Many brands are revisiting their customer experience initiatives, and are looking into investing in either a customer data platform (CDP) or customer relationship management (CRM) platform. The question is, what are the basic functions of CDPs and CRMs, which would serve a brand better for improving the customer experience, and why? The Primary Function of a CDP A Customer Data Platform is a software package that is used to unify transactional, demographic, and behavioral data from all of a brandâs channels, all of which are used to create a persistent, single-person view of each customer. It then makes the customer data available to other systems so it can be used for marketing, personalization, customer service, sales, and customer experience initiatives.