Marketing tech-company Zeta has launched an enhanced version of a traditional customer data platform it calls CDP+, designed to integrate the company’s proprietary live-signal data and predictive AI scoring. Data remains at the core of this platform.

“Acquisition and retention funnels are coming together around a common understanding of the user,” said Chris Monberg, Zeta’s CTO.

More than 2,500 proprietary signals, pulled from about 2.4 billion identities, makes this CDP+ different, Monberg said.

The technology does more than provide marketers with actionable, real-time views of customers based on a word. It infers behavior based on signals and intent.

This makes both the acquisition and retention of consumers less difficult.

Marketers had a difficult time getting data into systems, so Zeta set out several years ago to change the process. CDPs are traditionally considered to include existing and prospective customers.

About 18 months ago, the project came into focus, but at that time the company called it a private data cloud. Zeta built it basically for a telecom company. 

Each company Zeta works with has their own business rules, so it had to make the platform flexible. Inside the platform, connections between data can be made within a minute. 

“It gave us the potential to have thousands of connections,” he said. “Data transportability is important. If a customer trusts us with their data, we need to be secure, compliant and manage the risk.”

In the works is what Monberg calls a data explorer. A new interface that lets marketers add new data sources by dragging and dropping the information into a dashboard. Marketers don’t need to wait for someone in IT to move it. 

Monberg believes marketers need more than tag management and a unified view of customers. For Zeta, that means expanding customer data-management features such as one view of the customer, centralized data and the ability to merge data sources, integrating intent and behavior data, and measurement and analytics.

Supporting CDP+, Zeta offers services in the cloud — the data the company owns by collecting it from millions of websites.

It also offers a data marketing cloud platform to include all the plug-ins expected from companies like Adobe.  

The majority of Zeta’s technology is built on Amazon Web Services. Zeta supports brands including British Airways, Ralph Lauren, Sprint, Toyota, and Volvo on its platform.