Redefining your customer data strategy for amazing results
How are businesses working to reach new levels of sales growth, brand recognition, and customer loyalty? According to new research, they’re focused on boosting customer experience with a new data strategy.
The findings show that companies across regions and industries realize that great CX isn’t built on siloed front-end engagement solutions. Instead, they’re pursuing a more comprehensive, customer-centric approach fueled by data and systems from across the enterprise.
Let’s take a closer look at what this new customer data strategy involves, its challenges, and why businesses think it can lead to a big payoff.
Understanding customer expectations, needs, and preferences is critical for business growth. With this insight, organizations can deliver experiences that generate new revenue opportunities, reduce churn, and inspire loyalty.
Customer data management makes it possible for enterprises to gain a true understanding of their customers in today’s digital-first economy. Yet in an environment of rapidly evolving privacy legislation, browser technology, and martech innovation, putting the customer data puzzle pieces together across channels is harder than ever.
A Pulse Survey conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, in association with SAP, shows companies aren’t able to use customer data today in the ways they know are vital.
It takes people, process, and technology coming together to bridge these gaps. In short, organizations need an elevated customer data strategy. And many of them are putting investment behind this effort.
A paradigm shift is happening in the industry, Sameer Patel, Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer for SAP Customer Experience told CRM Buyer.
“Over the next 18 months, 60% of the companies will boost spending in the area of data knowledge and insight. So they are getting it that this is really important,” he said.
Gone are the days when CIOs and their IT teams could focus mainly on the collection and storage of data. Now, they’re building strategies for turning data into real-time insight that improves customer engagement.
As a first step, they’re widening the scope of customer profiles. Front-office engagement data can only go so far. To deepen their customer understanding, forward-looking companies are building processes so enterprise-level data from financial ledger systems and the supply chain round out their customer profiles.
Next, they’re ensuring this rich data can be used in real time by the teams that impact engagement the most.
“You can’t rely on stale or outdated data to personalize your customer experience,” said Scott Ramsey, CX digital transformation leader at Capgemini.
“Therefore, you have to have a customer data strategy and infrastructure that’s flexible, agile, and scalable, which allows you to move at the speed of the customer.
