Data Integrations: The Foundation For Success

A common question that gets asked is, why is data so important for sales and marketing? Alicia Tillman, CMO of SAP articulates in an interview, that “Data provides access to information to really truly help you run better. And ultimately empathy is as often about how well you know someone and can build a value proposition that is relatable to them”. Organizations, whether they are large enterprises or private businesses are leveraging marketing technologies at a rapid rate to amplify customer satisfaction and interactions – so much so that according to Scott Brinker of ChiefMartec, the landscape has increased from 2000 technologies in 2015 to 5000 in 2017. In this day and age, as customers have multiple touch points, this gets translated to various datasets living in multiple datasources. As we see an explosion in Advertising, Promotion, Content, Experience, Social, Mobile, Commerce and Sales technologies, the need to provide a consolidated view of all customer touch points and behavior patterns, becomes an essential part of an organization’s goal to provide a seamless, personalized and white glove customer experience.

There are many challenges to data integration, especially in this day and age. A few common issues that always prop up are heterogeneous data, bad data, challenges to storage and capacity, unanticipated costs, lack of cooperation within the organization, governance and just the overall perception that data integration is a monolithic task that one should not take on. These challenges are also the reason why they become much more important for organizations to really start on the journey of integration because it starts affecting the customers and their experiences. Imagine an organization where the Customer Support staff is disoriented from Customer Success, Marketing or the Digital Teams when dealing with a particular customer. What if the customer support representative knew about a particular request from an individual within the customer organization who had recently helped and participated in a webinar showcasing the technology, is in line for a renewal and potentially has an upside to purchasing a few more solutions. Such occurrences take place daily within many organizations. Imagine an organization who blurs the line between their B2B channels and B2C channels because all their datasets and integrated and every single customer touch point representative has a view of what the person on the other side would need based on their history, their communication, their interactions and brand loyalty.

It is also important to highlight that merely focusing on a particular channel does not necessarily mean that customer trends and their pulse can be predicted. With social media and mobile, there is a lot of big data that needs to be harvested via various marketing technologies to identify customer pulse. A recent study cited that customers are “overly positive, making it difficult to identify areas of weaknesses in organizations” while “online reviews are often overly negative”. Social Media tools such as Facebook and Twitter have also seen an increase in fake personas being created for various purposes. This clearly is a good indication that the channel data by itself might not be relevant anymore but a combination of channel, offline, online, legacy and other data systems are required to ensure that all customer touch points are consistent and there is a lifecycle of legitimate feedback taking place.
In 2017, a large personal computers supplier was able to create a consolidated view of all the customer data touch points to understand their behavior and journeys. This resulted in a 11% increase in revenue per retail unit, and combining all their data has helped them, to know better their customers and better serve them while operating cost was reduced by $1 million. Such efficiencies can be found all across various organizations if they started on this journey to really consolidate their data. At CloudSage, we believe that such consolidations of data begin with the integrations of marketing technologies – for without this there would be no foundation for success.