Customer Data’s impact on Digital Transformation

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When we hear the words “digital transformation”, the first thought that might come into your mind might be the shift from a traditional manual office environment into one leveraging all things digital.

That perspective is valid to some extent. Many companies and businesses shift from traditional physical business practices to more modern digital ones to improve not just operational efficiency but also to accentuate their digital presence.

They might do this either by creating a mobile app, revamping or launching their website to support e-commerce, or even by ramping up their social media presence. All of these decisions and behaviours fall under the umbrella of digital transformation initiatives.

Looking at the data

Digital data transformation is quite different from simple digital transformation. Here, the main concern is enabling and enhancing the data through a particular type of digital transformation, that adds value to the business using digital technologies to create or modify existing business processes, culture, and customer experience to address an evolving business requirement or business market.

For a while, we have witnessed how technology has transformed our world. Organizations that have made the shift to digital platforms have a chance for survival when compared with their contemporaries that might have chosen to stagnate. One only has to think of how travel, entertainment, fashion, and retail have cranked up their online presence and the characteristics of their offerings to realize that the presence and almost complete disappearance of travel agencies, video rental stores, photo processing centres, and bookstores have all been heavily impacted by digital transformation initiatives.

Often, organizations underestimate the power that is captive in their digital data and data capture activities and how it can help them run operations leaner and faster and engage with audiences more effectively. Success often depends on efficient customer data management.

All the data in one place: an important step to effective customer data management is streamlining the gathering of customer data, ideally in just one place, even if the medium of communication is different in different parts of the business. Having a single source of the customer provides a holistic and unified view of the customer.

Enhanced Marketing: when you’ve carefully curated your customer data in a central location, you have the potential to be very aware of which possible marketing campaigns might suit which customers. You’ll typically know some basic information about them but you may also know their age, their gender, where they live or work, and even their education level. All of this can help you to provide them with customized offers that meet their needs.

Enhanced Customer Service: whether your business is online or has physical premises, the main focus of your sales and support services should be wholly customer-centric. You’ll need to make sure that your digital assets are easily accessible to your customer-facing representatives, and that the information that is held is current, appropriate, and secured in accordance with local laws and customer preferences.

Is your business ready?

When you are constantly faced with fragmented data within your organization and do not know how to tackle this problem, you might consider a digital data transformation initiative. One where appropriate digital data transformation will consolidate data and yet make it accessible to those who need it and in general, make life and business easier for not just your personnel but your customers too!

A single, unifying strategy geared toward improving customer value, improving operations efficiency, and increasing business impact is what is needed in almost every kind of business.

Innovative data strategies can vary widely as much as the companies who create them, but most successful approaches typically have two key objectives in common: increasing top-line revenue through improved acquisition and loyalty, and creating bottom-line value through improved operational efficiency and insight.

Organizations can ensure clarity, discipline, governance, and justification for collecting, storing, and using data by implementing an optimised customer data management strategy.

It’s critical to put in place the right automation tools, principles, and governance model in order to achieve and elevate personalization at scale and keep data organized in a way that keeps it accessible to current internal users as well as potential future partner users and customer self-service mechanisms.

Once you have incorporated digital transformation into your strategy for customer data optimization, you will gather your fragmented data; identify, recognize and connect with your customers and work on communications and engagement to driver ROI.

An easy-to-use but flexible customer master data management platform will help you manage your customer details in one place, and avoid fire drills to find the information you need for your next initiative. No business wants to lose its customer due to poor customer data management. Additionally, if you don’t manage that data well, you will likely make generic offers that could lose interest in your business. To overcome such problems, digital transformation is necessary for your business. The Pretectum CMDM could be an aid in that process. Contact us for more information.