There has been an incredible amount of technological change that impacts our everyday lives since the advent of the internet and more particularly since the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
The advent of the internet, social media, mobile technology ubiquity, challenger banks, the internet of (every)thing, and more. All of this has impacted how customers interact with brands, and this in its turn has pushed for the need for change in brands. It is that need for change and increased versatility and flexibility that often drives effective digital transformation.
Transformation: a coat of many colours
Digital transformation can mean different things for different organizations. It can mean launching e-commerce to complement an existing brick-and-mortar network. It can mean streamlining supply chains and supporting a much more end-to-end digital pipeline of insight or it can mean launching a mobile app. For some, it could be about improving the web experience for all business partners.
Whether you’re already an online business that needs a transformation initiative to engage markets that have not yet been targeted or an offline brand that realizes that a negative digital brand experience can be damaging for customer experience, loyalty, and reputation.
One of the many goals of your digital transformation initiative is going to be the creation of insights and data points that will improve the customer experience. This all drives toward an intent of increasing sales, improving loyalty, and strengthening brand advocacy.
A defined data strategy accompanying your transformation initiative will connect all your data, online and offline and defines the steps needed for more advanced digital transformation.
Keep in mind, though, that tools or platforms don’t automatically make for an effective digital data strategy. As many as 84% of all Digital Transformation initiatives fail according to a 2016 KPMG’s Global Transformation Study and many do not reach their goals, which equates roughly to over $900 billion wasted spend against enterprise strategy.
So, it’s not enough to implement digital transformation. To yield results, you need a holistic transformed view to identify where the right digital tech is needed, fed with the right unified and accessible data accompanied by a clear data strategy. How could you possibly achieve this? Here is where centralized customer data management via a customer master data management solution might be not just useful but in fact transformative too!
A single source of truth
It has been said that “data is the fuel that powers transformation“. Excellent customer data management ensures that the supply of that fuel (data) is enabled, activated, consistent, well managed, and directed to the right places, at scale and in real-time. This helps to ensure a single, yet complete view of each customer.
Your organization likely has several different systems that store different data. Yet, without effective customer data management across these many environments and tools, you’d be required to input data manually, which many times may lead to inconsistency.
A customer that has been defined in one system as “JOHN DOE” might be similar to that in another with the name “J DOE”. This isn’t so much an error as a deficiency in one of the systems and this can lead to a lot of wasted time and a potentially poor customer experience. You might end up sending multiple marketing communication to these same people unnecessarily and the low yield rate of your campaigns may not have anything to do with the campaign itself but rather the underlying quality of the data that you’re depending on.
It is therefore important to consider how you can have a single system or a single source of truth where each customer data is managed. Such a system helps to ensure that you have consistent, enriched, and up-to-date customer data and information, no matter what system their records appear in.
A complete view
Customer data management can help build a more complete view of key business information to allow you to take full advantage of your organization’s data, for better business outcomes that include an optimized digital transformation program and overall strategy; maximized revenue potential; an improved customer experience (CX) and faster and cheaper lead and customer acquisition.
KPMG state that less than half of executives say they can realize sustainable value from business transformation.
Although they don’t explicitly indicate why that number is so low they do say that identifying the changing customer demographics, behaviours, and expectations is the most influential source of insights and trends for business transformation strategy.
Almost a fifth of those same executives predict that customer behaviour changes driven by the generation shift (e.g. Millennials) are likely to be disruptive to their current business models.
An MIT study also shows that digitally mature firms are 26% more profitable than their peers and generate 9% more revenue with 12% higher market valuations when compared with their peers. Getting ahead is more easily achieved with effective customer data management, we believe that Pretectum’s CMDM can be a cornerstone to that success.
Contact Pretectum today for more information on how you can take advantage of improved customer master data management to fuel your digital transformation initiative.