Not surprisingly, surveys point to a need for a customer experience makeover. A poll by Econsultancy in association with Ensighten referenced in the article “Why Marketers, Agencies Haven’t Mastered the Customer Experience” lists the following benefits to customer experience optimization:
- Higher engagement and conversion rates (by far the highest ranked)
- Better brand perception and loyalty
- Renewals, cross-sells and upsells
- Increased average order value
However, the survey also pointed to problems in that, “A single customer view is critical to providing a personalized and thus better customer experience. However, the study found that few respondents leveraged these for all marketing activities.”
Furthermore, “Forming a single customer view and improving the customer experience require data integration, and further results indicated that most respondents still struggled when it came to this. Just 10% of marketers and 8% of agencies had tied together customer data across channels, tools and databases.”
So we have an exciting opportunity to improve customer experience with tangible business benefits but data integration is a barrier to success. That’s not really a surprise, we have had islands of data with poor quality for many years. But as data becomes more visible to our customers, for example through a mobile apps, then poor data quality and data integration start to impact the user experience.
There are many tools available to profile and assess the quality of data. A review of data lineage, source systems of record and integration architecture will expose data synchronization issues. Before exposing data to your customers, perform a data quality assessment and see where there are gaps in quality, integration and timeliness. Start with customer facing data such as customer, item/product and order that will be needed early in a digital transformation program.
