Accelerate Customer Insights for Microsoft Customer Experience Platform Customers

Here’s a scenario I’m sure you have become familiar with over the past few years. Empty storefronts in your local shopping district and an increase in delivery vans in your neighborhood. Retail is going through a rapid and substantial transformation. That transformation began years ago but has accelerated rapidly due to the pandemic.

During the pandemic, online commerce became the critical path to survival. Most retailers had already embarked on this journey pre-pandemic but with the increase in online shoppers, the need for operating efficiently became more important, as did the need to differentiate from the competition. Improving and optimizing the customer experience has become a key focus area for retailers. With shoppers returning to physical stores, omnichannel retail has opened up even more possibilities to delight customers, and on the flip side to disappoint them.

There has also been an increase in companies cutting out the middleman and moving to directly interacting with their customers. The transformation in these organizations is even larger as they rapidly need to learn who their customers are while breaking down silos in their companies and channels to adjust their business processes to a more direct way of doing business.

Two Keys to Delivering Exceptional Customer Experience

To deliver operational excellence and customer experience, two key things are required. The first is excellent business processes for nurturing relationships, enabling personalization, and delivering support. The second is high-quality, complete data to ensure that the business processes deliver accurate and desired outcomes.

Let’s take omnichannel commerce for example. When your customer starts the order process online and completes it at a store the experience needs to be seamless to delight your customers. This means that processes need to be connected and data needs to be consistent across both channels. Once the customer is in your store, you want to be able to provide them with good service and advice—for example, a recommendation on which T-shirt would look great with the skirt they just picked out. This requires an accurate and thorough understanding of who your customer is and what their preferences are, combined with processes to guide the shop assistant.

Informatica and Microsoft have recognized the challenges retailers face around delivering exceptional, connected business processes and providing trusted, high-quality data that enhances the customer experience and improves operational efficiency.

Addressing Critical Retailer Needs

As a valued partner with Microsoft, Informatica has launched its Informatica Enterprise Accelerator for Customer Insights to more easily and quickly achieve the customer experiences goals that Microsoft customers are striving for. The accelerator addresses three critical retailer needs:

1. Deliver Operational Efficiency – Informatica offers industry-leading capabilities to connect and fetch data from different heterogeneous sources and process customer-related data assets. The breadth and depth of Informatica connectors (200+ high-scale, high-performing connectors) in the enterprise are unparalleled. Informatica technologies are 90% faster than manual processes in discovering the right customer data assets for integration. These capabilities reduce the time and expense required to carry out these tasks.
2. Cleanse, Enrich and Establish Trusted Customer Data – Customer experience delivered by intelligent, AI-driven business processes is only as good as the quality of the underlying data. Informatica’s AI engine, CLAIRE, has the ability to cleanse, enrich, and establish and master high-quality customer data and other related assets while demonstrating strong governance for enterprise data (with respect to data lineage, PII, compliance, privacy, etc.). This provides enterprises the foundational trust, confidence, and satisfaction that is a necessary pre-requisite for delivering outstanding customer service.
3. Drive Customer Engagement – Customers today want high-quality experiences. To maximize reach, cross- and upsell potential, and ROI, retailers must think beyond a linear customer journey. They must connect experiences across channels, operating companies, and business units such as marketing, commerce, sales, and service. The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform provides AI-orchestrated journeys so you can acquire, retain, and delight customers. A central component for delivering personalized customer experience is Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

Informatica offers the innovative Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) and is a Leader in five Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ reports in data management. We believe these demonstrate Informatica’s enterprise capabilities to discover, cleanse, master, and integrate customer and customer-related data assets. By addressing the fundamental data management challenges that retailers face, Informatica helps increase the effectiveness of the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform.

To learn more about the partnership between Microsoft and Informatica and to see how easily Microsoft customers can achieve their customer experiences goals, be sure to check out the Informatica Enterprise Accelerator for Customer Insights.
 

_{¹https://www.informatica.com/lp/gartner-leadership.html}

_{Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service, Eric Thoo, Keith Guttridge, Bindi Bhullar, Shameen Pillai, Abhishek Singh, September 29, 2021.
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools, Ehtisham Zaidi, Robert Thanaraj, Eric Thoo, Sharat Menon, Nina Showell, August 25, 2021
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Solutions, Melody Chien, and Ankush Jain, September 29, 2021.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management Solutions, Sally Parker, Malcolm Walker, Simon Walker, December 6, 2021
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions, Guido De Simoni, Mark Beyer, Ankush Jain, Alan Dayley, November 11, 2020.}

_{The Gartner document is available upon request from Informatica.}

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