other functions such as sales, support or success. This is why you’ll also increasingly see the terms of CDI for Customer data infrastructure instead of CDP which is more targeted toward marketing.
I believe that this trend is here to stay and we’ll probably see two things happening:
- First now that more and more businesses have CDPs in place, we’ll see an increasing number of products such as Correlated, Lago or Pocus built on top of them
- Second we will see a democratization of these specialized reverse ETL tools which were mostly available for the enterprise segment. So I expect to see more of these tools target small to mid-sized companies.