Recognizing Excellence in Customer Centricity

On average, customer centric organizations are 60% more profitable, compared to companies that aren’t focused on the customer. As consumers demand greater personalization for their interactions across both in-person and digital channels, delivering relevant experiences becomes more complicated. By putting the customer at the center of everything they do, leaders ensure every experience is personalized, targeted, and relevant. In this blog, we celebrate Informatica clients who have committed to putting the customer first and are leveraging data to achieve customer centricity.

The North American Customer Centricity Awards is one of the largest virtual Customer Experience knowledge sharing events in North America. The event recognizes leaders in customer experience, digital experience, customer success, and many more areas. Attendees learn from business best practices, hundreds of real-world case studies, and countless networking opportunities.

This year, two Informatica clients have been recognized as finalists: Discount Tire and California Business, Consumer Services & Housing Agency. Discount Tire is a finalist in two categories, Best Digital Experience and Best Customer Experience Strategy. CA BCSH is a finalist in the category of Best Digital Experience.

Discount Tire was founded in 1960 and is the world’s largest independent tire and wheel retailer, with more than 1,000 stores in 36 states. Products include tires, wheels, TPMS sensors, lug nuts, and wiper blades. Services include wheel and tire installation, rotation and balancing, free flat tire repair, winter tire changeover, free tire inspection, TPMS sensor installation/relearn/service, and wiper blade installation. The company succeeds through honesty, service, and a willingness to pay it forward, by providing unexpected experiences that delight customers and keep them coming back for more.

The pandemic dramatically changed Discount Tire's business model and accelerated their digital transformation. In-store operations have shifted as well, and now include touchless check-in and check-out, as well as communication through a mobile app to show (for example), a customer what their wait time is when they arrive at the store to ensure a comfortable experience.

Discount Tire set out to deliver a seamless and consistent customer experience across all touch points. To execute their digital transformation, Discount Tire built a single view of the customer as well as vehicle information to ensure consistent experiences and proactive marketing and service.

"Data management is foundational to any digital transformation program."

 - Gary Desai, CIO, Discount Tire

Discount Tire implemented Informatica's Customer 360 solution to create a single master record across various enterprise applications. By being able to rationalize 70 million customer records to 35 million unique customers, they were able to bring together data from ERP and legacy POS systems to establish a single view of the customer. Discount Tire also put people and processes in place to ensure quality and integrity of the data was maintained throughout the entire lifecycle of the customer. Having the appropriate governance in place to maintain the quality of that data enabled Discount Tire to realize the benefits of better understanding their customers and achieve the desired business outcomes of delivering a seamless, consistent customer experience and recognizing reduced marketing expenses due to consolidated customer data.

The Informatica Customer 360 solution provides:

• Empowerment for sales and marketing teams with consolidated, segmented, and augmented customer data
• Better visibility to ecommerce teams, allowing them to deliver the right information to the right customer on the right channel at the right time
• Better access for business users, giving them a 360-degree view of the customer and consolidated view of Discount Tires B2C customer landscape augmented with third-party data
• Consistency and adherence of customer data quality and data consolidation in real time within the ecommerce platform
• Proactive data stewardship and ability to manage customer data in a single repository
• Enhanced data quality across the critical data elements related to the customer (e-mail, phone, address, etc.)

Discount Tire was recently ranked as a leader by MIT Sloan’s Culture 500 in collaboration—employees working well together across different parts of the organization. As customer experience spans the entire enterprise, collaboration is key to living up to the vision of delivering seamless experiences.

The California Business, Consumer Services, and Housing Agency (BCSH) is responsible for fostering an equitable and inclusive California. BCSH does this by licensing and regulating over 4 million professionals, businesses, and financial services; funding and facilitating the preservation and expansion of safe, affordable housing; advancing statewide collaborative efforts to prevent and end homelessness; and guarding and enforcing California’s civil rights laws. The agency partners with local communities to prevent and end homelessness.

Established by BCSH, the Homeless Data Integration System (HDIS) is a statewide data warehouse that combines and processes data from the 44 local homelessness response systems in California. HDIS brings a critical resource online that will support the state to provide permanent housing to approximately 200,000 Californians experiencing homelessness each year.

Integration of data into HDIS establishes California’s first statewide repository of common homelessness data and streamlines information and analysis by combining information from 44 separate systems into one single point of access. HDIS enables the state to provide technical assistance for its local partners, to inform planning decisions, and to coordinate resources to more effectively prevent and end homelessness.

HDIS will enable all those focused on homelessness to answer key questions, such as:

• What services are being provided?
• Who is accessing those services?
• What interventions are proving to be most effective?

The agency set out to use data and analytics to control the cycle of homelessness in the state. They needed to implement accurate, high-quality information about the population being served to establish effective policies, services, and activities. With the help of Informatica and partners (including Snowflake, AWS, Tableau, and Plante Moran), they created an integrated, transparent, end-to-end data solution to help identify and track root causes, monitor trends, and predict homelessness. It will also facilitate coordination across the state by identifying patterns of homelessness, service usage across geographic regions, and support efforts to identify and address racial and other inequalities among people experiencing homelessness.

The integrated data system provides:

• Effective coordination at the state and local levels
• Who is accessing services across geographic regions
• Patterns in homelessness
• Insights into trends and root causes of homelessness across regions and subpopulations
• Identify racial and other inequalities amongst people experiencing homelessness
• Predictive analytics to target resources more effectively and protect high-risk populations
• Gap analysis to amplify policy decisions that drive positive outcomes across the state

The State of California will use the information to better understand the challenges impacting this population, identify trends, make data-driven policy decisions and drive program improvement at the local level. Additionally, analysis of the data will identify patterns of service usage that support broader efforts to identify racial and other inequalities among people experiencing homelessness.

HDIS has given the state insight into several metrics that were unavailable until its development. In 2020, for example, 248,130 people experienced homelessness and received services. And from 2017 to 2020, the number of people served through homelessness prevention services increased 131.6 percent.

Informatica is proud to partner with the State of California to deliver an end-to-end data management solution with real-time access to trusted data on the Homeless Data Integration System. As a company’s whose core value is, “Do Good,” we are committed to helping the State of California succeed in its efforts to address homelessness with a data-led approach. Informatica's cloud-native Data Integration, Data Quality, and Master Data Management capabilities will ultimately provide the much needed “trust,” a single source of truth the state needs to make the right decisions. Informatica's data integration solutions will ensure clean data and scalable connections to all necessary resources among HDIS partners.

Both Discount Tire and BCSH demonstrate a commitment to their customers to deliver the best experiences possible – from selling tires to controlling the cycle of homelessness. Data plays a critical role in both organization’s strategy.

Winners of the NA Customer-Centricity awards will be named on October 27th. Congratulations and good luck to all the finalists!

To learn more, download our white paper, “A Business Case for Customer Data Management”.