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.

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.