Companies of all stripes have relied heavily on technologies and solutions to help them comprehend their customers more deeply and to gain the advantages of a delightful customer experience (CX). Yet as CIOs and other leaders strive to understand customer preferences and behaviors and deliver the promised value, they continue to rely on ageing data integration technologies that have formed the backbone of CX efforts.
Organizations utilize these legacy data-driven systems to gain a deeper understanding of their customers through actionable insights. Entire business and IT teams dedicate themselves to onboarding, integrating, and analyzing all the customer data to deliver insights for faster decision-making and revenue growth.
The trouble is, leaders increasingly recognize that these old data-driven solutions fail to meet the organizations’ customer experience needs. Even though these solutions utilize a point-to-point approach to fulfil the requirements (when connections to be made are low), they result in a fragile and complex system when the number or volume of data sources surge beyond control. Companies need their IT teams to gather and integrate all complex data streams – and that does not allow them to focus on more high-value tasks. Leaders pointed to slow onboarding, IT burdening, low response rates, and data ambiguity as major shortcomings.
Related White Paper: Reimagine your Customer Data Integration
Many organizational giants are pioneering a reimagined approach to data integration that takes full advantage of the troves of data. These solutions can help business users yield deep insights about their customers and deliver value accordingly. These companies can rapidly create data connections and integrate customers without compromising speed or authenticity. The needs and preferences of customers can be quickly determined – and so businesses can better understand their interactions with customers and even preempt problems in customer journeys.
We’ve done research on how these organizations, that have made the transition, are enabling CX transformations. Here are three key steps to jump-start such CX transformations:
1. Change mindsets: Companies need to work on changing their mindsets. With emerging requirements and increasing data volume, modern data integration systems can prove tremendously useful. These solutions can enable business users (with minimal technical expertise) to gather and integrate customer data in minutes to speed up insights delivery. The actionable information gathered can be leveraged to make good business decisions and thereby deliver delightful CXs. It’s time to think bigger and better – and not be stuck with a system that’s limited and fragile.
2. Break down data silos and empower non-techies: Organizations need to integrate all the data spread across different functions such as marketing, technology, and finance so that they gain a full understanding. The data that remains siloed acts as an obstruction for teams. Users fail to gain a deeper understanding of all the data gathered from customers or partners. And so, the insights gathered would fail to provide a full idea about the customer behaviors and preferences. Companies need to resort to modern data integration systems that eliminate this problem. This will be vital to creating and scaling the CX insight engines of the future. Moreover, these systems enable even non-technical business users to handle large streams of data spread across different functions, thus freeing IT teams to drive more strategic tasks.
3. Build to improve data quality and accuracy: The majority of organizations confront issues with data quality and availability. The good news is that modern data integration systems can empower business users to ensure data quality and accuracy, no matter how complex or error-prone it is. These solutions proffer an end-to-end encrypted environment, AI mapping as well as self-service features to enable data quality. AI and Machine Learning technologies enable business users to ingest, map, and integrate data to generate accurate insights, thus driving improved decision-making and CXs. Speed is an added advantage. What took months will take minutes now.
After years of serving as the benchmark for delivering delightful customer experiences, legacy integration solutions are heading toward their twilight. The future of delightful customer-experience performance is moving to reimagined data integration systems, and competitive advantages are in store for organizations that can understand their customers better.