To transform your retail organization and jumpstart revenue growth, you need to improve in areas where it counts: areas that impact your customers’ experience.
The lifeblood of any retail organization, your customers expect a lot from the industry, especially with all the recent changes in buying patterns and business landscape in general. Customers are far more discerning these days, and it will be up to retail companies to cater to their emerging needs and expectations.
But before you can comprehend and address changing customer needs, you must exactly know what they are first. Doing so requires gathering insights from different data sources – and this is where data integration comes in handy. To truly get value from this wealth of data, retailers need a holistic and unified view of information – a single source of truth.
What is Data Integration?
Data integration involves consolidating data from disparate systems and sources and creating data connections – at the speed of business. This process results in a central repository through data warehousing and involves extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) to arrive at master data, a holistic view of enterprise information.
For example, you have a customer who invested in a product or service from your retail website. They might have established a communication link with your organization through multiple touchpoints and platforms, and so information about them is more likely to spread across different departments such as sales, marketing, operations, and other silos.
So, what happens when this customer calls for an inquiry? Without an absolute view of customers’ data, no company can understand its customers’ needs and requirements. They are unable to efficiently resolve issues because of inaccessible and incomplete information. The result is a cripply, unhappy experience for the customer.
Why Should Retailers Leverage Data Integration?
Apart from addressing customers’ needs and expectations, there are other benefits of using a modern data integration solution. Here are some:
- 1.No more rogue, inaccurate data streams
Data that isn’t thoroughly cleaned and prepared is essentially useless for any organization. It only leads to polluted results and misleading insights. Not only does the integration process consolidate information, but it also involves homogenizing data streams into a unified format and cleaning data – enabling accurate insights delivery and decision-making.
2. Onboarding turned faster by up 80 percent
Modern self-service-powered data integration solutions empower non-technical business users to create onboarding connections in minutes instead of months – faster by up to 80 percent. They can onboard complex, bi-directional retail data by pointing and clicking through easy screens. Meanwhile, IT can focus on more high-value tasks and ride the innovation wave.
With rapid advances in AI, ML, and security protocols, non-technical users can easily understand and define data semantics, and then make data connections following those data rules. That can minimize the chances of costly errors, improving the operational speed and ultimately improving ease to do business. Further, a single click is needed to retrieve, break down, and manage multi-dimensional, complex data and stream it in real-time to execute modern-day business transactions.
3. Rapid growth of relationships and revenue
As business users become empowered to integrate diverse retail streams in minutes, it becomes easier for organizations to create connections and foster everlasting relationships.
Transactions also improve. As a matter of fact, business users can process highly secure transactions between a protected ecosystem and their environment without worrying about breaches. This is because the current generation of customer data integration is already taking care of that in the background. This drastically improves relationships and enables business customers to not only invest in existing products or services but also in the adjacent market segments. As a result, companies can create new revenue channels and drive value, gaining an edge over others.
Taking a modern data integration approach enables retail companies to create data connections and integrate new customers – at the speed of business. That helps them deliver delightful CXs and ultimately accelerate revenue.