Digital transformation is something your business may engage in, above and beyond normal business operations. Transformation promotes the adoption of digital technology which often replaces your traditional offline environments with new accessible and online ones.
A transformation initiative often fundamentally changes how your business operates. The impact is felt in how your business conducts its daily activities or provides an enhanced experience or value to customers.
Digital transformation should not be considered only in the context of the renewal of systems for traditional brick-and-mortar stores; digital transformation has value even for online businesses who may be still figuring out how to exact more value from their transactional and master data.
What to consider as you make the shift?
Digital transformation doesn’t neatly fit into a “one rule” model for all business types. Two businesses that look alike can have varied digital transformation outcomes. Business owners have to figure out what suits their specific operational requirements.
Before making the shift, businesses also need to know the online channels that their customers are using to extract accurate insights with the right planning and data strategy.
How can digital transformation affect customer data quality?
Customer data can be a critically catalytic element in a digital transformation initiative. Data itself of course requires storage, maintenance, and regular updates. All of this is needed to sustain the basic quality standards needed to be useful and provide the business with valuable information-driven leverage.
Consider your customer data to be of two genres, that which is already existing and data that is yet to be acquired and created.
If the existing data is hard to locate, access, and use but contains some exclusive customer information then the value in its current form may be deemed to be quite low. As you embark on your digital transformation initiative you will want to pave a path that maintains and in fact augments the value of customer data for current and future needs.
As you add customers and prospects you’re acquiring more customer profiles and here, you want to ensure that newly captured data meets strict data standards that ensure that you can effectively meet your data-driven decision-making needs.
Your digital transformation initiative empowers you to take control of your data, affecting your business’s overall customer data quality and driving better insights and opportunities for business growth. Digital transformation also goes hand-in-hand with customer experience. The accuracy of the data collected supports the most appropriate messaging and customization of how your brand and business engage with the customer. Accordingly, your business needs to acknowledge that there are a couple of critical aspects to digital transformation that can lead to more effective customer engagement.
- Fragmented systems create data silos that impair the effectiveness of business insights. Digital transformation should address data silos so that the business can eliminate the unnecessary accumulation of isolated repositories of data; unified data management can be used to draw aggregated and appropriately detailed conclusions and align held data with organizational data standards.
- Paper records cannot be easily analyzed and leveraged for decision-making. making them digital means taking offline and paper records and transforming them into unified online data sources for the establishment of tactical and strategic analytics and insights as well as customer experience optimization
- Data Migration initiatives are almost always an integral part of digital transformation and often involve moving data from one source or location or format to another; considered migrations can help businesses replace outmoded and legacy systems with the latest repositories to support insights, analytics and customer experience optimization
- Data quality & enrichment will take your existing data and enhance its usefulness. Data quality standards are a characteristic of digital transformation effectiveness. You’ll need to define standards for ensuring that the information can be accessed uniformly from all data sources and ensure that they are consistently maintained across the landscape.
- Data analytics means knowing how your data maintenance and acquisition processes are performing and adjusting the methods that you use for control and acquisition as the needs of the business evolve.
To reinforce each pillar, you’ll need an inventory of appropriately detailed customer data that supports the effectiveness of your digital transformation.
Eliminate data irregularities with a centralized customer master
Without digital transformation, businesses have to maintain and control data in multiple systems in isolation of a holistic and unified view of the customer. This work is often also very manual in nature. One team may be using one system and have a wholly different view of the customer as compared with another, this can lead to data inconsistency. A customer data management system as part of the digital transformation initiative will create a unified customer record across all platforms that support automation and continuous update.
A unified view of the customer master will lead to a decreased cost of customer communication and reduce inefficiency and waste. A robust customer data management system is an effective way to enhance data accuracy and avoid duplicates. Careful consideration of Customer Data in the digital transformation process will ultimately lead to more effective outcomes for your digital transformation initiative.
Digital transformation is a journey that often doesn’t result in overnight success. The approaches you choose, the factors you consider, and the decisions you take will ultimately determine the initiative’s effectiveness.
The Pretectum CMDM is a customer data management system that helps businesses with setting standards for how to gather and maintain customer data. Businesses can easily layer CMDM into their transformation initiatives in a less disruptive way if they consider the customer mastering process early on. Pretectum’s CMDM provides you with a single system that can have many lenses in support of the differing needs of the business. Contact us to learn more.
RJ