Everyone’s talking about the power of ‘big’ data to drive a better customer experience and add relevant personal touches to marketing campaigns, but some large enterprises are struggling to grasp this opportunity.
Long-standing organisations and enterprises have a vast collection of data about their customers and the way their customers interact with them. Often there’s much more data stashed away in their systems than they even know about.
However this data is usually located in places that are difficult to access, or the data is in a form that’s not immediately useful for driving marketing or CX. And while they’re trying to figure out how to mine and use this data, disruptive young companies are converting their customers by providing digital CX and marketing interactions that are light-years ahead of anything that they are capable of.
BIG DATA DONE WELL
When rich customer data is available and usable, brand interactions can follow a customer across multiple channels, ensuring that the brand always communicates with them in a personalised, consistent and relevant way. Companies that started up less than 10 years ago have built data systems from the ground up in a way that’s ideal for creating these types of meaningful digital journeys. As a result customers are now familiar with this more personal, relevant approach. They now expect to see, hear and read communications that are tailored to their needs and their past interactions. In fact some groups, such as millennials, simply won’t tolerate a customer experience that is clunky and generic. They have a digital native’s expectation of engagement that sees them as individuals and remembers everything about them.
Businesses that fail to deliver these experiences will not only lose existing customers, but fail to attract these newer customer segments.
THE PROBLEM FACED BY LEGACY BRANDS
Traditional big brands typically struggle to have a quality digital relationship with each customer, because they’ve built their CX programmes and data infrastructure around physical interactions (in store and call centre). However they know they have to change, because their customers – especially the younger customers – are increasingly expecting fast, anticipatory digital experiences that only data-driven communication processes can achieve.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION MADE EASIER
Until recently, the process of digital transformation was formidable, lengthy and expensive. Replacing legacy data infrastructure can cost millions and re-structuring of data can take many years, if not decades,. There’s also an internal transformation involved, because the digital experiences that do exist within these large legacy companies typically operate independently from each other; they don’t usually share data and as a result they’re not consistent from a customer point of view.
This is where n3 Hub and its next generation Customer Data Platform (CDP) comes into its own. In a matter of months, our team can locate, format and store all the data that’s required to support superior digital customer engagement across all communication channels. So emails, mobile and in app messaging, paid media and even web content can draw on one pool of up-to-date customer data to deliver consistent and timely messages to each and every customer.
WHEN DATA TRANSFORMATION GOES WRONG
Before the advent of n3 Hub, transforming a legacy analogue customer experience into a modern digital customer experience would fail at the very first step – getting the right data. Imagine a large organisation attempting to mesh all their customer data together using generic or in-house-developed data platforms. If not done correctly, it can back fire badly. Here are two examples:
- Doesn’t comply with business rules
They could end up in a situation where they are communicating with customers who are either deceased or who have been previously flagged as ‘not to approach’.
- Incorrect insights used in personalisation
We have seen messages asking users how my stay was at a particular hotel, when they hadn’t stayed there or even in the same city as the hotel that they said they had stayed in. When data is not properly handled or organised, it can damage your customer experience and make future attempts to communicate with customers more difficult.
SEE WHAT A NEXT-GENERATION CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORM CAN DO
If you’re working in a company or organisation that needs to wave a digital magic want over your customer journeys, a demonstration of n3 Hub can be very enlightening. It’s also something of a relief, because you can quickly see that digital transformation of marketing and CX is no long in the ‘too hard’ basket. As George Westerman of the MIT Center for Digital Business puts it:
“When digital transformation is done right, it’s like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, but when done wrong, all you have is a really fast caterpillar.”