Want Frictionless Customer Experiences? You Need Seamless Data Exchange
Regardless of the industry, organizations of all sizes realize they need to deliver frictionless experiences across business silos and touchpoints from mobile devices to traditional call centers to increase customer acquisition, satisfaction, and retention. In fact, 61% of respondents to IDC’s state of the chief data officer (CDO) survey [1] said that customer experience was a top 3 business priority, and 54% said they would be prioritizing optimization of customer-facing processes in the next 2 years.
A big challenge in delivering frictionless customer experiences is the orchestration of data exchange between traditional on-premises systems and new cloud-based applications used in business processes that span the customer journey. To provision data into the right customer touchpoints, you first need connectivity to a broad array of sources.
I recently experienced the connectivity challenge firsthand with the national pest control company I use at my house. We had a sudden appearance of bugs in the kitchen and a strange smell coming from behind the kitchen cabinets. So, I went on to their website, scheduled a service call, and wrote a detailed description of the problem. I received a confirmation that a service technician would come to my house in two days, between 2pm and 4pm.
Because I wanted to get a better idea of when the technician would arrive, I called the local service office the day that the technician was scheduled to visit. When I asked the customer service person when the technician was coming, their response was, “Oh, I’m so sorry Mr. Everett! The corporate website form isn’t connected to our local office scheduling system and the technician is completely booked today.” While the customer service person was genuinely apologetic, it was not a satisfactory experience.
Informatica enables JDRF—the leading global organization improving the lives of people with type 1 diabetes—to connect to Marketo, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Facebook, Instagram, Luminate Online (fundraising), SmartSimple (grant management), and Eventbrite (event management and ticketing).
This broad connectivity helps JDRF increase engagement with supporters based on channel preferences. For example, while baby boomers prefer direct contact and email, millennials respond better to social and mobile channels. At the 2020 MIT CDOIQ Symposium, JDRF won an award from the International Society of Chief Data Officers for their work in creating frictionless experiences for their supporters (customers).
Once you have connectivity, you need to be able to orchestrate the flow of data across processes, applications, channels, and interaction touchpoints to create frictionless customer experiences. The orchestration of data exchange may span multiple architectural patterns, data formats, and communication protocols. Informatica supports messaging, API, and event-based data flow orchestration.
This is important because the selection of a data exchange method isn’t always definitive. There are advantages and disadvantages to every method that must be considered based on characteristics such as data complexity, size, and update frequency, as well as data flow, breadth of distribution, and schema variations of consuming applications.
One way to streamline and simplify data exchange internally is to implement a centralized master data hub to ensure consistency of master data used across systems and applications. This helps address both data complexity and schema variation issues. Because Informatica has built its 360 Solutions for master data management on our market-leading iPaaS platform, we can provide an all-in-one cloud-native solution with modular, best-in-class capabilities that are easy to deploy, easy to use, and easy to adapt.
Telus is a leading communications and information technology company with over 15 million customer connections spanning wireless, data, IP, voice, television, entertainment, video, and security. Their long-standing commitment to putting customers first fuels every aspect of their business.
They deployed Informatica Customer 360 on AWS to ensure consistent customer information across core business process, and seamlessly interact with customers across marketing, billing, call center and other functions to provide a superior customer experience.
I would love to hear your thoughts on frictionless customer experiences. Are connectivity and data exchange a challenge for you? How have you addressed the challenges? What best practices can you share with your peers?
For more insights, read A Marketer’s Guide to Customer Experience.
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[1] IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by Informatica, “The Priorities, Challenges, and KPIs of Today’s CDOs”, IDC Doc. #US46695720, August 2020.
