Getting to Customer Centricity with the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud

Customer centricity is the new thing.  It makes sense.  Today, you walk into a store, and you get very personal offers.  The clerks may know your name, may already know your buying history, and may be able to offer some good recommendations for you.  We see some of the same behavior in our online transactions.  And now, the global pandemic has pushed many more of our transactions digitally and online.  How does a store stay customer-centric when your storefront accommodates thousands per day?  Per hour?  How do you keep it personal when you aren’t even face-to-face?

Companies have turned to technology. The Microsoft customer data platform powers personalized experiences with a holistic view of customers and unmatched time to insight.  Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights allows companies to gain a more comprehensive view of their customers.  Sounds great!  All hail customer-centricity.  So why aren’t more companies implementing it?  The challenge is that great insights require great data.  But don’t companies have a lot of data?  True, but they can’t always get to it.  Data is spread across an enterprise and not always easily accessible nor discoverable.

A New Accelerator to Speed Customer Insights

Even if you have access and can bring the data together, can you trust it?  Is the data of good quality? Can the data be augmented with external datasets? Some of these points were covered in our blog last week.  There, Gopi Sankaran discussed the new Informatica Accelerator for Microsoft Customer Insights which we announced during the Microsoft Business Applications Summit (MBAS). This accelerator was designed to help customers speed their time to value and optimize their use of Customer Insights.  In our demo video presented at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit, we covered three key areas where Informatica can help accelerate Customer Insights:

• Accelerating customer data sourcing
• Enriching and cleansing data
• Turning insights into action

In the demo, you can see how to create a data mapping by selecting sources and using the “Preview” feature. With the power of the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud, you can have rich connectivity to 200-plus data sources, including streaming, on-premises, and SaaS data sources. Also, 90-plus scanners provide the ability to discover and expand the amount of customer data exponentially across the enterprise. What if you don’t know the underlying data model?  Our indexing can help with that.

The demo reviews features, such as “structured parser transform,” which helps you quickly find the fields that you need.  When trying to join XML data with your structured data, you will see how a “cleanse transform” helps keep your data in top condition. Then, utilizing the Common Data Model transform, you will see to make the data easy to use with Microsoft Customer Insights. Now, there may be a multitude of fields available in the CDM, which could make this process incredibly time consuming.  Be sure to pay attention to the “Automatch and SmartMatch” feature during the demo. You will see how you can save a lot of time during the mapping process.

The real value comes when you can now access all this rich new data within Customer Insights. You can see how the data resides in the ADLS store along with the CDM model structure with all the attributes needed for analysis.

The faster that we can accelerate your Customer Insights, the faster that you can truly keep the customer central and foremost in your efforts.  You will have enriched customer profiles with value-added context resulting in consistent high quality and intelligent insights.

To learn more, be sure to go to https://www.informatica.com/MSFTcustomerinsights