Businesses want to offer the best possible customer experience and allow for a unified view of all customers’ touchpoints.
This unified view is created by aggregating hard and soft data captured through the different interactions, channels and data sources enabling users to view and analyse all the data collected for each and every customer in one place.
A 360° view helps you make the right offer to the right person at the right time. What it really means from a business perspective is enhanced customer intelligence, hyper-personalized experiences and higher brand loyalty.
The implementation of such a view seems easy but nevertheless, it is much more complex than one may think, in a space that does not allow the free flow of data building a 360° consumer view becomes somewhat challenging if not impossible.
Even though there might be countless possible reasons for the failure of building a consolidated view of your customers or any other data-driven initiative, for that matter, data silos are most likely the most plausible reason for them all.
Customer data comes in a variety of forms from a wide array of sources and bringing it all together can be challenging. Data exist as user profiles, purchase records, form entries, or click-throughs. The systems where all this data is stored often don’t communicate with one another and lead to data silos.
When building a 360° view, we might need to cross internal data from one or many ERPs, back-ends, CRMs and some real-time customer behaviour data from the website. Ideally, all systems provide complementary data about customers, their user profile, history of purchases and online behaviour and when all linked, can create consolidated intelligence. However, if the systems cannot communicate with each other, then, the data sets cannot be linked, hence are invisible to each other.
Surviving as a mainstream business today means being data-driven. Yet, becoming a data-driven organization does not happen overnight, it takes a lot more than a few resolutions and a well-articulated data strategy. You cannot stop these data silos from emerging, they describe isolated islands in an insular system that are discovered when discrepancies occur. The only thing you could do is prepare your data projects as much as possible and think of ways to manage them.
Businesses that fail in managing data as an asset, building a data culture and using data to drive innovation will inevitably fail in becoming data-driven.
Digazu can help empower and accelerate your journey towards data maturity by giving you the means to efficiently manage and leverage the value of your data. We also help you avoid and manage data silos.